promised land

Let me describe my Promised land,
if I can
because milk and honey sounds like school lunch.

Take a look with me, see
what I see
and then, you'll understand the rush.

Let's start at the bottom and work
our way up--
First, no fire ants, 'cause I've had enough.

Next on my list, get a Satellite dish
so I can
pick up the station with the "good" news.

Let's nix American Idol, no Simon Cowell-- sure,
he's usually right,
but that doesn't make it right--instead, let's all sing without fear.

Sing loud, sister; sing proud, my brother--
in this land,
it's your heart that we'll hear.

Speaking of siblings, let's talk about family
in my Canaan,
it's breath in each lung.

Blood is thicker than water, sure,
but that living water
is the blood in the tie that binds.

Blood's tricky--it's sticky
and to be honest,
it covers our hands, but in my promised land,

we'll be over the thrill of the kill.
Let's ban crime,
and for real this time, let's put slavery to an end.

In this vision I see, we've put the "isms"
to sleep and
bid them our final farewell

So long, sexism; be gone, racism.
We're over it.
I hope no pessimism; we've ruled out legalism,

and I'm pleased that hedonism's no more.
Dare I say
we'll be past conservatism as well? It will be well.

Most of all, let's conquer this fatalism,
because it's the worst of all.
There is power in us, to make beauty of rust

and to make this idealist's dreams
into truth.
But before we're through, let's keep a few

of the isms that aren't all bad.
I think optimism
is cool, so let's teach that in school and be done

basking in the anxiety of life.
There's one more ism
we'll keep, and that's baptism, a deep

immersion in
grace--
LOVE--
truth.

Let me catch my breath, friends,
we're near to the end.
I can see the wheels in your mind turning fast.

You might say, "H, that's a lot!"
But really, it's not.
No, we're on the brink! We can swim or we sink!

Or even walk--Red Seas have been parted before.
It's all in your mind,
how high you can climb. The ropes course will

seem like a breeze. You might say,
"H, that's cool,
but what about you?

Where do you fit in this vision you see?"
That's easy.
I'm just one small part,

one beat of the heart, one step
on the way
to the promised land.

Enough of fear, I want to hear
what the rest
of you have to say.

God's running beside us, always ready to guide us.
Take that first step, friends,
and take me to your promised land!

blessed and ashamed

Sometimes I read a novel, a fictional creative work, that rattles me more than reality, and that makes me feel ashamed. Why must I follow eight fictional characters long enough to care for them, to know them, and be concerned for them before I can wake up and be terrified, outraged, heartbroken for living people truly caught in that world that seemed so surreal?

Today, I lounged in my cool house, whined about pollen,  played with my dogs, goofed around with my brother, and read a book. In the book, teen missionaries—each caught in their own disillusionment—barely survive a riot in an Indonesian village only to struggle through the wilderness to eventual safety. The disconnect still shakes me; how I can sit on a comfortable bed in my suburban home and type on a laptop I didn’t need about violence that is not stuck in fiction.

How easy it is to forget. I’m sure I will do it well, probably before this day ends. My life has been privileged. Any hardship I might have imagined into my life is laughable, a blessing in itself when I consider how so much of the rest of the world, within the borders of this country and beyond it, live each day of their lives. Sometimes I feel ashamed rather than grateful. Ashamed to have been born white, American, middle class, to loving parents with a genuine faith. Ashamed rather than blessed that I am free to leave my house with my hair and face uncovered, that I am free to learn and read, free to worship without fear, free to step from my house into a peaceful spring breeze. Instead of feeling blessed, I feel ashamed that I was not on one of those planes on September 11th or humming along to elevator music in the North Tower. Ashamed that I have unwittingly avoided the earthquake in Haiti, the violence in the Middle East, the massacre surrounding Uganda.

Certainly feeling guilt or shame is not a rational or even productive emotion. However, I think it’s closer to the mark than feeling “blessed.” If I can look upon the great tragedies in the world and feel only gratitude than I am spared, how motivated will I be to act, to abandon the refuge for which I am so thankful? No, no. Feeling blessed and thankful, though good, is not enough, is not much at all. Grateful is a start, and only a start.

If my only reaction to Good Friday is to feel “blessed that it wasn’t me” or “thankful for such a gift,” I have taken only the smallest step in the right direction. Certainly nothing I do, even with the most righteous of intentions, can allow me to “deserve” this gift. But that fact alone shouldn’t be enough to let me be content to live out my blessed life without concern for anyone else. Gratitude is a step, a spark that should spread into a consuming fire.

It is unmistakably easy to be moved to tears and trembling when one considers reality outside our American, or even Western, white picket fence. Or even consider the ugly truth of tragedy within it. It is much more difficult to swallow the lump in your throat, straighten your back, set your jaw, and do something.

I don’t know what I can do, or for whom, or even where to start. But I won’t let myself be content to feel blessed with my pleasant life when so many are denied it, and nor will I get stuck in the mire of shame and guilt of those blessings. Instead, I hope to walk the line between them, thankful for my blessings but ashamed to do nothing for those without them.

celebrate

When you get off the Interstate, turn on to the frontage road and pull into the church. It won’t look like a church; it’s just a warehouse, renovated into a small gathering place. The room will be dark; candles light the nondescript stage. The pastor will whisper, will pray with his eyes open. He won’t smile. The band will play; they’re wearing black shirts with their jeans. Not many people will sing along. It doesn’t feel like a day to sing.

Amongst the gathered, you can find her. She won’t stand out. She’s not overly pretty or thin. She dresses down. She’ll sit with her mother, and she’ll sing even though she doesn’t like the songs, even though she would rather cry than sing.

You won’t be able to sit next to her; her mother sits on one side, her former youth minister on the other.  She sits in the middle of people with as many problems and concerns as she. They’ll sing at first, but then they will stop. It seems too dark in the room, but they know the words anyway.

Slide into the seat behind her; you can watch her hold her head high when the pastor leads in prayer. Lean around and you could see her eyes are open. From behind, you can see her shoulders lift as she takes breaths between measures. You can see her shoulders tremble only slightly as she controls her emotion. Today is Friday. Sunday is Easter.

She won’t cry during the service; she’ll be too distracted by her worries to be much moved by the songs or by the solemn taking of bread and cup. Instead, you may notice that her tears are nearly drawn out by the friendly pats on her arm, supportive hugs about her shoulders, and knowing gazes that meet her eyes. She manages to hold them in as she is known to do. She will shake hands with the pastor, bid her fond farewells, and even when she is alone in her car with dusk closing in, she will only allow a few tears and no audible cries for the confusion, the fear, the anger, the worry. She will ride the whole way home in silence; her silent prayers fill the car like smoke, filling every crevice.

You will see right away that her life, like the earth after six days, is good. Not without strife and the occasional tragedy, but good nonetheless. You will wonder what has upset her; you are unsure if she would answer if you asked.

You will wonder what to do for her, this girl. Does she need you to listen to her? Certainly not. She will tell you what she will when she decides to. Does she need your sympathy or worry? No, no; she dreads that and has little need of it anyway. She is resilient; those over whom she broods are less so.

You will be curious. Morbidly fascinated. You will want to ask her first, what it is, and second, what you can do. What you should know before you do that is that this girl is not just a girl with stress in her life, with fear and addiction to the future, with unexpected problems. This girl is not just a girl. She is everyone. She is one teary set of eyes among a million others. She is everyone. She is you.

She wants what everyone wants. She wants what you want.

Her eyes are brown. You noticed. You remember. Good.

The Call (Or, Vague and Ineffective Spiritual Slang)

As a child, I grew up entrenched in the moderate side of the conservative Baptist spectrum. I went to GA’s every Wednesday until I was twelve, and at that point, I traded GA’s for youth group. I went to Sunday School nearly every Sunday until I graduated high school, and when I did, I plugged in immediately to the local Baptist Collegiate Ministry and started attending a Baptist megachurch in the area.

At every one of these institutions, the idea of the (capital C) Call was emphasized ad naseam. It became a holy game of Where’s Waldo?, searching for, and sometimes manually inserting, God’s Call into my life, though, no one really ever elaborated on a) What exactly they meant when they say The Call, or b) the means by which one discerned it.

The Call. (thuh * kawl) n. 1. The politically correct name used for one’s career aspiration when speaking in a church setting. 2. The name used for vocational Christian ministry, especially during an especially emotional invitation after a provocative sermon, sometimes as a means of subtle coercion. 3. The indistinct draw or pull toward a certain place, person, group, goal, or occupation. (taken from Beasley’s Un-Standard and Clearly Satirical Dictionary of Spiritual Slang, © 2010.)

In my own experience, I have felt “Called” to several things over the course of my life. As a little girl in GA’s (Girls in Action), I felt “Called” to be a missionary every week when we celebrated their birthdays and prayed for their ministries and families. As a teenager, enveloped by a mostly loving and occasionally challenging youth group, I felt “Called” to be a youth worker. As a student in high school—whose confidence was repaired and nourished by an excellent educator—I felt “Called” to be a teacher.

As a camper, I felt “Called” to be a camp counselor, and as a summer camp counselor, I felt “Called” to be a camp staffer (that is, to throw myself joyfully into more than just the summer “counselor” duties). When I was a student, I felt “Called” to be a teacher, and now that I’m on my way to being a teacher, I feel “Called” to be a seminary student.

Point being, the Call I’ve heard for my life has changed as I live.

So now, since I’ve defined “The Call” above, I will now dismantle each of my definitions for it.

Objection to Definition 1.

 Definition 1 defines the Call as “The politically correct name used for one’s career aspiration when speaking in a church setting.” This, in my opinion, is how most people tend to use the term. They take Colossians 3:17 and use it to justify how they spend their time.

Colossians 3:17 “And whatever you do or say, do it as a representative of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks through him to God the Father.”

Plenty of people say their job or occupation is their Calling but do little or nothing with the intention or even awareness that they do so as Christ’s representative.

Objection to Definition 2.

Definition 2 is “The name used for vocational Christian ministry, especially during an especially emotional invitation after a provocative sermon, sometimes as a means of subtle coercion.” This is the invitation-time use of the term, and there are problems here, too. Not everyone is called to quit their jobs and rush to seminary in order to fulfill their Calling. And furthermore, whose to say that vocational Christian ministry requires quitting your job and going to seminary in the first place? Third of all, it’s problematic to bombard people with feelings of guilt and obligation to serve the church in a moment of intense emotional and spiritual turmoil that some feel during an invitation, whether we choose to analyze those feelings or not.

Objection to Definition 3.

Definition 3 defines The Call as “the indistinct draw or pull toward a certain place, person, group, goal, or occupation.” Maybe this is the definition closest to the truth, but I don’t think we’re there quite yet. I used this definition for most of my life, especially when I considered the feelings I had about being a youth worker or missionary or camp staffer. I felt a draw towards those goals or activities, so I assumed it was God calling me to them. But because the “Calls” I have felt in my life have consistently changed over time, I don’t think this definition is quite right either.

So, I propose a fourth definition.

The Call. (thuh * kawl) n. 4. The holy and ineffable magnetism of God.

I think that each of the callings I felt growing up and feel now are one and the same, each valid in its own right. Each time I felt drawn to a particular career goal, or to a certain school, or to a mission opportunity was part of one great Calling, the siren song of relational love.

I say The Call is the same for everyone, though manifesting in different and deeply beautiful ways for each, and, if you’ll excuse the play on words, here it is:

“I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master's business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.” –Jesus, John 15:15

Again: The Call = The holy and ineffable magnetism of the Spirit, pulling us closer to God through loving, relational friendship with Jesus.

________

I’ve said all that to say this: let’s get rid of spiritual slang, purge it from our lexicon. It’s limiting and exclusive, and doesn’t make much sense anyway.

-H

Book of Eli?

I don’t generally use my blog for movie or book reviews, but after watching Book of Eli last weekend, I knew I would revisit it here. The film stuck with me long after the credits rolled, and as much as I enjoyed it, there are inherent points of contention there as well. Beware, this post will contain spoilers, so move on if you still haven’t seen it!

You can watch the trailer below.

Right away, you can see the draw and the problems here. The draw, obviously, is that in a world after a nuclear war where every Bible has been destroyed, where there is no hope, no color, no joy in being alive, both good and evil see the ultimate value in the Word of God. Denzel Washington, or Eli, is a man fighting to protect the only Bible left in the world. After the nuclear holocaust, a frenzy erupted and every Bible was burned because people blamed God for the war. However, God spoke to Eli (much like God spoke to Samuel, Eli’s charge in the Old Testament) and led him to the last Bible in the world and told him to take it West (to eventually be reprinted again).

Gary Oldman plays a villain who has been searching for a Bible for years, knowing he can use it to manipulate people. Eli kills again and again to keep the Bible out of his hands.

As an allegory of spiritual warfare, perhaps this film could work. Of course protecting the Word is a metaphorical battle. Forces of evil attack it consistently, and the protection of the truth is a daily, eternal war with many casualties.

However, to take life in order to protect a physical copy of the Bible is like spitting on the words within it. Though this is addressed briefly in the film when Eli gives up the Bible to save his friend’s life, the overwhelming violence seems to cancel out Eli’s confession that by “killing so many to protect the book, I forgot what it taught me.”

Eli’s murders are justified by the film; it suggests that in order to protect the Bible and to eventually reprint it so it can help bring the world back to hope and order that sacrifices had to be made. However, I can’t abide this notion. Where do we draw the line? It’s okay to kill the human scum of the earth in order to save the people who are truly searching? The ones on Oldman’s side were searching for truth, too; every life is precious.

Though I loved that the value of the Bible was emphasized in this film as the way to bring hope to a desolate, chaotic world after a devastating war, I can’t help be see the danger in it as well. As followers of Jesus, we can’t afford to abandon our morals in order to spread the Good News. If we do, we become conquistadors, not Christ-followers.

Jesus rebuked Peter for cutting off a man’s ear in attempt to protect His life; in the same way, I believe He would rebuke Eli for murdering to protect a copy of the Bible, and us, for consistently abandoning his commands to spread His name. No one can be led to truth that way; only through love can we bring hope to this world.