Into thin air

Cindy (not her real name) had stopped attending Young Life meetings, and was partying pretty hard again. She acknowledged as much when I asked her what was going on. Cindy had made a profession of faith in Christ, and tried the Christian life for a few months.

Then she walked away. "It's not for me," she said, owning her choice but avoiding eye contact with me after that. We hung around occasionally after that, but she drifted away. I chalked it up to imagining she felt convicted by my committment to Christ. Though maybe my committment played a factor in our estrangement, years later, Cindy's always-averted eyes flickered onto my memory's replay screen.

She'd grown up knowing she was a change-of-life "accident". Her parents reminded her of it all the time, as if it was her fault. Both parents, well into their careers, were unable to make the shift in their lives to embrace her as they had her much older siblings. She wasn't planned, wasn't wanted. She wore shame like her newest boyfriend's oversized varsity jacket and rarely smiled...

...except for that brief time after she told me she prayed to receive Christ. Cindy laughed like a child on a playground when she told a group of us about her prayer. Maybe she'd found the way to a Father who would be able to heal the deep wound in her soul.

But her newfound faith seemed to lose traction a few weeks...months at the most...after that. The lights went out, and she seemed to have pulled the shades down over her soul. She disappeared. Her pain obscured God, and she turned away from Him.**

I thought of my friend when I read David Sanford's If God Disappears: 9 Faith Wreckers and What To Do About Them (SaltRiver). This slim 158-page hardcover is written in a conversational, approachable tone, designed to respond to the stuff that obscures God's presence in our lives. Sanford discusses faith wreckers like:
- Neglecting time with God
- Experiencing crushing circumstances
- Being wounded by the church
- Living as an individualist
(and 5 more)

If God Disappears is meant to be a safe place for a reader to see some of their own struggles mirrored in the stories of others. There are some general Biblical principles presented in each chapter, along with an empathetic tone. A couple of times in this story-filled volume, the anecdotes of those who've made it through to the other side of a struggle can make the process sound simpler than it would be for a reader. (That's the sometimes the problem with after-the-fact anecdotes: the mess and time passage of a struggle gets compressed into a nugget of a story.)

But that's a small quibble, and it might just be me. The gentle, genuine care Sanford uses to address readers comes through loud and clear. The book is a helpful tool, especially if it's accompanied by the kind of in-person continuing dialogue about its contents that I wish I could have had with Cindy when she first averted her eyes and disappeared from my life.

**I don't know what happened to Cindy. I do know she is priceless to God, and that her story with Him isn't over yet.

Dodgeball revisited

I'm 49 years old, far too old for Dodgeball.

Right?

Today I was sitting in a meeting at work, and some of the other staffers were discussing some end-of-semester student activities. One of these events was a Dodgeball tournament with the proceeds going to a ministry in Africa. The person making the announcement said, "I'd like to see Student Affairs staffers put together a team and participate." Then he looked around the room to see who might want to join the effort.

I could not believe what I was hearing. It was like some sort of bad dream. You know...like the one where its finals week and you haven't been to the class all semester. You wake up, drenched with sweat, running your wrinkled fingers through your graying hair, and realize its a piece of unfinished business from your past, come back to haunt your sleep.

Well, I purged my Dodgeball bad dream by writing about it.

And then today, Dodgeball (known as Bombardment in my elementary school P.E. class) came roaring back into my consciousness. Even if the guy putting together the team was eyeing the twenty- and thirty-something staffers, it was just a little unnerving and a whole lotta ironic to be invited to play that game again in my life.

I hate Dodgeball SO MUCH I wrote about it in my first book. In honor of today's unwelcome invite, here's a little bit of that story:

...One thing was certain - Mr. Slovowsky wasn’t much for lesson planning. It seemed like we spent at least 3 or 4 solid months each year in P.E. doing nothing but playing Bombardment. Bombardment, also known as Dodgeball, seemed to define my place in the world.

The Mark Twain Elementary School version of Bombardment wasn’t the formal affair depicted in the scatological 2004 Ben Stiller movie “Dodgeball”. Instead, our low-tech, high-torture version would begin when Mr. Slovowsky would pick his 2 pets to be team captains and let them loose on the rest of us so they could choose their teams. For me, it meant sitting on the dusty gym floor and waiting…and waiting…and waiting until someone was forced to pick me.

Draft accomplished, he’d send each team to one end of the gym and tell us to face the other team, each side lined up like a firing squad. Which, of course, was exactly what we were.
Mr. Slovowsky then proceeded to toss a few hard red rubber playground balls into the middle of the gym and blow his whistle, signaling that the carnage could begin. He’d then settle his middle-aged girth on a rusting metal folding chair and watch dispassionately as the brave kids ran out, grabbed the balls that rolled onto their side of the gym, and then proceeded to throw the balls as hard as they could at the kids who were lined up against the opposite wall. The balls would then be fired back across the room as fast as possible.

If you got hit by one of those red rubber missiles, you had to go and sit on the floor next to Mr. Slovowsky’s folding chair. The idea was that the weak would be quickly picked off, and the strong would survive. It seemed like about once a week, someone had to go to the nurse because they had a bloody nose or a broken wrist from all this physical education. I read not long ago that many school districts have banned this game, for obvious reasons.

But back in Mr. Slovowsky’s day, we were all trapped in that gym. There was no school district trying to protect us from the terrors of Bombardment. There was just Mr. Slovowsky and his chair and his whistle keeping an eye on things.

The odd thing was that I always ended up as one of the last kids standing on the firing line. It wasn’t because of my natural grace and athleticism. It was because I hated pain. I hated the angry red welt that came along with getting whacked with one of those rock-hard playground balls. So I learned to hide behind the kids who cannoned those balls as if their lives depended on it, probably because in some weird way, their lives did.

A lot of kids seemed to thrive on this sort of testosterone-based competition. My aversion to Bombardment ended up making me oddly successful at it. My strategy was to try to tuck myself in a corner. If that didn’t work, I’d run klutzily from one spot along the wall to another, hiding behind the kids who were actually firing those balls at each other. When there were no more kids to hide behind, I ended up getting clobbered. Hard.

Bombardment summed up for me the way the world seemed to work. The strong and wily survive; the klutzy, the homely, the Losers get clobbered and have to sit on the filthy gym floor next to Mr. Slovowsky’s rusty metal chair, watching, watching...

There was one interesting thing about today's Dodgeball request. At least I wouldn't get picked last for this team.

But there's no way I'm participating.

A little light hit a dark corner in my soul this morning. Maybe these words will do the same for you today. Listen:

Then came the day of Unleavened Bread on which the Passover lamb had to be sacrificed.

Jesus sent Peter and John, saying, "Go and make preparations for us to eat the Passover."

"Where do you want us to prepare for it?" they asked.
He replied, "As you enter the city, a man carrying a jar of water will meet you. Follow him to the house that he enters, 11and say to the owner of the house, 'The Teacher asks: Where is the guest room, where I may eat the Passover with my disciples?' He will show you a large upper room, all furnished. Make preparations there."
They left and found things just as Jesus had told them. So they prepared the Passover. - Luke 22:7-14

It was just as He told them it would be.

"In my Father's house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am." - John 14:2,3

It will be just as He told them it will be.

I'm not making this up...

If you and I have ever talked about books, you know I have always proudly proclaimed that I'm not much of a fiction person. Oh, I appreciate the classics, and have written a number of works myself fiction over the years (kids' stories, plays and skits), but I've not been grabbed by much contemporary fiction of either the CBA or ABA variety. Every once in a while, a brilliant book cuts through the chatter and silliness and reminds me that sometimes fiction is the best way of all to tell the truth.

Tosca Lee's Havah: The Story Of Eve is one of those books. Lee traces the story of Eve with some of the most lovely, stunning prose you'll ever find in a CBA title:

The adam tried to hold me, but I pushed him away. He pulled me gently back - now I could feel the tremor in his hands - and lifted the leaves from my face. Perhaps with a vestige of that understanding that needed no words - or of my guilt in all its multifaceted forms - he lowered it to my waist and tied it there, so that the leaves hung over those parts stained by our use of each other.

I wept to see our industry, so joyously applied in gifts and tokens, in experiments and invention, given to such purpose. When the adam had made a similar covering for himself, he pulled me to him, hard against his chest. He did it, I knew, not to comfort me but himself, as he lowered his head to my breast.

I held him in silence. We did not know the language for sorrow or apology. We had no words for forgiveness, for it had never been needed.

I met Lee briefly last spring at the Mt. Hermon writers conference, and watched her putting in long, hard hours editing the manuscript for this book as a publisher's deadline loomed. I could sense the intensity of the task before her - the intensity carried a spiritual dimension to it that overshadowed the nuts and bolts of line editing text.

When I read the finished product, I understood why.

Though we only have the essence of Eve's story in Scripture, those early chapters of Genesis are the launch pad for the story we all now find ourselves in. Lee's "fiction" somehow doesn't feel like make-believe at all. She told the truth about me, you, all of us, with her story - and I was left with a deep ache for which I had no words by the time I finished the book. Homesickness, perhaps...or maybe just a longing for redemption.

Even if you're a fiction hater, I highly commend this book to you. And if you've read it, I'd love to hear what you thought of it.

Post-election consolation prizes

In the wake of Tuesday's election, I have read and listened to plenty of response from Christians across the spectrum. And one of the things I'm hearing again and again, usually from people disappointed (or much, much worse) about the results is the phrase "God is sovereign".

This phrase is usually a part of some self-comforting speech that goes something like this: "Even though we're not at all happy with the way things went on Tuesday, and this country is going to go ______ (fill in the blank with "socialist", "fascist", "Muslim", "to hell in a handbasket" or "broke"), we need to remember that God is sovereign."

What I'm wondering today is why this phrase is used like it is some sort of consolation prize - or an attempt to comfort ourselves. Would those who've used the phrase use it if the election had gone their way? If they had, how would it sound as they said it? Sadly, I can remember elections or other civic events in the past when things have gone a different direction, and the same folks who're in mourning now have sounded eerily like a "noisy gong or a clanging cymbal" as they proclaimed their certainty that things were finally going God's way. "God IS sovereign! WE WON!"

Though I follow politics, I am re-evaluating my interaction with the process these days. The Internet Monk's post on this issue really captures some of my questions and concerns about civic responsibility and the kingdom of God at this point: http://www.internetmonk.com/archive/imonk-101-the-tactics-of-failure-why-the-culture-war-makes-sense-to-spiritually-empty-evangelicals.

I have one friend who has embraced the truth that God is sovereign for as long as I've known her - in profound ways, through times of plenty and times of terrible loss in her life. She doens't use the phrase as either a consolation prize or the slogan stamped on her winner's trophy.

Instead, the words are her expression of trust in her Savior. They aren't a reaction - they are a measured, surrendered response of trust. You can almost smell the sweetness of the offering of her life as she expresses these words. I heard them again in an e-mail from her this evening, in fact.

And the words reminded me again of the spirit with which they were properly meant to be expressed.

Random anecdote Tuesday

It's not too often we get an opportunity to have a do-over in life, but on Sunday afternoon, I had a chance to revise a reader's theater script I'd adapted from a Tolstoy short story almost 15 years ago. The script was published by Eldridge Publishing as part of a book of short readings and program ideas for Christmas. The new version is a definite improvement.

Which leads me to wonder if I will feel the same way in 15 years about what I'm writing these days. And I already know the answer.

* * * * * * * * * *

Someone climbed the steeple of the chapel at Trinity over the weekend and tied a big pirate flag to the spire.

* * * * * * * * * *

Hardly anyone is talking about gas prices right now. I have been watching prices come down, down, down for the last few weeks, but they are not a topic of conversation at all. I think people see the lower prices as a hiccup.

* * * * * * * * * *

This past weekend, each of my sons randomly commented in conversations with us that they missed having a cat. (Cats and student apartments don't usually go together.) My son-in-law and daughter are the same way. Not one of them is much of a dog lover.

We had an awesome cat named Mike who died in August. My kids grew up with Mike and his much-less loveable half-sister Phyllis. Mike was one of those fun, friendly cats that even cat haters liked. Just this morning, I woke up and looked for Mike, who liked to sleep outside our bedroom door. (That way, he could be in the know about when he could expect his next meal.)

In the middle of discussions about hermeneutics papers and illustration projects, it was funny to hear Ben and Jake both expressing the desire for a cat or two independently of one another.

* * * * * * * * *

The highlight of this absurdly long election season has been Tina Fey's impersonation of Sarah Palin. There haven't been very many truly funny moments over the last two years, but Fey's sardonic, spot-on take on Palin crossed party lines and brought some wonderfully uniting laughter to everyone who saw it.

I saw the first skit online early the Sunday morning after it aired. I was sitting alone, and laughed so hard I had tears running down my face.