A Spiritual Spring: Part IIIC - The other sprouts

I'm going to indulge one of those culture rants (or whatever we should call them) that pastors and Christian authors seem so fond of. At least I feel like I've heard a related rant before. Usually I feel a need to avoid ranting up popular trees, but there's no harm in barking with the pack every now and then.

Americans these days tend to value the therapeutic side of religion. We want to know that our practices will help us be happy and healthy, and we seek out a sense of agreeable wholesomeness. This isn't just the case for the quasi-religious average Joe American; I think it's also true of dedicated Christians.

Now I would say seeking and valuing health, happiness and wholesomeness is good, and I'm not about to stop. But I'm wanting to highlight something helpful I gleaned from that book by the Puritan John Flavel, a non-contemporary Englishman, that might help people like me from getting too skewed.
I'm used to assuming that negative emotions like sadness are understandable problems that ought to be solved in due course. Who would want to be sad? Isn't it obvious that we're meant to pursue happiness? And don't Christians have reason to "be joyful always"?

I would contend that sometimes the critical problem is not that we're sad and when we want to be happy, but that we're happy and carefree when we ought to be sad and sober. Consider James 4:7-10:

⁷ Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. ⁸ Come near to God and he will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. ⁹ Grieve, mourn and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom. ¹⁰ Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up. (NIV)

It may be true that God's forgiveness is not contingent on just how much sorrow we work up, but maybe working up a good sorrow is nevertheless a helpful idea sometimes. Maybe we should fast sometimes and welcome some sobering sadness because we want to be serious about listening and changing. Maybe because we love God, we should join him in his concerns this way, even at the expense of our pleasure.

I suspect that as a personality trait, I tend to come across as one who takes life a bit too seriously, with my perpetual philosophical quandaries. Nevertheless, I'm not used to thinking quite in the way I've described, and becoming more like this  has been an element of the "fear and humility" sprouts of my new spring. At least it was; I can't say I've had a good long "fasting and sorrow" session lately. But opportunity will likely arise. It also seems tempting to make another therapy practice out of this, which would be bad insofar as it turns seeking God primarily for his sake into something primarily for my sake. But surely I can hope in God to correct me of that too.

Let me know if you have anything to add to this. It can be hard to try and correct your patterns and sensibilities on your own. It's better to do it in community.


Another facet of my "fear and humility sprouts" has been sobritety about doctrine. I've seen (or been reminded) that...
A) God seems to care quite a bit about doctrine in the Bible (maybe more than I might wish)
B) In the Bible, there are stern and serious consequences for adopting and spreading bad doctrine
C) Some of the people and movements I appreciate nevertheless may be making big mistakes in this regard, and I should be wary
D) The answer to the doctrinal problems that make me want to wine is less found in seeking out more agreeable views that could possibly be true, and more in taking on a submissive attitude toward God. (The stuff I wrote about hell and "quietness and trust" in recent earlier blogs are a case in point.)

Does the word "submissive" sound weak, dangerous, shameful and even dehumanizing to your ear?  Sometimes it does to mine. It sounds like choosing to be open to manipulation and maybe other bad things too. But if God is real and trustworthy, submitting to him is wise.


Moving on. Let's throw around some more James:

James 3:¹ Not many of you should become teachers, my fellow believers, because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly.

James 3: ¹³ Who is wise and understanding among you? Let them show it by their good life, by deeds done in the humility that comes from wisdom. (both NIV)

So if I want to be wise and share wisdom, I gather I should watch out about the opinion-sharing I do, judiciously shut up more often, and learn to do more good in a humble spirit.

I've had mixed success with holding my tongue. I've at least been a bit more conscious that I need to be judicious in what I say. On the other hand, an opportunity for the service end of wisdom has arisen and done substantial good in my life. This spring I became a "family mentor" (read: general American friend and assistant) for some Eritrean refugees. It's been a great way for me to grow in brotherly kindness, and in focusing on other people's needs more than on my own. Sometimes it's been taxing, but I don't think that should come as a surprise. I'm hoping this sort of service becomes a sustainable discipline for the rest of my life. So them's the love sprouts.

And I think that's about enough for the Spiritual Spring series. More of a like nature will likely come, but it will come under a different heading. After all, it just turned summer.

Question for you

I have a question (set) for you. When was the last time you were sincerely trying to figure out the  (morally) right thing to do? How did you go about it? What did you take into consideration?

I just watched this TED talk:

Damon Horowitz calls for a "moral operating system"

That made me want to ask.

Don't know whether anybody besides my Mom comments here anymore (thanks Mom), but I hope the rest of you give it a crack, take a risk and post. It will warm my philosophical little heart.

A Spiritual Spring: Part IIIB -- Faith Sprouts

In a former post, I mentioned that faith, love, fear of God and humility have been sprouting up with greater force in recent months. I'd like to describe my faith sprouts to you.


Faith Sprouts: type A

Faith seems to have a couple different aspects in the Bible:  belief of certain ideas, and trust in certain people in certain ways. In Part I, I already put some of the first kind of faith sprouts on display: evidence for the Christian God acting in history at the time of Jesus has, for whatever reason, seemed more formidable to me than it used to. Further, the many uncanny"coincidences" that faithful Christians experience today while following God's lead have made a similar turn. Together they've made the Christian worldview seem more credible to me, and this nurtures my walk with God.

"But Tom," somebody might ask, "didn't... uh didn't you already know all that? Hadn't you read the apologetics books, and heard the accounts of God's uncanny work in the lives of your friends and family, and even in your own life? And didn't you think that your reasons for thinking the Christian worldview mistaken were decisively stronger than the reasons for belief that you already had? What really changed?" That's hard to answer, but here's a stab at it. When the acid of skeptical, critical thinking is poured on a something like Christian religion, it can (in a sense) dissolve many claims. For example, a lot of the positive feedback in the Christian worldview might be explained by expectations: maybe people puzzle over the Bible until they find a way to interpret it that is intuitively edifying (which is possible even if from a more objective point of view, the text isn't all that edifying). similarly, maybe people see God's hand at work in what is actually meaningless events in life, just because through expectantly looking for it they're able to make "sense" out of all sorts of random events and make lemonade out of almost any lemon . Maybe also through trusting God, Christians willfully ignore and forget all kinds of evidence that they're wrong, but notice and take to heart any evidence that can be construed in the other direction. In fact, I would be surprised if we humans didn't do a lot of all this sort of thing, Christian or otherwise. So the skeptic may lose that positive feedback, and in fact be encouraged to be more skeptical because so much of the motivation to believe doesn't need the truth on its side to work.

Seeing stuff turn to slime, it's easy to suppose that the whole deal is doomed to slimehood eventually. If so much is so easily explained away, maybe the rest of it's bologna whether you see why or not. Still, what happens when you revisit the experiment after a while and find that though some parts have their shell eaten away, something pretty sturdy remains underneath, more than you would have expected? Suppose you give it some extra special attention with your corrosive agents and it still seems more-or-less solid? Time and more kinds of chemicals that you haven't obtained just yet may still do the trick... but then again maybe not. You don't have forever to keep hacking away at this one question. So you start fiddling your theories. Your attention and your expectations may change. Maybe you decide to reorganize your resources to favor different types of investigation.

Does it look to you like there's an obvious reason compelling the change? It actually kinda doesn't to me. But I contend that this sort of processing is exactly how humans work to make sense of things all the time, whether we're scientists or sandwich makers. Maybe it just comes with being Homo sapiens; maybe there's no real way around it. Are these choices to change direction and the shifting currents of our intuitions essentially arbitrary?Are we all just waves on the sea? Well what do you think?



Faith Sprouts: type B
A retired theology professor from my old church has a way of trying to lend me books I don't want to read. In an earlier meeting, I essentially opted out on an unfriendly book about predestination. As we continued to meet, he kept on pushing this stuff across the table. The Westminster Confession of Faith and some other book of a similar stripe met with a similar reception to Predestination. The next book that made its way in my direction was a little book by an old Puritan named John Flavel called The Mystery of Providence. My friend thought it would be relevant to my faith struggles, perhaps because there is evidence for God's existence to be seen in how he provides for us. I think he had other reasons too, but I don't always grasp exactly what goes on in his head. Anyway, I gave it a try.

Puritans aren't really known for being buckets of fun. I'm not about to dispel that stereotype. But there are more important things in life than either having fun or being fun, and this guy's got some of those. His reverent fear of God and proclivity for talking about duties to God and working one's self into a proper mindset may feel a bit disagreeable at first to people like myself. But with some patience, I've found humbling depth there.

Being able to satisfyingly explain something away doesn't always mean you should.

I've been missing out and negligent when it comes to looking for God's hand at work in things. Supposing God is in fact orchestrating all sorts of events together for my good, he doesn't have to make it obvious from the face of things, and if he likes to develop our trust muscles, he may have reason not to. It's a solemn shame not to give him credit for it. Suppose he gives me lemons with the express purpose of making lemonade. I'm kind of a loser if I say "hm. Lemons." and sit around with a sour face. There's all kinds of joy and encouragement waiting for us in trusting that God's at work in the entirety of our lives, and meditating on what he could be up to.

 It might even help me notice the stuff that's harder to explain away; God seems to do more uncanny things when people, in faith, take risks serving him. And if I'm paying attention to what he's doing and saying, God may actually respond by leading me and helping me grow in ways that wouldn't have happened otherwise.

Maybe the "doubt", the "double-mindedness" that James 1 says keeps us from receiving God's generous gifts of wisdom has to do with asking for God's help, but not really putting your attention and trust in providence, and thus not giving him credit when he does stuff for you. He doesn't get the thanks and honor he deserves, and you don't learn from the lessons he gives you, because you don't study them or even acknowledge what they are. Maybe you even complain. So why should he try to teach such people? He wants us to work with him, not sit around hoping maybe there's an off-chance he'll just zap us with instant understanding. Nor is it enough to ask him to work with us and show us what we need to know through our own projects; though he may on occasion graciously condescend to that, he's the Lord in the relationship, and we need to act like it.

I've resolved to not be "double-minded" like that. I think I was being "double-minded" in this way a fair amount, and I need to stop. To trust more clearly and fully in God's wonderful providential hand to be at work in the pleasant and the uncomfortable things, whether or not I have any idea exactly what he's doing, and to work to be attentive and fittingly responsive to what he is up to, this is growth in faith.

But I need help making sure it happens. It would be a pity if this all turns out to be a passing phase, with pious-sounding words that don't end up meaning a whole lot in my life. Part of the help I need comes through Christian community. If you're part of my Christian community, would you remind me of all this and encourage me in it, should you see times when it might help?

A Spiritual Spring: Part IIIA -- The Big Heck

 As I write, Part III is getting too big. I'm afraid people won't get around to reading novella-sized posts. But I told you last time that part III would contain certain details. So what's the solution?  Why re-labeling, of course. Nobody said Part III couldn't have sub-chapters...


 The Big Heck

Hell is a problem.

It's played a big role in my doubts about the Christian message. I frequently have mulled over just how disturbingly sick and deranged the traditional Christian notion of hell seems to me. I could rant about it to you in the strongest terms if you liked. I've wrestled for a sense of divine permission to believe lighter, less horrific pictures of what goes on with hell. I could argue to you on their behalf if asked.

But God's word to me on this, as I hear him, is neither "you're right, Tom, those traditional views are deeply flawed and you shouldn't believe them", nor "you must fully believe all those things about those views that you resist, and do it now", but rather,

 “In repentance and rest is your salvation,
   in quietness and trust is your strength,
   but you would have none of it."

See, for all my knowledge and airs of sophistication, there's a heck ( a hell?) of a lot out there I don't understand. There's a heck of a lot that no human understands, that maybe we can't understand. I suspect a great deal concerning the afterlife is part of that Big Heck. Though not quite all of it for Christians.

So will this ignorant child throw a tantrum about it? How big of a deal will he make of what he doesn't understand? I think it's reasonable to share my issues with God and with friends, to ask for help and see if any sturdy answers are available. But in the end, there's an invitation to "quietness and trust". Will I have some of it?

I've decided I think I will, thank you. I think I'll choose to trust God with the problem. That doesn't necessarily mean giving up all hope that reality is more agreable than the traditional views suggest. But it does mean being open to the notion that those terrible things really are true, being willing to believe it if God would have me believe it, and being ready to move ahead in faith and hope with whatever God gives me on the matter. And it means repenting of the way I had let the matter suck the joy and peace out of life when it doesn't seem like God would have it do that.

It's an interesting sort of choice for an agnostic-ish person. Maybe my inveterate challenges such as the hell stuff do point to the Christian theological system being utterly flawed and thus not underwritten by any living God who happens to be out there. Maybe the value of faith and trust and the emphasis of my ignorance can be slapped on to patch every logical hole conceivable in all sorts of great falsehoods, and maybe that's basically what's going on. I wouldn't be shocked. Nor am I inclined to blame you if that's what you think is going on.  I could choose to trust in my own reasoning more than in the God who Christians know.  But quietness and trust seems... better to me. There are risks and benefits in trusting, and risks and benefits in not trusting, and in this case the former looks like the better deal.

The reappearing and reapplying of this verse to me and the resolution that followed were part of my Spiritual Spring.

A Spiritual Spring: Part II

There's a place in Psalm 25 that goes like this: 

⁸ Good and upright is the LORD;
   therefore he instructs sinners in his ways.
⁹ He guides the humble in what is right
   and teaches them his way.
¹⁰ All the ways of the LORD are loving and faithful
   for those who keep the demands of his covenant.
¹¹ For the sake of your name, O LORD,
   forgive my iniquity, though it is great.
¹² Who, then, is the man that fears the LORD?
   He will instruct him in the way chosen for him.
¹³ He will spend his days in prosperity,
   and his descendants will inherit the land.
¹⁴ The LORD confides in those who fear him;
   he makes his covenant known to them.
¹⁵ My eyes are ever on the LORD,
   for only he will release my feet from the snare.

Over the past few years, I have dearly wanted assurance that if there is a God, he will guide me and teach me the way he wants me to be. Not as in, "there Tom, you've got the Bible. That's more than enough. Believe it Or Else." Rather, I've hoped for the sort of friend and teacher who sees and understands my problems and challenges, shows it, gently helps me work through them, and makes sure I understand what I need to. It would also be nice if he didn't get upset with me every other moment. It seems to me like that's what (who) I need if "my feet" are to be "released" "from the snare".

Reading this Psalm, I'm encouraged that maybe this is true. But there do appear to be some contingencies: it's "the humble" who get guided, "those who fear him" who get confided in, and "those who keep the demands of his covenant" who receive the LORD's love and faithfulness.

"The demands of his covenant" are framed differently among Christians these days than in the psalmist's time, but 1 John 3:23 seems to give a decent summary of what the Christian God asks:

²³ And this is his commandment: We must believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and love one another, just as he commanded us.

So then I've found I have some problems on my hands. For one I'm not the humblest of individuals. No, I tend to think like I'm pretty hot stuff actually. A paragon of insight, intelligence and nobilitude. Still, despite this character flaw, I do regularly seek God in humility, so that part's not what gets me.

There is a nagging gadfly voice that pipes up, the same one that likes to announce that "all you need is the Bible" line above. It points out that I don't believe there's a God, therefore I don't believe in Jesus, therefore I'm disobeying God's command, out of keeping with his covenant and had better get myself back in line Or Else. Plus, it claims, James 1:7 says God will happily give needed wisdom to everyone who asks except doubters like me, so if I want wisdom, I'd better make myself Believe and not doubt Or Else.

"Hey!" I say, "But I have conscientious objections! I'm 'doubting' because of a good faith effort toward honesty. And how, aside from willful ignorance, do I just decide to 'believe' something? Maybe despite first appearances these passages somehow mean something more reasonable?" And the gadfly replies, "You're whining; stop. Your 'reasonable' is not God's reasonable. If God commands something, you're accountable to do it. God's said what he's said. Just Believe the Truth." These sorts of conversations generally leave me  anxious, insecure and a little angry.

That's been typical of my spiritual dry spell. I've already shared the above with some of you months ago. What does it have to do with the recent spiritual rains, this little Spring?
The thing is, this Spring, I've been seeing and thanked God for sprouts of humility, the fear of God, a mindset of faith and a life of love: just what I need.

But I'm not gonna elaborate til Part III.

Let me know if you have any thoughts about the gadfly voice. What do you think it is? Where do you think it comes from? Is it familiar to you? How would you deal with it?

A Spiritual Spring: Part I

In mid-to-late 2007 I experienced a season of spiritual feasting. It was a feast of hearing from God and perceiving him work in my life. This festival spanned a world-between-worlds time of mine, a prolonged airport trip if you will, the phase when I was transitioning from college to the working world; from Ann Arbor, to a 5-month layover in St Joseph MI, to sunny Salt Lake City. Among the things I believed God said to me in that time, that I have treasured up, was Isaiah 30:15:

This is what the Sovereign LORD, the Holy One of Israel, says:
   “In repentance and rest is your salvation,
   in quietness and trust is your strength,
   but you would have none of it."

At the time, I was mostly just interested in the nice part of the verse—the first part. Still, I went ahead and recorded the less nice part as an afterthought because it just seemed indecent (and suspicious) to cut the verse midsentence.


While all this was going on, I was in the process of working through my spiritual misgivings and reasons for persistence in following Jesus. Here in Salt Lake City, the place God made ready for me, I dove deeper into spiritual skepticism. I dove believing (usually) there was a good reason for diving, asking God to swim down with me. But in these waters, the bright spiritual feasting I had known before dried up. My reasons for skepticism did not go away.  As happens with water, the skepticisms gradually soaked through my skin. Like happens with silt, I stirred up new ones.  Trying to live for a God whose existence seemed highly unlikely was becoming more strained.

It seems that what grows in the garden of Christian spirituality is designed to drink full-fledged belief, and much of the garden starts wilting without that water. Cactus gardens can have a special sort of beauty, but exclusive cactus gardeners miss out on a lot too.  And even cacti shrivel and die at some point in a bad enough drought.


When I review my journal from this past November and December, I notice I was doing a lot of calling out to God, feeling stale in my relationship with God, crippled in my Christian belief, and mediocre in service to others. I noticed in others things that I was thirsty for. For example, I saw my friend Sarah Martindell pouring out her life for others in the Peace Corps in Namibia, and wondered if a disagreeably large portion of the fruit of my life would pass as a fog of abstractions and worthless self-importance. Later, her reading a sermon she’d delivered describing her recent adventure seeking to know Jesus (figure out what he was/is as well as personally interact with him in the now) and finding what she sought (and more) also made me feel like maybe I was spiritually missing out; maybe there’s more to knowing him than I knew or had or expected. Likewise, reading my Cousin Chelsea Douce’s blog, I saw a groundedness in a faith of peace and love that looked very worth having. Or getting.

I believe this longing and felt need is in itself a blessing. To be authentically humble and ready to grow is part of the good life. To have the longing fulfilled, though, is even better.



All this is tied to the diving expedition. The currents in my skepticism have been shifting in 2011. One of my big prayers for the year is to come to a secure, well-founded conviction of God’s existence and faith in Jesus. We’ll see what God’s timeframe is on that one, but there’s been progress of sorts.

In recent months, the difficulty of explaining away the evidence for Jesus’ miracles and resurrection has been more prominent to me. It’s not as if I hadn’t heard the arguments in question years ago. It’s also not as if I don’t have ideas on just how one might go about that explaining away if one had to. Nor is it as if my difficulties with Christian belief seem smaller than my difficulties with unbelief. It’s mostly just that, paying more attention to all the particulars of the records of what went down with Jesus, it has appeared more clearly to me that (like, in my view, Christian belief) unbelief concerning Jesus requires some substantial faith beyond just taking the obvious to heart. The facts need to do some very surprising things behind the curtain, and to choose not to trust the gospel accounts amounts to betting (maybe even betting your life) that those surprising things happen.

This may make me an agnostic of sorts from a factual standpoint: I don’t know whether Jesus rose from the dead! It’s crazy and weird if he did, and crazy and weird if he didn’t! Both highly unlikely options. Sometimes we can just leave things sit that way. Sometimes that’s the better choice over forcing a resolution. But sometimes when we don’t know the truth, it’s appropriate to choose to trust one story or another. If some old geezer says “ it’s gonna flood and yer all gonna die! ” and he has this ark he’s been working on the past few decades, one must decide whether to assume the guy is prophetic or deluded. To shrug and carry on as usual is implicitly to assume something along the lines of the later, whether or not you mean to. As you probably know, I’m invested in trusting the Christian account of things. I was before, but recently it’s been more like trusting in the face of my blatant ignorance and less like trusting in the face of a clearly stronger case for the other side, helping what looks to be a schizophrenic Noah gather his wood.

I would not be surprised if I keep swinging back and forth on this one, as I continue to reevaluate the state of my ignorance and biases, my choices and leads. It’s already happened to some degree.  I don’t think I know how to stop the pendulum in good faith.  What I do believe is that I should trust God to guide, secure, deepen and purify my faith, come what may.



Enough for now. You’ll have to wait for a future installment to read the rest of the story.

Attitude

Attitude is a funny thing. A funny, powerful, mysterious, and probably neglected thing. I don’t think I like Mark Driscoll. I haven’t read anything by John Piper, but I don’t like him either. Nor am I fond of Kevin DeYoung (if you’ve heard of him).  The whole Reformed thing really annoys me actually. Same with Christian Manhood/Womanhood literature (which I also haven’t read). All this idealized testosterone pumping and jumping around on sharp rocks and stuff is gonna give somebody cancer or something. It has to.

Note that I never said any of these people or schools of thought are necessarily wrong. But oh, it would please us to know and proclaim their wrongness. Yes, we would like that very much, and we will probably keep an eye open and roving for opportunities to do so, even if only to ourselves (that’s the royal we, by the way… though you may join Us in Our Article usage if you wish).

On the other hand, I like people like Rob Bell and Brian McLaren and the Emergent Church. Again, admitting this doesn’t exclude the possibility that I think they have their mistakes, or even that they’re wrong as sin. We’re talking about attitudes here, not sin. I feel understood and resonant with such as these.  Predictably, I’m inclined to root for Christian feminists. Theistic evolutionists make me feel at home (probably because I am one). Heck, why just talk about Christians? I have a positive attitude about atheists and look forward to conversations with them. To a lesser degree, I’m partial to Mormons too. I get a warm fuzziness for fringy oddball untraditional people with their fringy oddball abnormal notions—even if I don’t share them.

Sometimes I worry that maybe God doesn’t appreciate what I appreciate in some of these folks (and ideas), and that he might want me to revile them-- at least the unrepentant ones.  Sure, Jesus hung out with whores and corrupt IRS agents, but somehow they all got repentant in convenient order when he came around, and that doesn’t seem to happen with me. I’m not even sure I get repentant when I come around. I worry about being an unholy person who doesn’t put up with sound doctrine (2 Timothy 4:3 being in mind here)—or at least aids and abets others in being that way.

But I digress. We were talking about attitudes. I recall learning of a study that showed how people from opposing schools can watch a sports game between their teams, and when honestly answering questions about it afterward, would render substantially different pictures of what happened. Their different attitudes led them to focus on and notice different stuff, as well as interpret what they saw in different ways.

We also tend to surround ourselves with people and ideas that mostly confirm what we’re already inclined to believe (2 Timothy 4:3 seems pertinent once again). Just think of all those people who listen to conservative talk radio. Or if somehow that strikes you as unbiased pursuit of the truth, think about those of us who soak our heads in NPR. I bet you do something similar with your religious literature. (Or your anti-religious literature.)

I recently attended an Easter celebration with an African community that involved me eating sheep guts. Yes, guts; there were clearly intestines in there (among other exciting novelties). Fortunately the other food was good, so I could honestly express appreciation. But to the point, even before I stopped eating meat in general, I wasn’t a big fan of lamb, let alone innards. Reading some literature (a lot of those conservative Reformed books, say) is like eating that stuff for me. Other people, with other backgrounds, may love consuming the stuff. They may on the other hand, be overcome with irrational terror in the presence of foods I appreciate (like, say, salt licorice, or nutritional yeast flakes). In rare instances, we may even agree on what’s good for us and what’s not. That doesn’t always make it go down without some retching.

To me, it seems like a whole lot of our arguments have to do with our attitudes. See, we really don’t want to give any legitimacy to the things that disgust us. We may try to control ourselves and be reasonable, but our preconceived attitudes tend to express themselves in how we evaluate the other side. If we can draw it up as a battle between good (namely our point of view) and evil, all the better.

This situation isn’t always that bad for something like science, where competing schools of thought can be productive. But it sure does take a toll on things like Christian unity and doctrine. It’s hard to be open to correction by someone who doesn’t seem to understand or respect your values, insights and sensibilities. It can be even harder if they think they do understand and continue to disrespect all that. It’s hard to stand up for sisters and brothers whose flavor makes your stomach turn. We sure do need a lot of “longsuffering” along with gentleness, respect and humility—without sacrificing a bold concern for truth and a (humbly, fearfully careful) willingness to offend if God calls us to it.

I expectantly hope God knows how to deal with my attitudes, cuz I can’t tame them on my own. I hope “knowing how” is gentle and friendly more often than not. I hope he doesn’t have to squash a whole bunch of them like earwigs. I pray he finds a positive use for them.