Table of Contents

• Is God Hard to Please?
• Pray Without Ceasing
• On Becoming a Radiator
• What I Knew For Sure
• WWJ Do? WWJ See?
• Sweet Spot in Petition Prayer?
• Prominence, or Lack Thereof
• Like A Snake
• Heaven Can Wait, or Can It?
• Principles of Effective Personal Prayer
• Short Memory for Sin?
• Drifting Toward God
• “Wherever you are, you are where God wants you.”
• I have not been perfect; I am not now perfect; and I will never be perfectly perfect.
• Is Grace Fair?
• The Plan: I Will …

Is God Hard to Please?

Carefully determine what pleases the Lord.
[Eph 5:10 NLT]

Okie Diamond

We adopted a retired racing greyhound named DiDi (Okie Diamond). We had rescued her from the track, but she still loved running laps in our backyard at 40 MPH. Cruising was effortless, as if the law of gravity did not apply. She ran for the pure joy of it, and it was pure pleasure to watch.

I’ll get back to this line of thought in a moment. For now, let’s switch gears.

It was a Sunday morning in St. Joseph, Missouri. The pews were filled with about four hundred of the faithful. From the pulpit, Andrew Wommack asked for a show of hands on this question:

“How many of you really want to please God more than anything else?”

Every hand was raised. But then, after a pause, he asked for a show of hands on a far more revealing question:

“How many of you think God is really pleased with you?”

All hands remained down … except for two, one belonging to an 11-year-old boy and another belonging to a 10-year-old girl.

Would you have raised your hand? Would I have raised my hand? Is God pleased with me, Walter, right now, at this very moment?

I do know God loves me but, realistically, I also know that it is just God’s nature to love anybody and everybody. He can’t not love me and still be God. But does he accept me as I am? Does he like me?

On the God-scale, I will humbly concede that my performance ranks toward the low end. Maybe I would fare a little better if God measured effort and not actual achievement. Or … maybe there is a loophole that would allow God to accept me, provisionally, as a “work in progress.” Maybe … but would that be enough?

What would it actually take to please God?

Producing fruit, good fruit, seems to be at the top of the list. As Jesus said,

The ax is already at the root of the trees, and every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire. [Mat 3:10 NIV]

But does God value fruit for its own sake? Or, is it possible that God is pleased, less by actual fruit and more by a fruitful attitude? Consider this: Before Jesus took up the mantle of his ministry, before he built a reputation, before any of his recorded public works, a voice from heaven spoke these words:

This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased. [Mat 3:17 NIV]

There was no fruit inspection at Jesus’ baptism, so Father God must have been pleased just with Jesus’ so-far status, including his unconditional “yes” and his intention to abide in his Father’s will.

As Jesus explains so beautifully in John 15, the branch (that’s you and me) does not strain or strive to produce fruit; it simply abides in the Vine (that’s Jesus). Fruit comes along as the natural, unforced and genetically inevitable result. Abiding. Could it really be that simple?

Maybe it is. Since the New Covenant law is written on my heart [Hebrews 10:16], I only need to follow my heart. For me, this does not seem to require a notable amount of self-control or self-effort. Technically, this may fall under the heading of “obedience” or “discipline” but it doesn’t feel unnatural or forced. I am just doing what, at a very deep level, I really want to do.

Maybe you have heard of the “hedonistic paradox.” This is the idea that we cannot put ourselves in a happy state simply by trying, very directly, to make ourselves happy. We can only become happy indirectly, by aiming at something other than happiness. We then experience happiness as a by-product of that other activity.

In a similar vein, perhaps we cannot please God simply by striving straight-on to produce pleasing fruit. Perhaps the best we can do, as mere branches, is to stay connected to the Vine. Then we can rejoice, along with Father God, as bud, blossom and fruit naturally develop. These outward signs are important, but they are just a secondary effect. It is by the working of the Holy Spirit, not by our own effort, that our lives become “well-pleasing in his sight.” [2 Cor 3:5; Phil 2:13; Heb 13:21]

Bottom line: What is most pleasing to God is an unforced, self-effortless life in the Spirit.

If you think reducing your effort profile is impractical advice, here are some ideas to get you started:

• Answer without making the effort to excuse your behavior.
• Enjoy without making the effort to find small defects.
• Forgive without making the effort to set preconditions.
• Give without making the effort to determine cost.
• Listen without making the effort to interrupt.
• Pray without making the effort to set an agenda.
• Speak without making the effort to parse words.

Pray Without Ceasing

Ever wonder why “prayer without ceasing” [I Thes 5:17] seems so out of reach? Hang on, I have a possible explanation.

When you learn to drive, you discover very early in the process that an automobile has a forward mode and a reverse mode, and that these two can’t be mixed. You can’t go forward in reverse mode, and you can’t go backward in forward mode. Before you can do either, you must get in the proper mode by shifting into it. Choosing one mode makes the other mode impossible.

Is this a metaphor for how your natural life and your prayer life interact? If that’s a “yes,” we must be soul mates. In one mode, I could take care of daily routine, but I needed to get myself in a different mode to experience relationship with God. I couldn’t get the spiritual connection to work while absorbed in the business of life, and I couldn’t do “life” while I was experiencing the presence of God. Choosing one mode made the other mode quite impossible. Problem was, shifting to the spiritual track of my parallel universe required so much “disengagement” effort that I didn’t spend much time in the presence of God.

I can’t claim any credit for this, but the Holy Spirit has put me in a “place” or a “season” where I can say, with Eric Clapton, “I have finally found a way to live in the presence of the Lord like I never could before.”

I have loved this song for years, especially as performed by the Blind Boys of Alabama, but I never understood what it meant … until now. Wow, I don’t have to switch back and forth between modes anymore. The old boundaries are gone. Life feels simpler and seamless. Look, Ma, I’m praying without ceasing!

How did this happen?

Actually, two things happened, one on the talking side and one on the listening side.

First, I observed most folks regularly use the language of prayer without really meaning the words as prayer. We say

• God help us
• God forbid
• Oh my God
• Good God
• For God’s sake
• By God
• So help me God
• I hope to God
• Thank God
• [Sneeze] God bless you

Me too. I have said, do say, all these things without breathing life into them. I am reminded of my favorite aunt’s favorite all-occasion phrase, which was: “God love you.” Spoken over a tearful child [that would be me], these words had the power cure all manner of little-boy hurts and scrapes. But wait. Could Aunt Eddy possibly have meant these words as instant intercessory prayer?

Hummm … possibly … hummm … probably. Yes! I believe she did.

So … following the example of my favorite aunt, if we want an easy way to inject regular prayer into daily living, it can be as simple as meaning what we say. Instead of using these habitual idioms unreflectively, just to add emphasis, we only need to begin intending them as deliberate prayer. This has the lovely consequence that we are subverting popular culture by rehabilitating and redeeming speech patterns that are very nearly profane. Same speech pattern exactly, but now it’s sanctified by a new layer of intention. Try it. You’ll find this is a stealthy way to pray; no one raises an eyebrow if, every now and then, you exclaim, “Oh my God!” or “God help us!”  We have immediate no-wait access to God’s instant messaging service.

Second, I observed that God is pushing his side of the prayer dialog toward me all the time, 24/7/365, using any and every available means. If you’re God, that’s a lot of broadcast channels! And, if you’re God, you can make anything speak. You can make the eraser on my pencil speak to me about human imperfection and forgiveness.

Here is what God appears to be doing at his end of these channels of unceasing prayer. Look how many are consistent with active living in the real world:

• alerting me to coincidences or pairings of events
• bringing something surprising or unexpected into my life
• causing me to remember something, and to see the point that recollection
• causing me to see something familiar in a different way (e.g., more sympathetically)
• creating an emotional connection or “tug” between me and another person
• drawing my attention to something I neglected to notice, shifting my focus to it
• forming and sustaining an impression, so that it grows and develops
• giving me a deep thought — one I would never have formed all by myself
• giving me a recurring thought, image or face (usually a prayer-starter)
• giving me an empathic connection with someone (e.g., sense their mood or pain)
• giving words of advice or encouragement to me through other people
• leading me to make “spontaneous” association
• opening a door, inviting me to walk in
• replaying part of a song in my mind (e.g., “He fails us not”) until the full meaning sinks in
• revealing a pattern that “connects the dots” in “random” events
• revealing new value in something or someone I had under-estimated
• revealing the “hidden” meaning of something (seems obvious afterward)

Before I caught on to this, I had a “prayer mode” and a “daily living mode,” but these did not coexist so well. I obediently cloistered part of my life for prayer but lived mostly in the other compartment. This worked passably well but didn’t take advantage of the fact that God was trying to reach me all the time, using multiple channels, through every available means, through everything in the universe that could possibly have meaning, through every thought and every image that floats across my brain.

Now that I am free from the necessity of compartmentalized prayer, I can react differently to the events of daily living. For example, I am open to the possibility that it could be the Holy Spirit that is causing my mind to drift into a particular area, or causing me to take a sudden interest in a particular person. When the channels are open and working in both directions, I can convert that “drift” or that “steering” into prayer, in real time. Good God, could this really count as a steady prayer? Oh my God!

On Becoming a Radiator

This posting will provide further evidence that I am not fully recovered from my sibling-free “only child”-hood. Hey, I like me.  I like singing “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.” After all, those are my favorite personal pronouns! I live in my own little world, population: me.

At some level, I do realize that it’s not my own private light that shines, to my own personal credit. It is actually the light Jesus planted in me that shines through me, or in spite of me. My job is to be a pumpkin lantern, hallowed only because I’ve been hollowed. When the Holy Spirit re-sculpted the Walter-pumpkin from the inside out, she also cut some serious cracks in my outer pumpkin shell, enough so folks can sometimes clearly see the Jesus candle burning inside.

Still, I’m not too fond of the pumpkin metaphor, so I asked God to clothe my life in a better metaphor. Gotta be something better than a pumpkin. Expectantly, I promised to do some of that dangerous listening I rarely do. I even gave my informed consent:

Yes, Jesus, I Walter am fully aware that actually listening to you will knock me off my stride and turn my life inside out … again. Proceed at my own risk.

So, what happened? Well, it seems that I am supposed to be … ta da … a radiator. That’s right — one of those old-fashioned, bang-banging, leaky, cranky, iron-finned forced-steam heaters like you would expect to see in an old hotel that’s ready for demolition. Radiators I know well. I survived a half-dozen Boston winters with drafty windows and hot iron hissing in every room.

Yeah, a radiator, for Christ’s sake!  Not very glamorous is it?

Maybe not, but it is a good fit for Scripture, which tells us that that there is power in the breath of God:

• “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you.” [Acts 1:8]
• “I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being …” [Eph 3:16]
• “For the Spirit God gave us does not make us timid, but gives us power …” [2 Tim 1:7]

So, when the Spirit wind blows, it is not necessarily a cool breeze that whispers through us with hardly a leaf stirring. Don’t get me wrong. Sometimes I need the presence of God to descend ever so gently on me, feather light, covering me like a down comforter. On the other hand, I need to “open the valve” for those times when the Spirit wants to fill me with expansive steam, bursting into the fins of my personal radiator, ready, willing and able to distribute holy energy into a cold world.

Although radiators seem passive — no fancy moving parts, belts, gears or wheels — they manage to make a big difference just by doing one thing well: releasing the energy that flows into them. So who am I? Who are you? Among other things, we are radiators and, more importantly, we are releasers! If we do this one thing well, we shall be radiant.

Finally I understand odd-sounding prayers that contain release phrases like, “I release the peace of God in this place.”

What will you release in your world today?

What I Knew For Sure

“It’s not what you don’t know that kills you,
it’s what you know for sure that ain’t true.”
— Mark Twain

This is going to make me look like an idiot but, for what it’s worth, here is my list* of things I once knew for sure … that ain’t exactly true. I don’t mean they are false through and through, but they steered me in the wrong direction.

Is there a common thread? Yes. Count how many times I use the pronouns I, my and me. In one way or another, directly or indirectly, everything I’ve listed puts the burden on me to build and maintain a relationship with God. This seems impossibly self-reliant and backward to me now. The truth is that it was not, is not, and will never be about me, or because of me. I am merely a consumer of grace, not a producer.

• After accepting that first big round of forgiveness for my past sins, all I need to do now is ask forgiveness for each new sin as I commit it.
• “Amen,” at the end of a prayer, is like hanging up the phone; it means, “Goodbye for now.”
• God hides from me.
• God is very busy running the universe.
• God is a serious, controlled and humorless character, with no excesses of passion, who is never amused by my vanity and foibles.
• God loves me, but only because that’s a requirement of being God.
• God needs my help.
• God sets the bar very high and expects more results than I can deliver.
• God won’t dump more on me than I can bear.
• I am living inside one of God’s backup plans due to bad choices I made in the past.
• I become more and more holy by doing “spiritual” things.
• I can somehow “fall out” of the kingdom.
• I need to control my sinful nature through willpower and self mastery.
• I need to put my best foot forward in prayer.
• I should decide what to do for God, then ask God to bless my efforts.
• I should feel guilty when I could have done something good, but didn’t.
• If I tell God the straight-out honest truth about X, he may take offense.
• In prayer, I should be on my best behavior, being careful what I say and how I say it.
• In the divine dance, God wants me to take the lead.
• It is normal for me to have a desire to do things for God coupled with a constant inability to carry them out.
• It is normal for me to have an on-again off-again relationship with God.
• It would be wonderful if I could reboot my Christian life and start over from square one.
• My bad behavior comes as a shock or suprise to God.
• My inconsistent behavior frustrates God, or frustrates God’s plan.
• My life would be a lot better if I could just “get it right”.
• Obeying strict moral rules is a sure way to attract God’s favor.
• Prayer is putting my agenda on God’s table.
• Resisting sin will make me holy … eventually.
• Salvation does very little for me now, compared to what it will do for me when I die and go to heaven.
• Salvation is my giving my life to Jesus.
• Sometimes God is close to me and sometimes God is distant.
• Take away God’s super powers and there wouldn’t be much left in terms of personality.
• The Christian life I am called to live is difficult and demanding.
• The kingdom won’t come unless I do my part.
• There is a proper way to pray. I should follow the standard protocol.
• To keep God “on my side,” I must keep on doing certain key things (going to church, reading the bible, praying …).
• When I sin, I should be ashamed of myself.

At least one of these needs a little explanation: “Salvation is my giving my life to Jesus.” The truth is exactly the opposite: Salvation is Jesus giving his life to me.

I’m coming back to the heart of worship
And it’s all about You,
It’s all about You, Jesus.
I’m sorry, lord, for the thing I’ve made it
When it’s all about You,
It’s all about You, Jesus.

— Matt Redman

* Lorilynn Barth and Steve McVey made lists similar to the list shown above; I have adapted some of their items.

WWJ Do? WWJ See?

Sorry, Jesus, but the truth is your kingdom is full of surprise endings, plot reversals, twists and convolutions. Where I grew up, we kids had a couple of favorite slang expressions for this, words that were fun to pronounce: wopperjawed and cattywampus. They meant something didn’t line up the way you would expect, maybe even lined up opposite of what you would expect. Last is first, losing is finding, giving is receiving, the rich are poor, servant is master, greatest is least, and freedom is slavery to the will of God. Yeah, Jesus, your kingdom is clearly wopperjawed and cattywampus. Maybe this explains why we have so much trouble getting ourselves aligned with the program.

For example, I have earnestly tried to apply WWJD (What would Jesus do?) as a simple rule of conduct. “Just do it” feels right and seems to work in a few obvious situations. Unfortunately, in the remaining ones, it’s not much help. I finally realized that, most of the time, asking WWJD cannot be the first step.

A close inspection of the gospels shows Jesus did what he did because he saw what he saw. “When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.” [Matthew 9:36; see also Mark 2:5]. Where the disciples saw a crowd control problem, Jesus saw people in need. He always saw what others ignored or avoided or minimized or pretended not to see. I should have known this already because, when he looks into my heart, he sees what I tend to ignore or avoid or minimize or pretend not to see. He sees, for example, that I often do good things for selfish reasons. So … in any given situation, perhaps the first rule should be: What would Jesus see (WWJS)? This doesn’t align well with my natural bent, which is (1) do it, then (2) see what happens. The Jesus rule is (1) see it, then (2) do what happens. It’s wopperjawed, like other parts of the gospel.

Around me, I see people I can learn to love but not necessarily people I can learn to like. Seeing was a completely different experience for Jesus. When he looked around, he saw people that were both lovable and likable. He genuinely liked the tax collectors and the prostitutes, the sick and the lame, servants and masters, nobodies and somebodies. The surprise is not that Jesus loves me and loves you; that’s old news. The surprise is that Jesus actually likes us.

If I apply the WWJS rule, I will need to see, in others, the qualities Jesus would have found likable. I will need to see their quirks and foibles as somehow endearing. I will need to see their self-inflicted predicaments as drama. I will need to see their misdirection as adventure. I will need to see the half-buried image of God in their lives. I will need to see their private world as a world where the kingdom is coming instead of a world that is going to waste. This kind of seeing will keep me living on the side of the God’s promise instead of on the side of what passes for realism.

Dallas Willard, in The Divine Conspiracy, invites us to see, as Jesus saw, that “this is a God-bathed, God-permeated world.” I’ll give that a try. Here, in context, is the full quote (Chapter 3, page 61):

Jesus’ good news about the kingdom can be an effective guide for our lives only if we share his view of the world in which we live. To his eyes this is a God-bathed and God-permeated world. It is a world filled with a glorious reality, where every component is within the range of God’s direct knowledge and control — though he obviously permits some of it, for good reasons, to be for a while otherwise than as he wishes. It is a world that is inconceivably beautiful and good because of God and because God is always in it. It is a world in which God is continually at play and over which he constantly rejoices. Until our thoughts of God have found every visible thing and event glorious with his presence, the word of Jesus has not yet fully seized us.

Before you hurry to replace that WWJD bumper sticker with WWJS, you might want to consider that, in some quarters, it means “What would Jesus shoot?”

Sweet Spot in Petition Prayer?

“And my God will meet all your needs [emphasis mine]
according to his glorious riches in Christ Jesus.”
— Philippians 4:18-20

I confess I don’t spend much time in petition prayer, which is good and bad.

Good because I actually spend most of my prayer time in “immersion” or in “therapy.” When I am not lost in worship (immersion), I am sharing the muddles and mysteries of my life with God (therapy). Jesus is my shrink.

Good because I trust God to see me through most of life’s pesky situations without appealing for emergency relief. (I hope that shows my faith, not stupid self-reliance.)

Bad because I don’t want to risk the disappointment of putting yet another request into play, only to see it land on God’s back burner, leaving me to wait and wonder.

Bad because I don’t think much about petitioning for the needs of others. Yes, I have a kind of fringe awareness of the desperate circumstances others face, like those in Guatemala after tropical storm Agatha left 152 dead. Maybe I should try “praying the headlines” as an experiment.

Still, I do throw up the occasional petition.

At one extreme, I have been known to make very specific requests, which would seem to limit God’s flexibility. The benefit, for me, is that I can verify the result, like Gideon and the dewy fleece [Judges 6:36-40]. The risk is the same as the benefit; I can verify the absence of results.

At the other extreme, I have been known to make requests that are so vague, so low-risk, that I will never have to deal with consequences. I can say, “God bless Judy Kay” without ever feeling any pressure to check back with her to see if God really did bless her. What does “bless” actually mean anyway?

Between these two extremes, maybe there is a “sweet spot,” as might be found on a tennis racket or baseball bat. This would be the spot where prayer is risky without being pushy, specific without being demanding, assertive but without sacrificing humility.

My son worked for a company in New York City that closed its doors in 2009 due to the economic downturn. Tim survived on unemployment benefits, and then on an extension of unemployment benefits. As his situation became more and more desperate, I prayed more and more urgently for him to find a job that would sustain him and continue his career track. We stuck “Job for Tim” signs all over the house as prayer reminders. If I knew he was going on a job interview, I would name the company and pray he would be hired into the exact job that had been posted by that company.

Maybe a little too specific, huh?

It finally dawned on me that I should offer a more humble request, perhaps closer to that “sweet spot.” I would ask simply for whatever he needed most, right now, at this point in his life, even if that was to remain unemployed. Being a daddy, I had assumed a job was what Tim needed most, but I had to admit I was not clairvoyant. “Father to Father,” I prayed, “You have an only Son. I have an only son. I still believe my son needs a job but I’m taking that request off the table. Instead, I’m asking you for whatever Tim needs most right now. I probably don’t even know what that is, but you do.” A couple of days after I turned this blind corner in faith, Tim landed a job better than I could have imagined.

So … I am learning to ask God for what is most needed, whether for myself or for others. What is the one thing I need most right now? What is the one thing you need most right now? Not an easy question, is it? While I look for my answer, why don’t you look for yours?

Prominence, or Lack Thereof

“When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars that you have established;
what are human beings that you are mindful of them,
mortals that you care for them?“
— Psalm 8:3-4

• I happen to live at the center of the universe (childhood illusion).
• I am not, personally, the center but at least my neighborhood or my village is the center of the universe.
• My village is not the center but at least there is some location on earth (Eden, Jerusalem, the Vatican) that does occupy the most favored spot in the entire universe.
• No location on earth is especially favored but at least the earth itself is the center of the universe.
• It is our sun, not the earth, that is the center of the universe.
• Although our local star is the center of our local planetary system, that system is located in the backwaters of the Orion spur of the Milky Way galaxy, which has about 200 billion other stars.
• The Milky Way galaxy, which is 100,000 light-years across, is just one component of a “local group,” which encompasses more than 30 galactic objects, including the only galaxy visible to the naked eye, Andromeda.
• The “local group,” which is 10 million light-years across, is just one component of the much larger Virgo supercluster, which contains around 100 galaxies.
• The Virgo supercluster, which is 110 million light-years across, is just one of about 10 million superclusters in the visible universe.
• There is no center or otherwise special position in the universe.
• Apparently, I have no cosmic importance … except … to the God who created both space and time, the God who knows my name, who pursued me, who found me, and who loves me like crazy.

Watch Francis Chan’s “The Awe Factor of God” on YouTube

Like A Snake

κήρυγμα

Kerygma. Greek word, apparently pronounced “kay-roog-ma.”

Theologians sometimes use this term to refer to the irreducible essence of the gospel message as preached in the early church. In that context, kerygma refers to what the earliest preachers said, probably in the first five minutes, to introduce Jesus to people who had no knowledge of him. Zero to full gospel in five minutes. How did they do it?

In those days, as told in the book of Acts, kerygma included a personal witness of the story of Jesus’ birth, life, death, resurrection and ascension, combined with an expression of hope for his early return and, until that day, release from the burden of sin and comfort from the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Simple and effective.

Today, it’s harder to convey that “irreducible essence” because so much of it has been frozen into doctrine that’s either stale or familiar or both. Even if you can get someone to listen to that Nicene Creed you’ve memorized, I bet it won’t have much zing or persuasive power.

[Still curious about the snake, aren’t you? Hang on, I’ll get there before I’m done.]

Zero to full gospel in five minutes. How can we do it today? What’s first, and what’s next, and what’s after that?

Maybe that’s the wrong question. What if the “irreducible essence” isn’t in the content but in the witness? What if kerygma dwells in our personal testimony, in our own come-to-Jesus experience?

That would mean that kerygma isn’t the backwoods preaching I heard from Brother Verdier before the altar call, or the well-turned homilies I heard from Father Carr before the Eucharist. I love you guys but, to tell the truth, I have forgotten just about everything you proclaimed from the pulpit. Somewhere along the way, I lost the disturbing images of hellfire, and I can’t remember how absolution works. I have retained only what happened inside my heart and head, as I was fitting jigsaw pieces of gospel into my personal puzzle, one step at a time.

• Step 1: I stop fighting the idea, and concede that God is real. In fact, God is CEO of the universe. Better keep a low profile and a respectful distance.
• Step 2: Although I am a mere speck in the universe, God apparently knows me, knows who I am — the good, the bad, the ugly — but reaches out to me anyway, extending a hand of welcome. I look the other way but, secretly, I am flattered.
• Step 3: Finally, timidly, I reach back. Awkward but honest prayer follows, something like “O God, if there is a God, save my soul, if I have a soul.” Now and then, in times of crisis, I use the Godphone to call 911. Occasionally, we connect, but it feels strange.
• Step 4: Gradually, I begin to see Jesus’ life, death and resurrection in a new light. It grows on me. Yeah, if I were God, this is what I would do if I loved the world [John 3:16]. It was wrong for me to peg Jesus as a shallow moralist; in real life, he was profound, provocative and perplexing.
• Step 5: As this begins to make more sense, I realize that something important is still missing from my life, but what the heck is it? I look for it in all the wrong places. I still see myself as a curious mix of virtues and vices, but the vices are really starting to bug me. I stop listening to most of my own self-serving excuses. I brood. I feel guilty. More than anything, I wish I could be different. Please, God, make me different!
• Step 6: I hear a persistent knocking at the door. I crack the door a few times but, mostly, I manage to ignore it. Finally I open wide and let the spirit of God occupy my heart. This time, I put up no resistance whatsoever. I let grace wash over me, immerse me, turn me inside out. Afterward, I feel vividly fresh and clean. For a while, my entire life seems to have that indefinable “new car” cachet. Taking stock, I realize that some of the most helpful changes are permanent but it is not an all-changing “soul transplant.” That’s okay because I now realize God loves me just as I am, with my own unique mix of assets and liabilities.
• Step 7: I get adopted into the family of God, but not because I qualified for membership. Apparently, God will adopt anyone. Still, I belong. I finally understand who I am and whose I am.

That’s my witness, my kerygma, the irreducible essence of my encounter with Father, Son and Holy Spirit. That took less than five minutes, right?

I must now confess that this abridged version, this essence, isn’t entirely faithful to the original. For simplicity, and to make me look purposeful and organized *smile* , I listed only the Seven Big Forward Steps. Truth is, I did a little backstepping, sidestepping and retracing along the way. Okay, more than a little.

So, was there a unique “born again” moment? Well, yes, that would be my first pass through Step 6. That’s when my pilot light got lit, my own portable unquenchable flame, as in “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.” I haven’t made a point of memorizing the date because that’s not the only (re)birthing moment in my life. Besides, my version of Step 6 came with unlimited refills of a prescription that reads “Repeat as necessary.” I don’t need the original dose, but I do need an occasional booster.

Sometimes I wish I could point to one sparkling moment of instantaneous hyper-transformation. Such conversions are clearly valid [Acts 9:17] and I regard them with holy envy, but my day-to-day story is much less glamorous. In fact, it’s more like the life of a snake. Yes, that’s right: a snake. Not just an ordinary snake, mind you, but a Lenten snake.

Seasonally, at least, I need to shed the skin I’ve outgrown, discard the old ways, and expose the new life. Like molting, it’s not fast, it’s not pretty but it’s progress. Amen.

Heaven Can Wait, or Can it?

“Seriously now,
if Heaven is as Christians describe it,
why wait?”
— Anonymous [http://tinyurl.com/ygys7b2]

“For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain.
… I am torn between the two:
I desire to depart and be with Christ,
which is better by far;
but it is more necessary for you
that I remain in the body.”
— Phillipians 1:21, 23-24 [http://tinyurl.com/y9rgb2x]

As Christians, most of us develop some degree of assurance of life eternal and, with that, comes a longing for fulfillment in heaven. So why don’t we just cross our hearts and hope to die?

This question is not about suicide. Please see your pastor if you think that’s what it is about.

No, this is about the paradox that the longing for heaven, the hunger for heaven, doesn’t contradict living in the here and now. But why not? Why shouldn’t we hope to get lucky and catch an early flight?

For some of us, this longing began when our heart finally caught up with what our brains already believed. The longing grew as we grew, developed nuances, gave assurance of things unseen and, oddly enough, the very aching gave us hope and comfort. C. S. Lewis considered this heartfelt longing to be the best evidence of who we really are, which is: God’s creation, intended for life in his presence, life somewhere else, life in our true home.

“Apparently, then, our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside, is no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation. And to be at last summoned inside would be both glory and honor beyond all our merits and also the healing of that old ache.” [C.S. Lewis, The Weight Of Glory, 41]

But how can we, standing on the “outside of the door,” manage to enjoy life to the fullest? After all, we are the ones who try to avoid the empty pleasures even as we seek consolations that can never be had in this world. How can that be a recipe for a happy life?

My personal experience is one of desperate longing and joie de vivre, each running strong on parallel tracks, with no adverse interaction. I want to dwell in the presence of God forever, and I want this more than life itself. On the other hand, I desperately want to extract from life all the opportunities life affords, strive for justice, and leave the world a better place.

I have made some progress toward resolving the paradox, but I would be the first to admit that an element of mystery remains.

• First, I note that I live within the body of Christ and have a role to play. If I retire from my role, others will take my place. However, if we all forsook our roles by taking early retirement, the body would suffer.While living, while playing my limited role, I take great satisfaction in knowing that I contribute something that puts a smile on God’s face.
• Second, I note that life isn’t just a temporary inconvenience I must endure. Life, including my very breath, is a gift from God. The truth is, right now, outside the door, I am already living inside God’s vivid dream for our world. What dream? It’s the big dream behind John 3:16. It’s the big dream behind the “hammer of justice” in the lyrics Pete Seeger wrote for “If I Had a Hammer.” Consider this: We get to surf through life on God’s dream. What could be sweeter than that? In life, we are partnered with the living God, which means we get to collaborate in bringing a small piece of God’s dream to life. We aren’t just marking time, “waiting for our ride”; we are an active part of the “family business.”
• Third, I would venture that heaven can wait. Why? Because I can experience the sweet and tangible presence of God now, while living on the “wrong” side of the door. Worship can transport me beyond the door, into the other realm. I can experience the awe and electricity of heaven in the here and now.

Truth is, my tiny cup already overflows with awe and electricity. What I really need is a bigger cup *smile* , but that cup probably won’t be super-sized until I get to heaven … so … there’s no hurry. I have an abundant life that is deeply touched by God. That’s not all of heaven, but it is all I need. For now.

Walt

Principles of Effective Personal Prayer

Here it is, my well-researched, complete and unabridged list of all the important principles of effective personal prayer:

1. Be brutally honest.

That’s it; there are no other principles.

Just to be clear, under Rule #1, all of the following are allowed: whining, cussing, questioning, excusing, complaining, blaming, arguing, fighting, ranting, pleading, denial, sarcasm, avoiding, embracing, boredom, exuberance, frustration, yelling, silence, why me, poor me, not me, listen to me, talk to me, get off my case, help, hurry up, wait, no no no, yes yes yes, where are you, find someone else, stay with me, leave me alone, work with me, break me, fix me, do it, start it, stop it and, of course, both crying and laughing out loud.

In eloquent free verse, Steven James (A Heart Exposed) writes …

Jesus, your prayers were drenched
with sweat and blood,
and throbbed with glory and pain.
My prayers are so often soaked in perfume,
decorated with nothing more
than stock phrases and catchy clichés —
carefully varnished pieces of furniture
for you to admire.

Unpeel my pretenses, masks, and façades,
and stare beneath my whitewashed life.
Shake off the rust,
and the dust,
and the tired repetition.

Here, now, Jesus,
I will break the trend,
I will speak prayers raw with the realities of life,
tender with the realization of grace;
prayers
with flesh and blood,
born of both marvel and pain.

Prayers like yours.

Walt

Short Memory for Sin?

“Whether the play works or not,
you have to have a short memory.
You can’t let one play affect the next one.”

—Rich Brooks, UK Football Coach 10/14/2009

Can an all-knowing God choose not to know something? Apparently:

“I, even I, am he who blots out your transgressions, for my own sake, and remembers your sins no more.” [Isaiah 43:25 NIV]

Even if God is the consummate list keeper, even if God does have that ultra-sharp pencil, I know from abundant personal experience that God spends most of the time using the eraser at the other end.

Since God’s blotter erases every trace of my sin from God’s memory, it would make sense for me to shorten my own memory for those sins. If I need to make restitution, it shouldn’t be because I have been tortured into it by bad memories, but because I have accepted responsibility for my actions.  In times past, I have almost considered it my Christian duty to agonize over past mistakes. I didn’t see it as neurotic wallowing but as necessary discipline. In reality, it led to paralysis by analysis.

Today, I am shadowed less by Big Guilt and more by the combined effect of many smaller regrets. It is the disappointing accumulation of daily mishaps, self-indulgences, missteps and thoughtless behaviors that literally dis-illusions me, that demonstrates I am still well short of the mark. Always, my single biggest disappointment is knowing that I do not yet love God enough.

In its best and most helpful form, that disappointment washes like a tear into a sweet brokenness that mellows me, re-sizes my ego, strips my masks, and carries me even deeper into the heart of God. In its worst and least helpful form, that disappointment causes me to sequester myself away from God until, in my opinion, I have endured a sufficient period of self-inflicted isolation. Disappointment is helpful when it drives me back to God, just the reverse when it drives me away.

Why would God want me to come running back to him, almost immediately after tacking on yet another sin?  Shouldn’t I take myself out of the game and warm the bench while others do God’s work? And, if I do bench myself, how long should I sit out?

Not long.

God urgently wants to shorten the time I spend on the sideline, but that doesn’t mean I can cheat the process, which usually unfolds like this. First there is fringe awareness, then conviction, then acknowledgment, then regret, then forgiveness, then self-forgiveness, then self-forgetting, then (yay!) rebound.  Sounds complicated but, sometimes, when I take the fullest possible advantage of God’s saving grace, I can accelerate prayerfully through all these stages in less time than it has taken you to read this reflection. My Catholic friends tell me the confessional booth is a powerful accelerator.  Somehow, we all need to move quickly to the rebound stage because, hey, there is work to do. If we stay too long in one of the other stages, we won’t be able to respond to God’s call to action.

So, the choice is mine. I can allow myself to get stuck somewhere between fringe awareness and forgiveness … or … I can go on to develop the self-forgetting, the “short memory,” that allows me to move ahead without the weight of disappoitment.

Drifting Toward God

If you think people only drift away from God, give this a read.

In the absence of any opposing force, my experience is that we naturally drift toward an inevitable connection with God, toward the heart of God. It is, in fact, our own subconscious longing that connects us to the “pull” of God. This is our nature, and this is why Christian meditation works … but … there is a complicating factor: The gentle force that draws us is, at first, easily resisted. Initially, the tug of God is like the subtle magnetic flux that causes a compass needle to swing toward true north. It is such a gentle attractor that the needle will not respond unless it is resting free of all disturbing forces. If we break free of those forces, we will eventually be carried on an accelerating river of grace toward the ocean of God’s love. Meanwhile, until we gain the necessary momentum, we are easily trapped in the backwaters and swirling eddies of life. These become our comfort zones, and we are reluctant to leave even when given a chance.

As a wannabe Christian, I find that I still get sucked into the occasional backwater. I figure I must be about average in that respect. Like many other average folk, I need release from the distracting swirls of ordinary life. If the Holy Spirit supplies the tidal force, we average folks only need to be set adrift, right? This is exactly what Jesus did; wherever Jesus went, he created disequilibrium.

“Lost souls” are mostly, but not exclusively, just ordinary folks whose gyroscopes are spinning with the selfish busy-ness of life. True, some have “gone over to the dark side” but, for the rest, if we can perturb their comfortable gyroscopic spin, they will begin edging toward God. Evangelism doesn’t always mean that we must “bring people to God.” In many cases, we only need to distract people from what is distracting them, tweak their equilibrium, and let God’s own charisma and drawing power do the rest.

Practically speaking, this means that church can never afford to be 100% business-as-usual. It needs to be a bit edgy, a bit different, a bit uncomfortable, a bit outside-the-box. If it doesn’t have these disquieting characteristics, people will remain in their comfort zones, trapped in their personal backwaters and eddies.

Let me tell you how I got perturbed, connected, and rivited to the Good Friday part of the Easter story. In 1980, when I walked into a modernistic Virginia Beach Catholic church for Good Friday services, I was given a single nail — a really big 5 1/2″ 50d galvanized steel flat-head nail. Biggest nail I had ever seen. Humm, I thought, this is one very cool object lesson! I placed the big nail on the pew and largely forgot about it … until … it was my turn to take my nail, and drive it into a huge wooden cross that occupied most of the floor space surrounding the altar. Somebody handed me a hammer, I got a grip on my nail, knelt beside the cross, and found that, for the life of me, I could not make myself hit a single lick. Never saw it coming. Forced me to reconsider everything I thought I knew about Easter, with the result that I was drawn into a deeper emotional bond.

That’s been the pattern for me; first I get religion in my head, then later, sometimes much later, I get it in my heart.

“Wherever you are, you are where God wants you.”

I thought I would take a quick stab at explaining this piece of theology I learned from Larry, a former Catholic priest and trusted counselor. It was given to me as “spiritual direction” at a retreat, after I remarked that I had missed some turns along life’s way, with the effect that my value to the Kingdom had been somewhat compromised. Larry countered: “Wherever you are, you are where God wants you.” Both he and I were referring to the spot where my life choices had taken me, but it seemed beyond impossible that this “wander route” could have taken me to the exact spot where God wanted me.

But it is true, and it is true at several levels.

(1) First and most simple level.  Forget the past; forget the future; God wants me right now, where I am, just as I am. It is not necessary for me to qualify by putting my life in better order. It is not necessary for me to progress to a different place where, say, my prayer life is more consistent and I have made a redeeming series of improved life choices. God is a present-tense God; God’s unconditional grace is sufficient now. No qualifying. No waiting. No excuses.

(2) Second and deeper level. My life choices do not limit God in any way, shape or form. Sure, they limit me; if I commit a felony, I will be excluded from certain types of employment. On the other hand, God is not constrained in the least. This means he is always able to produce the maximum “kingdom value” for my life at any point. Not just the maximum possible value, given the constraints my past bad choices have imposed, but the maximum value without limit. This is possible because neither my past nor my future restrict the value God can produce in me right now. In Christ, my life does not determine my horizon.

(3) Third and still deeper level. Let’s suppose I surrender my past, present and future to God. Sure, God will build new value into my life by leveraging what I did right. That’s not particularly surprising. Here is the wonderful and surprising part: God will convert even my past mistakes into equivalent “kingdom value.” In the simplest possible case, God will convert my acknowledged mistakes into the virtue of humility. He will convert my past wandering into empathy for all those who relapse or stray. Maybe I can’t be a role model, for example, but I could be a counselor. Surely, in God’s hands, these two would be of equal value. The beauty of this, is that it makes self-forgiveness possible.

In the final analysis, God does not apply the external performance and achievement measures common in our secular society; he asks simply, “Have you become, are you becoming, the person I want you to be?”

So, yes, I am redeemed, which means, I am where I am, and it is where God wants me. I’m in the cross-hairs of God’s active grace.

I have not been perfect; I am not now perfect; and I will never be perfectly perfect.

“Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and leave your life of sin.” [John 8:11 NIV]

“Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” [Matthew 5:48 NIV]

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Breaking news: Loss of life is the main cause of mortality among both males and females, according to a recent 20-year study done at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Well, not exactly, but you have to respect that near-perfect statistical correlation between birth and death. Still, I sometimes court the illusion that, if I get regular checkups, faithfully follow medical advice, and take good care of myself, maybe I might earn an exception to the 1-to-1 birth-to-death rule.

At other times, I have courted the illusion that, if I am very careful and disciplined, from this moment forward, I might be able to live without committing sin.

[I will wait for you to stop laughing before I continue.]

Mathematicians call it a proof by extrapolation. Here is how it works. I ask myself: Say, Walt, what’s the longest period of time that you can go without committing a sin? Hmm … let’s see. Since puberty is well behind me, I think I can safely answer: An hour. At the end of that hour, I merely repeat what I did or didn’t do for another hour, and so on, and voilà : a life without sin begins to unfold.

Realistically, that might work for a day. For longer periods, I will need to separate myself from society, thereby avoiding a vast number of social sins: theft, adultery, lying under oath, and parking in handicapped spaces. Then, while I am in my self-imposed isolation bubble, I will be careful not to complain or whine or make reckless promises to God. I will avoid all good works that carry with them any risk of offense to anybody.

Even in this monastic life of super-cautious isolation, I am not necessarily sinless. I still must act from the purest of motives. And that’s the rub. Honestly, even when I am doing exactly what God wants from me, there is always some element of ego satisfaction contaminating my otherwise honorable motives, like weeds in a prayer garden. For example, at this very moment, I am taking selfish satisfaction in my blogging style, imagining that you are admiring my work. You are, aren’t you?

Bottom line: I have not been perfect; I am not now perfect; and I will never be perfectly perfect. So how do I reconcile this fact with Jesus’ admonitions to be as “perfect” as the Father and to “go and sin no more”?

There are at least five possibilities:

• A quick read of John 8:11 and Matthew 5:48 is sufficient. Jesus meant what he seems to mean, so my life will be filled with frustration, guilt and occasional self-loathing.
• Jesus gave the terms “perfection” and “sinlessness” some softer meaning that is not immediately apparent, but is revealed in context or in the original language.
• By the grace of God, I am repeatedly being restored, as necessary, to a debt-free start-over state — like a computer that gets “rebooted” after a crash.
• I am inhabited by the Holy Spirit, who is perfect and sinless, who shines through my shell of imperfect humanity.
• God rewards the sincere and faithful effort I put into becoming like him, crediting it to me as righteousness, just as he did with Abraham [Genesis 15:6].

I’ll let the theologians wrestle over the first two. I have enough trouble just living up to the Scripture I already fully understand. Meanwhile, I will embrace the last three possibilities:

• Regardless of my sins, grace puts me back on the shortest straight path to the heart of God. Because of this assurance, I can afford to take on kingdom responsibilities that stretch or even exceed my limits — tasks that could grow my faith, could do much good, but also bring with them temptation and risk of failure. For example, I have accepted the risk of selecting art and images to enhance the worship experience at my church. When projected on screen, the images usually draw us deeper into worship but, once in a while, they become a distraction. Doesn’t matter. My experience is that God is always willing to put new “venture capital” into my hands, as if I had never sinned and will never disappoint.
• I feel and cherish the tangible presence of the Holy Spirit, living within me, breathing within me, inhabiting my body, molding me, re-making me, perfecting me from the inside out, even re-wiring my brain during periods of deep encounter. I may not be perfect, but there is a large and growing chunk of holy perfection living inside me, cleansing me from within. Hopefully, some of it shows through to the outside.
• The idea that Abraham’s faith was “credited as righteousness” is a recurring theme of Scripture [Genesis 15:6, Psalm 106:31, Romans 4, Galatians 3:6, and James 2:23]. I hereby claim my inheritance from Abraham and apply it to my deficit of perfection.

The end result is that, in an odd kind of way, I am comfortable living a life that produces mixed results — to be sure, an excess of good over bad, but not without sin. I am comfortable in my own human skin because a holy Flame burns within me, like an oversized pilot light. This doesn’t mean that I should sin on purpose just so grace may abound [Romans 6:1]. It does mean that I can abandon all my fears and push forward toward new challenges without obsessing on the possibility of sin. The result: A fine vineyard with a few weeds. Sorry about the weeds.

Is Grace Fair?

Jesus answered him, “I tell you the truth, today you will be with me in paradise.” [Luke 23:43 NIV]

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Traffic is heavy, but you’re breezing along in the fast lane. Then you begin to get the bad news in shades of black and blaze orange: CONSTRUCTION AHEAD — EXPECT DELAYS. A little later: CONSTRUCTION AHEAD 3 MILES. Finally, the unwelcome details: LEFT LANE CLOSED AHEAD — MERGE RIGHT.

Off in the distance, an endless line of orange barrels is just coming into view. You exhale, start signaling, and look for room on the right. Someone gives you just enough space to angle over into the slow lane, which is more like a linear parking lot than a passageway. Meanwhile, you do a series of slow burns as self-privileged vehicles whiz by in the left lane, seemingly immune to the signage you have seen and obeyed. You make a point of giving each of these irresponsible jerks the evil eye, knowing that some bigger jerk will probably let them squeeze into the right lane ahead of you.

Flash back two thousand years.

Jesus has just given the thief on the cross next to him a last minute get-into-heaven-free pass. Jesus, Jesus, what were you thinking? This guy bypassed your commandments. There will be no restitution for his crimes. There will be no I-found-Jesus testimony in the synagogue. The guy cheated the very system of justice that you labored to leave as your legacy. I hate to say this but, Jesus, you are behaving just like the guy who helps those “outlaw” left-lane drivers slide into an undeserved place in the right lane.

Death-bed conversions. Prodigal sons and daughters. Why do they get to cut in line ahead of the faithful, who are playing by the rules, who are running the full race? I have to admit that there was a part of me that felt cheated by God’s hospitality toward late-comers. Maybe it’s because I thought my life ought to have greater value than theirs. Maybe it’s because these late-comers demonstrated how I could have spent a lot more time enjoying my sins before accepting the disciplines of faith. But that’s not the heart of the problem. The more the world screws with me, the more I need to know that Jesus was fair, is fair, will be fair. I desperately need a Jesus who is even-handed, but that can be hard to reconcile with a Jesus who gives “early adopters” and late-comers exactly the same access to the kingdom.

The same issue surfaces in the parable of the vineyard laborers [Matthew 20:1-16]. The landowner hired workers at the third hour (9 am, in the Jewish day), the sixth hour (12 noon), the ninth hour (3 pm), and the eleventh hour (5 pm). At the end of the day, those who had worked 12 hours, sweating through the heat of the day, got the same exact pay as those who had worked only one hour. Naturally, those who had labored the entire day complained to the landowner that paying the same wage for one hour wasn’t fair, because it greatly devalued their own service.

Granted, it does seem unfair, but maybe that’s only because I don’t fully appreciate how redemption works as an equalizer.

We have a God who, solely by the gift of grace, can recover the entire value of any human life at any point in time. The cost of our past deafness, blindness, or misconduct is paid off in full. God’s grace is not just a mid-course correction for our lives. It’s not just that we live better “ever after,” as in a fairy tale. Grace redeems the entire worth of our life — future, present and past — even if this was a life we thought was, or is, or will be wasted.

It doesn’t matter that we’ve wandered off “the plan,” or sneaked by in the left lane, or lived outside the rules or God and society. God is always active re-planning our lives, always re-calculating how we can get from our current Here to his There. After a mistake, God has a backup plan ready for us, and a backup for that plan, and a backup for that, and a backup for that. Any one of these contingency plans contains the grace to lead us, restore us, redeem us, to a place of equal worth and value. Regardless of the baggage we bring into our multiple encounters with the Holy Spirit, we will all stand as trophies of God’s abundant grace and, at the end of the day, none of us will stand any taller than any other.

How does it happen that the lives of prodigal sons or daughters can be of equal value to the lives of siblings who remain faithful? In a word: Redemption. My post-grace life fully exploits all my pre-grace experience with no loss or waste. “God causes everything to work together for the good” [Romans 8:28 NLT] — good from good and, equally, good from bad! In God there is no profit and loss; there is only profit and profit. It is as if God is always adjusting my future to leverage all the positives and all the negatives contained in my past. Whatever I have done or didn’t do, I am always in line to get the maximum benefit from the redeeming grace of God.

So … this is how I make sense of the thief’s life. He, too, was in line to get the maximum benefit. Everything he was, everything he did, was re-purposed as preparation for that excellent glory-to-God moment with Jesus. Grace did not change his criminal past, but it fundamentally altered how that past impacted that moment, converting it into a showcase for the unconditional love of God.

At the time I turned twenty-one, I was pretty sure God wanted me to enter the ministry, but I managed to slip the call. Doesn’t matter. God has repeatedly shown that he is able to recover my life to a place of value equal to anything it might have been — not because I deserve it, but because he can leverage all things for good. God multiplies the sugar of my life and, from the lemons, he makes an excellent lemonade.

By the redeeming power of the grace of God, I stand on equal footing with all the other children of God … and on equal footing with the thief on the cross. In the even hands of Jesus, we are all trophies of God’s grace.

The Plan: I will …

I am, even on a good day, just a work in progress.
Clearly, God isn’t finished with me, but still delights in me just as I am.

People want to know, “What do you believe?” This can be an indirect way of asking, “How far do your beliefs overlap with mine?” Fair question. But it’s the wrong question.  Instead, you should be asking me to answer a more revealing question: To what am I fully committed?

Before I break that down for you, I need to make one important clarification. When I say “I will,” I don’t mean self-reliantly. The “I” that’s doing the willing is the new part of me that has been touched by God.

CONNECTEDNESS. God has claimed me as his own and I will claim him as my own. I will be connected equally to God, to my faith communities, to God through my communities, and to my communities through God.

WORSHIP. I will vigorously pursue both individual vertical worship and communal liturgical worship. I will, at times, express myself with utter abandonment and spontaneity to “an audience of One”; at other times, I will express myself within the historic forms, structures and rituals that exist within my faith communities.

PASSION. I will express my insatiable longing for God by cultivating a passionate and radical intimacy with him in every dimension of my spiritual life, including worship, prayer, Word, sacrament and service.

RECEPTIVITY. I will remember that my good relationship with God exists only because of what he does and is in no way the result of effort on my part. My primary “contribution” is the abandonment of my own agenda and my distractions, insofar as I can, and the surrender of self control to the Holy Spirit. This gives the Spirit free reign to break into my life, through whatever small opening I offer, to do whatever he chooses — or possibly to do nothing, even though that drives me nuts. “Faith holds out the hand and the sack and just lets the good be done to it …. You need only to open your mouth, or rather, your heart, and keep still and let yourself be filled” [Martin Luther as quoted in Doctrine is Life: Essays on Justification and the Lutheran Confessions, p. 115].

SOCIAL AND ECO-JUSTICE. I will not hide from injustice, hunger, poverty, disease, catastrophe, discrimination, exploitation and oppression. I will recognize my responsibility to the future generations who will inherit this polluted planet. I may not respond with sufficient generosity, but I will allow my heart to be troubled, broken and shaken to the core.

HEALER. I will place no limits on what the Holy Spirit can do, including what can be done as Helper and Healer. At the same time, I will not expect the Holy Spirit to function as my own tag-along valet, tending to my personal comfort and prosperity.

PRESENCE. I will seek, enjoy and celebrate the tangible reality and manifest presence of God, not just in prayer and worship, but in all of life and all of creation, from cosmos to quarks. I wish, hope and pray that all people would discover a similar holy spark at the core of reality.

EMPOWERMENT. I will remember that the quintessential experience of the presence of God is not an end in itself. It comes with the kick and the power to change me and to change the world.

DOCTRINE. I will remain open and teachable. At the same time, I will be skeptical of my ability to understand substantial amounts of theology, doctrine and dogma …and … I will be skeptical of those who believe such understanding is fundamental to discipleship.

SCRIPTURE. I will look for Jesus, not only in the gospels, not only in the red-letter passages, but in all of scripture, BC and AD. I will begin any study of scripture by admitting my inability to make much sense of scripture without direct help from the Holy Spirit, who sometimes “breaks the code” that had kept subtle meanings trapped on the page.

PRAYER. Because I am desperate to touch the face of God, I will pray in every way that it is possible for humans to pray, using every means available.

JESUS. I will put Jesus at the front and center, as the pivotal force in my life and, indeed, in all of human history. I will place equal emphasis on the cross element (Good Friday) and the glory element (Easter).

FREEDOM. I will live forever free of the oppressive weight of sin because of the finished work of Jesus on the cross, and I will experience this freedom in every way possible.

LOVE. I will love God as he loves me — wildly, without boundaries or conditions — and I will try to love others with similar exuberance.

SINGULARITY. “One thing I ask of the LORD, this is what I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD and to seek him in his temple” [Psalm 27:4].