#WhereWereYou?

Postmodernism has a bad rap.

At least in the evangelical church, people think "postmodernism" means "having no moral standards." Not true. Postmodernism is far more complex than that, and there is value (as well as danger) in it. The value lies in how postmodernism expresses truth: Whereas earlier philosophies expressed truth as a series of propositional statements and rational claims, postmodernism expressed truth as a story. It traded the "grand narrative" (a single, all-defining understanding of the world) for the "individual narrative" (the way one person sees the world), and then it asked individuals to start talking.

Incidentally, there is something deeply biblical about this: When Christ the Word came, He did not come as a series of propositional statements; He came as a human being and lived here, creating as he lived (as we do) a series of stories, a Story that shows God to us. In the story as well as in the propositional statement there is Truth.

Perhaps this is why, every year in early September, people tell their stories again. All day I've listened as people remember where they were on 9/11. My father can remember where he was when JFK was assassinated, and we remember where we were when the Towers fell. This, more than anything else, is the story that defines who we are as people, the world as we understand it now, and this understanding comes in a series of stories.

Like my father with JFK, I have my own story with 9/11:

I was sixteen, and since I was homeschooled, I was at home, working through my Bible curriculum with my mother. The phone rang, and my mother took the call. I heard her say, "Oh, it's worse than Oklahoma City, then?" She came back, told us of the attack, and said that we'd finish our schoolwork before we turned on the television.

So we did. By the time we turned on the television, both towers had fallen. We watched television for the rest of the morning - my mother, my younger sister, and I - even though the television is never on in our house. When my mother and sister left that afternoon to run an errand, I tried to do work, but I kept going back to the TV, kept turning it back on, kept watching until late that afternoon when everyone came home again.

I could leave you with something very philosophical, urge you to pay attention to people's stories because these define us. All I want to leave you with for tonight, though, is a poem.

This is a found poem - in other words, a poem in which many of the words and phrases are drawn from outside texts. The point of a found poem is to discover poetry in straightforward literatures, to turn something simply factual into something thought-provoking. I have taken my found poem from the stories that have been cropping up all day on Facebook under #wherewereyou and across the web. interwebs on the National Journal and the People Press.

I hope the poem makes you think. (As you read, keep in mind that I wrote this rather quickly this evening, so - be gracious.)

Liturgy

Psychologists babble about our

Public collective consciousness, but

All I know is, every year we

Tell our stories, tell them

Again –

Tell that we were in a 9 a.m. class, that

We were driving to work, driving to

School, we were getting a haircut, we were

Trapped – in a chair at the orthodontist’s.

Again we tell, we were in fourth grade, or

Tenth, we were starting our workday,

We were at our desk, we were

Exercising – in front of the TV.

Then someone called.

Father, sister, co-worker –

Someone called, someone said,

‘Turn the news on, we’re under attack.”

“It’s worse,” – “ worse than Oklahoma City.”

So we turned the news on, and now

We tell how we watched TV that

Beautiful fall day, watched all day saying

Nothing to nobody, and when someone

Turned the TV off, we turned it back on –

Again.

So we tell that we saw the South

Tower as it started to fall, saw

Rivers of people walking north,

Terrified business people – so many –

And we tell of doctors and nurses and

Gurneys lined up not moving, not talking –

Waiting. We tell of the sign on I-95, reading

“Avoid Lower Manhattan.”

So we were undone and

So we tell our stories – these

Broken cries, catechisms for

Those who come after, repeating

That we may pray, that we may

Pray in peace.

Argentina: Post 2

In Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton argues that Christianity is a faith of paradoxes, a faith (for instance) in which we both hate the world and yet love it enough to work for its salvation; in which we love the good things of this world and yet abstain out of gratitude for their existence.

I would like to add one more paradox: We who are Christians are to reach out to the needy with both physical aid and spiritual comfort; soul and body are equally important. 

This, in my experience, is not particularly well understood in the church today. Some (usually more politically liberal) believers emphasize the spiritual at the expense of the physical, putting great effort into helping people find food and clothing and housing but less into helping them walk with Christ. Other believers (a la Bob Jones University) are so terrified of slipping into the social gospel that they put all their effort into spiritual aid, none into physical aid.

(Incidentally, emphasizing the spiritual at the expense of the physical becomes an even greater problem when spiritual aid takes the form it did at Bob Jones: tracts and street evangelism and witnessing-to-random-strangers-or-the-hapless-priest-beside-you-on-the-airplane, as opposed to regular personal discipleship, encouragement, and care.)

I, in traveling through the Argentine Interior, went from ministry to ministry, from evangelists who concentrated on spiritual encouragement, to teachers who concentrated on physical aid. To see the various ministries, especially how one was different from the next, was to see how God cares for both the soul and body of his people.

As you know, our first stop was Tucuman, and there the evangelists emphasized - obviously - ministry to the soul. We spent an entire day in Tucuman, traveling for six hours from tiny village to tiny village to tiny village in northern Argentina, tucked away six miles along dirt roads so dusty we couldn't see more than five feet behind us, through the dust cloud the car kicked up. There, the evangelist Juan led the children in song and catechized them; he asked the adults about their walk with the Lord, made sure they were reading their Bible, made sure they had no images in their houses, stopped so we could hear their testimony - and then away we went to the next village, to repeat the process.

Juan and his family were themselves poor, wholly financially reliant on God (Indeed, Juan left a stable job thirty years ago to work as an itinerant evangelist). So there was no money to be offered, no physical assistance that could be provided. Yet the spiritual communion was enough. These people, who cooked over a wood fire, who lived a full day from the nearest village, whose cows wandered around with their ribs sticking out, were content with the spiritual comfort of the body of Christ.

This is the first half of the paradox, and (like all paradoxes), the first truth seems obvious enough that stating it is ridiculous: Our faith is a spiritual one, untouched by physical circumstances.  Whether we have great wealth or great poverty, Christ and His body the Church are the heart of our faith, and therefore, belong at the heart of ministry.

Yet Juan's ministry was very different from that in Brea Pozo. Where Juan has seen hundreds come to Christ over his thirty-year ministry, the school in Brea Pozo estimates that perhaps only one out of every five graduates from the school devotes their life to following the Lord.

Unfortunately, some believers would consider this a low success rate; they would wonder (to themselves, of course!) whether perhaps the ministry wasn't really worth it. When I was at Bob Jones, some chapel speakers would count with pride the many people they had witnessed to and seen converted over the years; the implication was clearly that those who were not responsible for so many conversions, or who were responsible for perhaps one or two only, were falling behind in their walk with the Lord.

Thankfully, this is not the attitude of the Brea Pozo school. There, they have no interest in counting up conversions like badges on their chest or medals on the wall. Do they wish more students would follow Christ? Absolutely. Do they consider their ministry worthwhile, even if many students are not saved? Absolutely. As we talked with the leaders over loose-leaf mat'e tea and the hard iced cookies popular as an afternoon snack, they reminded us that physical compassion, no less than tracts and preaching and singing, is a revelation of Christ to the world. It was Christ who loved us first, they explained, and so when they gave the children an education, a place to live, friends and strong adult role models, they were giving them the love of Christ.

This is the second part of the paradox: Regardless of "conversion rate" (how hideously mathematical to even think of it like that!), we as Christians are responsible to love the world as Christ loved us - and, since He did not bid people to "be warm and well-fed" without actually feeding them, to actually care for the physical needs of those around us.

True, Christ-centered care for others, whether they be in our church or not, believers or not, is equally concerned with soul and body; we are to rejoice in the sufficiency of our faith and spiritual encouragement even as we supply each other's physical needs, without attention to the spiritual realm.

Most of us, including me, are not currently missionaries, and so the temptation is to think that this paradox is of limited application. Not so. I can think of two possible applications:

First (and of the two, this was the one I most needed to learn): Do not despise those who minister to the soul and not the body. Perhaps because of listening to those braggart chapel speakers at Bob Jones, I am overcautious of ministries focused entirely on the spiritual. I imagine them sending people away to "be warm and well-fed", loading their arms with tracts but not a blanket or granola bar among them. This is what Tucuman symbolizes to me, then: While we as believers should not be insensitive to physical needs, we must also remember that our faith is pinned on another world, that this world, and all its suffering, pale to the treasures we have in Christ, that - most importantly - ministry is about exploring those treasures together.

Second, and equally important: Physical aid, in itself, is a legitimate ministry.  I found, this summer in my parents' house, a church magazine reminding conservative Christians that the social gospel is strictly replacing the Gospel with social aid; fear of slipping into the social gospel, he argued, should absolutely not prevent us from helping people. That this article was written and published tells me what I already knew: In conservative circles there is a distrust of ministries that can't tally up big numbers, or at least consistent numbers, of people saved. This should not be. Regardless of whether there are tracts involved, regardless of the numbers of people saved, any time spent helping people who need help is time spent being Christ who a world desperately in need of Him.

Ultimately, this is the paradox of Incarnation: Christ was and is and will be both God and man, having both a human body and spiritual power. In what can only be a faint echo of that we too are called to be invested in ministry that reaches body and soul, that finds sufficiency in spiritual encouragement but continually, generously assists with physical needs.

Argentina: Post 1

So. Last month I went to Argentina.

Some of you knew this already, and to those who were praying for me, I thank you. The purpose of the trip was a kind of cultural and missions adventure: During the first ten days, our five-person team helped at a Spanish-language ministry conference in Buenos Aires; during the second ten days, we traveled north, stopping to visit a variety of ministry projects along the way.

I plan to return to posting on singleness and the church, but before I do, I want to write a short series - maybe three or four posts - on my time in Argentina, the people I met there and the things that I learned. Since school starts next week, I want to start with something I learned about teaching.

Mosaic tile sidewalk in Brea Pozo

Our second stop on the trip north was Brea Pozo, a tiny village (perhaps 1300 people) tucked away in the arid Santiago del Estero Province. There's not much in Brea Pozo: a a few cows remarkable only for their protruding ribs, cactus plants shaped like trees, and lots and lots of wind - enough to create a sandstorm worthy of the Sahara Desert. The only other thing Brea Pozo is notable for is the rural community center it hosts: a Christian boarding school just outside the city limits. There, nearly two hundred students attend primary school (defined as kindergarten through seventh grade); of those, about fifty students live on campus.

To these students, the Brea Pozo school is a godsend. Poverty in Argentina, as in the United States, almost kills students' chances of a good education. Even students who live right across the street from the village school in Brea Pozo are sent a mile and a half down the road (and remember, most of these families don't own a car) to the Christian school. The problem of education is greater still for students who truly live in the country, up to fifty miles away from the school: Thanks to their isolation, these students would perhaps receive no education whatsoever were it not for the on-campus housing at Brea Pozo.

Yet there are more serious problems than education facing the rural poor in Argentina. Children raised in such deep poverty may also be raised by an abusive, alcoholic father. They may be raised by a mother who, for her livelihood, sells her body. They may be raised by a grandmother or an aunt so that their mother can work in town. In other words, the children who attend the Christian school come from badly-broken homes.

Having fun in Brea Pozo

Unsurprisingly, then, the Brea Pozo school includes in its student body a rather large number of what we would call at-risk students and what they call, all politically incorrect, troublemakers. By 'troublemakers' they do not simply mean students who don't turn in their homework. They mean students who sass the teachers - all the teachers - and students who burn down fields, students that the entire instructional staff has, at some point, wanted to dismiss from the school.

Yet these students are not, or are but rarely, actually dismissed. The school directors (a lovely married couple named Oscar and Susa) explained that as long as possible, whenever possible, the Brea Pozo school hangs onto these troublemakers, trying desperately to give them an education, to give them a safe environment, to teach them about Jesus.

Sometimes it doesn't work. But sometimes it does: One troublemaker raised in the Brea Pozo school later committed his life to Christ. Today he is leading a church and writing Spanish-language books about pressing church issues; we met him briefly at the Hispanic conference in Buenos Aires.

A teacher myself, I found this fascinating. As we sat around Oscar and Susa's kitchen table, I remembered the troublemakers in my classes, at least one a semester for as long as I have been teaching. These are the students who don't play well with others, who talk back to me in front of the entire class, who lie to me about what work they have and have not done. These are the students (I am ashamed to admit it) who I sometimes thought would be better off dismissed from the college, sent away because they were nothing but trouble.

I arrived taking pictures and completely
distracting the students in class.

Yet it is just these students that Oscar and Susa hang onto. "We are Christians," they explain. "The troublemakers may not come to Christ, but if we who are Christians do not take them in, who will?"

Good point.

It reminded me of something I heard earlier this summer. At the end of June, I spent a week in Cedar Falls at a workshop on teaching first-year college writing. There, the workshop director suggested that perhaps we stop complaining about how under-prepared our students were, that college instructors stop passing the buck back to the high school teachers and high school teachers stop passing the buck back to the middle school teachers. He told us, "You're the writing teacher, the expert in your field. Stop worrying about what their previous teacher did or did not teach them. You teach them."

That call to be the expert, to assume responsibility, was present in Oscar and Susa's school. In hanging onto the troublemakers, they sent a message to other Christian teachers: "You're the Christian, the expert in love and compassion. Show your students love and compassion."

Is that hard to do sometimes? Sure. But that's the point: As Jesus said, we all show love to people that are easy to love; we all show compassion to people who do not need to be showered with our compassion.

In Game of Thrones, the patriarch of the Stark family is asked by one of his sons, "How can a man be brave if he's afraid?" Ned Stark responds, "That is the only time a man can be brave."

Like bravery, the only time we can show love and compassion - really show them, as they were meant to be shown - is when we show them to those who do not deserve them.

Brea Pozo school buildings

That means the only time I am a loving, compassionate teacher is when I show that compassion to a student who perhaps did not deserve it but who needs it. The only time I can be a patient teacher is when I am working with a student who makes me impatient. The only time I can be merciful is when I am working with a student who has done something wrong.

I feel like Murphy's Law will come back to haunt me after I publish this post, that I'll somehow end up with an unusual number of troublemakers this semester because I am resolved to treat them with kindness, compassion and consistent love. Yet the point remains: Just as I am the expert in writing and so responsible to teach my students writing this year, so I am also, because of Christ, the expert in love and compassion and kindness and responsible to show all my students the love I received, regardless of whether they deserved it. Those who did not most did not deserve it are often those who need it most.

May the next semester be one of consistent grace and compassion in my classroom.

What We Say When We Talk About Chastity

I imagined this post, when I first conceived of it, to be a denunciation of the spiritual dangers lurking in books like I Kissed Dating Goodbye and When God Writes Your Love Story. Then talking with friends convinced me to scale back the tone of the piece, from accusatory prophet to a gentle warning against the spiritual unhealthy aspects of such books. Then time (short in part because I published something about singleness!) forced me to scale back still further: I want to get personal about these books, talk about how such books - written with such good intent! - may in fact push single believers further away from our gracious God.

Let me tell you a story.

Growing up, I was not particularly boy-crazy. I pulled my hair back into an unflattering ponytail until I was well into my teens, didn't wear make-up regularly until I was perhaps sixteen, and didn't discover that flat irons existed until I was in graduate school.

All this probably explains the unusual offer I received, late one night at a sleepover. I was about twelve, flat on my back on a mattress in the living room, sharing secrets with my friends at a sleepover. I don't remember what questions or discussion led up to it, but with perfect clarity I remember the offer: My friend, just a year older than me, offered to teach me how to flirt.

How to flirt? 

That's something I'm supposed to be learning? As in, good Christian girls actually try to flirt around guys?

(Also, this: Why in the world would anyone want to flirt? As I said, I was not boy-crazy.)

I kindly refused the offer, and conversation moved on to other topics. I recall feeling ever-so-slightly better, more spiritual than my friend. She flirted with boys. I did not. Even then, I was learning from the culture around me that extreme caution around young men was the way to follow God, and in my twelve-year-old mind I assumed likewise that to not flirt was to follow God.

I remember another evening, years later on the front porch of the church where youth group was held. Sitting there in the hot summer sun, my friends and I talked about first kisses. Romantic killjoy that I am, I interrupted the conversation with an announcement that I planned on never kissing until I was married, standing at the front of a church in a white dress and all. My friends, unsurprisingly, defended kissing before marriage, kissing before engagement, then went back to the more romantic conversations. I was left feeling ever-so-slightly superior to my friends, better off spiritually because I was reserving my first kiss for the altar. Christians, I knew, were called to purity, and I was better at purity.

At fifteen, of course, I wouldn't have put my thoughts in quite those terms, but that's what they boiled down to: Not flirting, not kissing - these things made me a better Christian, albeit a romantically challenged one.

In retrospect, what I thought made me a better Christian only made me a self-righteous prig, and it is that self-righteousness which is among the chief dangers (though by no means the most well-known) of so many evangelical books designed to teach readers how to stay pure before marriage, books in the vein of I Kissed Dating Goodbye and When God Writes Your Love Story. 

Before I go on, I need to clarify a few things.

First of all, books such as I Kissed Dating Goodbye are not all bad. In fact, I re-read Harris's book recently, and I was impressed by how he urged readers to behave in a way that helps others walk more closely with God. Mutual care and respect for our brothers and sisters in Christ is rare these days, and I appreciated his reminders.

Second, and more importantly, I still believe that within Christian theology, sex is to be reserved for marriage. It is therefore possible to write books urging readers to chastity without also falling into spiritual pitfalls (Lauren Winner's Real Sex is an excellent example of a book that manages this balance.)

Yet such books, written as they are to singles who are to remain chaste, link that chastity to pleasing God in a way that slides towards legalism, away from grace, and so runs the risk of turning those of us who are single and chaste into modern-day Pharisees. They run the risk of undermining all that singleness is meant to be.

In books such as Harris's and Eric and Leslie Ludy's, chastity is to be maintained through rigid personal standards, standards that please God. Harris, for instance, writes that "God is not impressed with my ability to stand up to sin. He's more impressed by the obedience I show when I run from it." (96). His point is clear: The way to impress God - an interesting choice of words, to say the least - is to flee from sin. In light of that fact, Harris urges his readers to accomplish that flight through a system of self-imposed boundaries and standards for maintaining sexual purity: "Set your standards too high," he tells readers. "You will never regret purity." (97).

On the one hand, I appreciate that Harris is reaffirming the importance of chastity. Even we Christians try to wriggle out of God's plan that sex is for marriage only, so the value that Harris places on purity is to be commended. My problem is not so much what Harris says but how he says it, not that he urges chastity (which is good) but that he urges chastity in a way that rings of legalism (which is bad).

Incidentally, although I use Harris's name throughout this essay, this is only because this essay began with a reference to his book; the problem is, unfortunately, not limited to Harris but spread throughout the evangelical church.

The evangelical church, as Harris says, believes that our moral purity impresses God. To say that we may impress God by running from sin (or really, by any behaviour whatsoever) is to step away from the gospel back towards legalism. We may be saved by grace, but we harbour a belief that we earn spiritual brownie points after salvation by our goodness; we think, and are taught to think, that we deserve some kind of gold star for not lying, not cheating, and for those of us who are single, by not having sex.

Within this system, it makes perfect sense for Harris to urge his readers to "set your standards too high". As long as spiritual life is a quest to impress God, then we will naturally be urged to prop up moral purity in whatever way we can, including imposing extra-biblical sanctions such as "No kissing," "No dating," or "No holding hands." Yet while we are told these these sanctions will promote holiness, all they really promote is self-righteousness; they drain us of spiritual energy without leading us closer to Christ.

The danger, for those of us who are long-term singles, is that people like Harris link our spiritual vitality and success as singles, not with the grace of Christ, but with our own success at maintaining not only chastity but also all those extra-biblical sanctions. Yet such sanctions actually threaten our spiritual vitality: Singleness is meant, like marriage, to draw us closer into communion with God, to make us more holy, yet to persist in certain behaviour patterns in an attempt to impress God is to defeat the purpose for which God designed singleness.

Don't get me wrong: Having standards, even ones that are not directly spelled out in the Bible, may well be a good thing. Think of those, for instance, who know that addiction runs in their family, and so they hold themselves to a standard of no alcohol. This is a wise personal standard. In fact, I Corinthians teaches that we ought to respect each other's standards, not urge people to violate their own standards.

Yet while we may feel that certain standards are useful in the cause of holiness, we are never told that the standards in themselves make us holier before God.  As St. Paul reminds the Corinthian church, "Food will not commend us to God. We are no worse off if we do not eat, and no better off if we do" (8:8). To translate this to dating, we are no worse off if we do not kiss our boyfriend, and no better off if we do. Before and after salvation, we are impressive to God only in Christ.

Incidentally, I find it interesting that Harris emphasizes fleeing sin through standards. If this works, so be it; the Bible also instructs us to "flee sexual immorality." Yet in the Bible the point is not so much what we're running from as who we are running to: "Walk in the Spirit," St Paul tell us, "and you will not fulfill the lusts of the flesh." Whereas evangelical culture tells us to start sprinting away from sin, God tells us to start sprinting towards Him. The one race is a long and wearying one with nothing at its end; the other, a gentle walk with God Himself waiting for us at the end. This is the message that we should be giving to those who are single, and hearing if we are single: While we may choose to embrace certain standards, we do not stand or fall based on having those standards; we stand or fall in Christ alone.

And this is both more encouraging and more challenging: challenging, because walking with Christ involves all of life in a way that compartmentalized, narrow standards does not; encouraging, because we are loved and will not ruin ourselves beyond a point that grace can rescue us.

Lauren Winner, writing in Real Sex, points out that an over-emphasis on self-control and rigid sexual standards "perhaps fails to recognize that one resists strong bodily urges like sexual desires not primarily through willpower, but through grace." It is that grace which we as the body of Christ want to taste. Whether we are married or single, whether we are chaste or still working in that direction, our God will walk with us.

This is how the church needs to start talking about chastity: Ultimately, the single years are not meant to be a grit-your-teeth-and-bear-it chastity in an attempt to impress God, nor a series of escalating standards meant to secure His approval. They are indeed meant to make us holy (as marriage is also meant to make married people holy), but this happens not through our efforts but through the transformative grace of Christ. There is nothing to be proud of, nothing to be self-righteous about, nothing to boast about but Christ.

To close, let me return to my story: That self-righteousness of mine is, I think, a fair illustration of the dangers of linking high standards to success as chaste men or women. What success at chastity needs to be linked to is, of course, Christ alone. There's no reason to excuse sex before marriage, but there's also no reason to talk as if anything but Christ our sacrifice keeps us from sin and pleases God. Only in Him are we, married and single people alike, made whole.

All the Single Evangelicals

This weekend, a personal research project sent me back into some books that I hadn't read since I was a teenager: books about being single and preparing for marriage.

I remember thinking, as a teen, that these books were okay. As an adult, I had to keep myself from throwing the books across the room in frustration and anger. In the next few weeks, I hope to write a post identifying possible spiritual abuse in the books, but until that post, I want to write something for those who are like me, long-term singles.

Just this evening, I was talking with a single woman frustrated with her situation in the church. Just last week, a high school friend held a long online debate about the merits of singleness and those of marriage. Wherever I look in the church, single men and women are being pulled down by expectations that the evangelical world has about singleness and for singles.

I want to push back. I want to encourage my peers. So, to the single women and men out there, I say:

You are normal. Sometimes the church pretends that marriage is the norm, that God designed everyone, with the exception of a few random people, to be married eventually. Within the last two weeks, I have found people posting on the Internet that in God's plan for the world, marriage is normal; singleness (by implication) abnormal. But you are not abnormal! You are created by God and designed to be in this place of singleness, at this time. Your singleness is not something unusual. It does not catch our God by surprise. In fact, God designed singleness as much as He designed marriage: Eve may have been created so the first Adam would not be alone, but the second Adam lived more than thirty years as a single man on this world. Your singleness, just as much as marriage, is part of our loving Lord's good plan.

You are strong in Christ. Unfortunately, married people sometimes pretend that their lifestyle is more likely to produce strong believers than a single lifestyle does. Karen Swallow Prior and Marvin Olasky have both written that marriage is God's way to grow people up, to mature them quickly. Not so. David writes in the Psalms that in heaven or in hell or in the farthest parts of the earth he is still in the guiding, tender hand of his Father. You too, whether you be single-never-married or married or widowed or divorced, are in your Father's hand; He is bringing you closer to Him, and those who are married will not get there faster.

Even more importantly, your singleness is not a test that you have to pass before you are spiritually qualified for marriage. I have read authors (I'm looking at you, Eric and Leslie Ludy) that claim that the lonely single years are God's way of cleaning up the bad parts of your character. They imply that you will be married when you have matured enough. Guess what? They are lying. They are corrupting the wonderful truth that we are all - single and married - in Christ, and that every gift we have - including marriage and singleness - is a gracious and good gift from Him. You do not have to pass any test whatsoever to receive good gifts from God. You have received every gift abundantly and overflowing in God (see Romans 8.32), including your singleness.

That your singleness is a gift from God does not mean you have to be happy about it all the time. You do not need to plaster a smile on your face, be upbeat, tell everyone how much you are using these single years for God's sake. Sometimes our loving God assigns us a hard fate: Even His Own Son begged for something different. God is not going to be upset or surprised if you have days when you are discouraged or sad about your singleness; He will not think you are discontent, anymore than Jesus Christ in the Garden was discontent, when you ask Him to bring a spouse into your lives. Please, don't worry about being the perfect, content Christian single. Be honest. 

That includes being honest about not wanting marriage, if that be you. Unfortunately, our evangelical culture tries to convince us that everyone wants to get married, that marriage is the norm and not wanting it is a sign of being really weird. Not true. Some of us just aren't built with that desire; others will develop it only when someone special comes into their lives. Either way, it's okay. Be honest: Enjoying your singleness is worth so much more than pretending you really want a spouse.

On a related note, do not try to justify your singleness by extraordinary, draining acts of service. If all we have spiritually is from Christ, there is no need for you to work extra-hard as a single person to prove your spiritual wisdom and worth. You do not have to work yourself to the point of physical and emotional exhaustion; you do not have to ignore your needs and boundaries simply because there is not a family at home waiting for you. You can balance service and your human needs and still be using your singleness wisely. Sometimes, married people will tell me that singles have so much more time to serve God (or the community, or whatever). Not true. On your own, you earn a living, you balance the checkbook, you pay the bills, you schedule oil changes, you wash the laundry, you open the jar lids. You are both husband and wife in your household, and you are strong for carrying both burdens.

Concluding Thoughts

To the married people who are reading this: I don't want to imply that you are, by virtue of being married, contributing to singles' discouragement, that you are belittling singleness as opposed to marriage. Certainly not! You are our friends, our brothers and sisters in the Lord, and we value your friendships.

Yet in the end, I'm not really talking to married people in this post. I'm talking to fellow singles: Unfortunately, the church is sometimes abysmal at communicating its value of single people, and that has to change. Sticking up for women's rights is not a condemnation of men, so sticking up for singles is not a condemnation of marriage. It needs to be done: Whatever our evangelical culture says, singleness and singles, as well as marriage and married people, are valued in the eyes of God.

Let's remember.

Towards a Better Understanding of James 4

As you know from my last post, I spent a few days in California earlier this month for a conference. Yet in spite of the fact that this visit was my first time on the West Coast, in spite of the fact that I desperately needed a few days away after a stressful semester, I deliberately reined in any enthusiasm until I arrived. I didn't plan much, besides making sure that I had housing and transportation. I didn't talk much about my trip with other people.

I've done this kind of thing before. Visiting Paris last summer, I planned my housing and transportation in advance. Everything else I planned during the two-hour flight from Prague, bookmarking interesting pages in my travel guide with the napkins from the in-flight snack. Visiting London two years ago, I did the same thing: There were a few things I planned in advance (my self-initiated, self-guided T.S. Eliot walking tour, for instance), but almost everything else I planned out on the plane.

For a long time, I thought I was the only one who did this. Then, a close friend of mine took a trip to London, and she too confessed that she was trying not to get too excited, lest the whole trip fall apart at the last minute. Even in the weeks leading up to a trip that had been planned for months, she was still holding back her enthusiasm, just in case. (For the record, she made it, and she's enjoying London right now.)

When I noticed this pattern, this tendency to rein in excitement lest something prevent our plans, I thought of a passage in James 4:

Come now, you who say, 'Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit' - yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, 'If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.'

In the past, I've always interpreted this passage as a caution against undue excitement: Because we will not live forever, because all pleasures in this life are but temporary, there's no need to get particularly worked up about any of them. Remember that only through the generosity of God do we enjoy any of our pleasures at all; when He turns off the tap, whatever we loved is gone.

Probably this interpretation owes a lot to the parallels between James 4 and Luke 12, in which Jesus, like a divine stockbroker, warns his readers that spiritual wealth is far more stable than material wealth. This, of course, is true. Yet I can't help but feel that the pessimism of this interpretation - beware! You're likely to lose everything at any moment! - is problematic.

Read as an indictment of planning ahead and getting excited about the future, James 4 turns God into a bogeyman. Sometimes, believers who subscribe to this interpretation will tack the phrase, "If the Lord wills" onto their plans, whether those be for a summer vacation, a new job, or a spouse. I appreciate the sentiment: Yes, everything we are or accomplish is designed by God. Yet I can't help but feel that repeatedly using the phrase to discourage excitement about life turns God into a killjoy, who wants nothing more than to spoil our happy plans.

Imagine, for instance, I said this: This summer I hope to visit my family, Lord willing. You could, in place of the Lord willing, just as easily substitute the (perhaps more honest?) phrase, If nothing goes wrong. Like so: This summer I hope to visit my family, if nothing goes wrong. In other words, what this phrase, as inspired by the pessimistic interpretation of James, does is repeatedly associate God with things in our life going wrong. Please don't misunderstand: I'm not saying that God hangs around in order to make us happy, like some kind of cosmic vending machine. I'm not even saying that God tries to grant us plenty of good things in this life. As Stephen King reminds us, In this world those who do evil ride over the roads in Cadillac cars.

Yet our God is a good God, a gentle God, and to use a phrase that implies when things go wrong, God is responsible, does not do justice to the complex and deeply compassionate way that God is involved in our disappointments and sufferings, whether they be trivial or deeply important. From elsewhere in the Scriptures, we know that Jesus does not stand around waiting to yank the rug out from under our feet just when we are happiest. Jesus weeps when we weep.

I am therefore cautious about interpreting James's epistle in a way that makes it seem like our God is trying to zap us. As I thought about this passage before California, it occurred to me that there is a deeper theme, one more affirming and encouraging - and, as is true with almost all of Scripture, more difficult to follow.

Notice the context of James's words. When he instructs them to say, "If the Lord wills, we will do this our that", he has just finished comparing their life to a mist, to the morning dew. Imagine how long that stuck around in the summer! Confronted with such truths, the natural reaction is not to forge ahead; it is to pull back from life altogether. Think of the people who quit their jobs and traveled the country when Harold Camping preached the Rapture.

This is not the instruction that James gives to believers. Instead, he tells them to get back to life, to go on working and planning and dreaming, albeit with the single caveat "if the Lord wills". And in the context of their short lives, the phrase "If the Lord wills" takes on new meaning: Doom may be assured, but it is the Lord who holds back that doom, and it is the Lord who sees that their plans are carried out, that they live and do this or that. In other words, the Lord is a giver of good things. Thus, the goal is not so much to worry about what bad things might happen, caused by a vindictive God, but to recognize that we live in a world of uncertainties and rely on a good God for good things.

No, God will not always supply us with sunshine and roses. No, we cannot be certain that any of our plans will turn out. Yet as believers we are to make plans anyway, to forge ahead with bravery and faith because our God is good.

I am reminded of something that Lilias Trotter, one of the first missionaries to the Muslim world, wrote:

Faith learns to swing out into nothingness and drop down full weight on God - nothing between us and the abyss but Himself - A rejoicing in every fresh emergency that is going to prove Him true - the Lord Alone - that is trained faith.

Surely the future - what will happen to us, who we will know, what we will do - is the deepest abyss of all; there is no seeing what may come. Yet that is no excuse to hold back in fear, to choose the clear, safe course. It is a call to draw up our plans, and in those plans to 'drop down full weight on God' - our loving, gentle God who may (or who may not) will for those plans to happen.

Time with Friends

As many of you know, I took a few days at the tail end of my time in Prague to visit London. One of the things I remember most about that trip is how refreshing it was to hear and see English everywhere. After six months in the Czech Republic, I was fairly comfortable with the Czech signs and the basic Czech phrases (especially the one for, "I don't speak Czech."), so I was astonished that the pleasure of the English language was powerful enough to be almost physical.

This weekend, I experienced something similar: I spent a long weekend at a literature conference in California. Before I went, I was looking forward to giving my talk and sharing some of my own poetry. I hoped to see the Pacific Ocean. Yet I was only mildly interested in the conference itself: In graduate school, I attended two conferences (one on rhetoric and literature, another on Willa Cather) and while I enjoyed both, neither stands out.

My conference in California was outstanding. Yes, I stood at the edge of the Pacific Ocean, and yes, I read my own poetry to an audience of perhaps fifteen people. Yet the conference itself was equally a treat. There, I talked about narrative structure, the horror genre as a vehicle for religious themes, Lady Julian of Norwich and phenomenology, and T.S. Eliot. I picked up tips on using literature circles in class, and I brainstormed about how to fold service learning projects into the notoriously messy English Composition class that I teach. At the end of the conference, several other (very sporting) participants and I headed off to a nearby trail for a hike and trooped through the Southern California sun heatedly debating the narrative potential of video games and the differences between English and French romance novels.

Confession: I kinda want to go back for a PhD now. Oops.

(For those of you who don't keep up with humanities higher education, the job market for PhDs in literature is terrible these days.)

Here's what I think made the weekend such a treat, especially compared to conferences I attended in graduate school: I am trained and love to analyze literature as a scholar, but I rarely hold scholarly, in-depth conversations about literature anymore. In graduate school, I had such conversations all the time. I was guaranteed an interesting, thought-provoking discussion about literature whenever I showed up to my class on DeLillo and the postmodern American novel or to my seminar on literary theory. Now, the closest I get is teaching Four Quartets to my mother so that she can teach it to her high school literature class.

I am reminded of a passage in The Last Battle. Towards the beginning of the novel, nearly all the characters - Edward, Lucy, Peter, Jill, Eustace and the Professor - meet to "have a good jaw about Narnia (for of course there's no one else we can ever talk to about things like that)". What made my weekend in California such a treat was the chance to "have a good jaw" about T.S. Eliot and Julian of Norwich and all the rest.

When I was a child, I used to wonder how in the world the early Christians could bear to be together so much. They seemed to gather all the time, for great lengths of time. You remember the young man who fell out the window during the middle of Paul's sermon? I always had complete sympathy for him, thinking to myself, "How I would hate to be stuck in a church service that long!" Or Paul will instruct the elders of a church to read the epistle to the rest of the church, and I would imagine sitting through a reading of all fifteen chapters of I Corinthians and think to myself, "How boring!"

Of course, my problem was not that I was disinterested in faith; I was simply saturated with it. I was homeschooled. I had Christian parents. I read the Bible daily and I prayed daily. Sunday mornings were simply an extension of my ordinary week, but with me stuck in a hard pew and growing hungrier by the minute.

Now, I am better able to appreciate why the early Christians met so often and for such long times. The fact that no one else in my world reads literature like a scholar does not, of course, compare to the fact that no one else in the world of the early Christians cared two cents about Jesus.

Yet all the same, I know now that what compelled them to meet until they could not stay awake any longer was the almost physical pleasure in having a good jaw about Jesus Christ. From dawn to dusk, they were surrounded by members of the Roman Empire: people who worshipped Anubis and Isis, Jupiter and Minerva; people who regularly engaged in temple prostitution or who spent their wealth acquiring wines and spices from the far corners of the universe. No wonder they stayed up till all hours listening to Paul whenever he came to town.

To turn again to Lewis (this time, his nonfiction), I am reminded of his analysis of friendship: "born", he writes, "at that moment when one person says to another, 'What! You too? I thought I was the only one.'" Especially since we are not created to live alone, the discovery of like-minded people - whether they share the same language, the same scholarly interests, or deepest of all, the same faith - is good. 

Incidentally, in writing this post I caught myself slipping into a kind of utilitarianism. I spent perhaps thirty minutes with visions and revisions of what I should write about why friendship was good. I had very practical reasons: It encourages us. It keeps our interests going. It keeps faith from dying out. This is true, but I think we forget that friendship - that being with other people - is created to be an intrinsic good for us. God has designed us to spend time with people who share our language and our interests and our faith, and when we take delight in that, we take delight in a goodness that He created for us.

Yet it is this goodness that should send us away from our friends and back into the world again. Here, I can write more concretely. If I never stopped talking about T.S. Eliot, none of my students would read him. Too much time with literature scholars, and I am no longer able to talk intelligibly to non-majors (Just ask my senior English class in Prague, whom I overwhelmed with twelve pages of Milton.)

If we believers never left the church, no one would be converted. Perhaps expectedly, the church emphasizes the need for more church. Go every week, our pastor tells us. Join a weekly Bible study! Meet up with Christians for prayer before work and lunch during work. This is true and good advice, yet it is just as important that we eventually leave church and talk to other people.

As individuals with a wide range of interests and faiths, we are not meant to indulge those alone. What we are meant for is to indulge them in community, to drink deeply of the pleasures of friendships, and then to pass the cup around for those who have not yet tasted them.

Coming up: I plan to post about faith sometime before the end of the month. Keep your eyes peeled!

Poem: Several of you (meaning, my parents!) have asked about my poems. I have a separate post with all three poems here.