The Giving Tree read by Brennen Manning

Lent Day One: Vivid Virtue

Lent Day 1:  Michala and I spent some time thinking and praying about what this season would look like.  We both felt that instead of simply giving up some item that we would try to live differently, and hopefully sacrificially.  We would not only try to cease destructive patterns in our lives but also replace them with beautiful and holy practices.  


For so many of us, holiness may seem rather bland.  We may sum up holiness as "If it feels too good, tastes too good, or you do it too long, stop!"  This is an oppressive definition but one that many of us hold to.  However, this past summer, I was struck by something I read in a devotional (A Faith and Culture Devotional).  G.K. Chesterton wrote an essay called "Piece of Chalk," in which he describes a cherished childhood pastime of playing with chalk.  He details his preferences in brown paper and in color of chalk.  He loved most his collection of white chalk.  He writes, "One of the wise and awful truths which this brown-paper art reveals is this, that white is a color. It is not a mere absence of color; it is a shining and affirmative thing; as fierce as red, as definite as black."


I found this intriguing, for I like so many of us had never thought of white as a color, just a 'mere absence of color.'  Chesterton compares this misinterpretation to our understanding of virtue.  He writes, "The chief assertion of religious morality is that white is a color.  Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell."


This realization hit home with me.  For long I would deal with my negative problems of pride and selfishness, instead of pursuing the positive virtues of humility and love.  While the distinction may seem small, it is huge in practice.  If we seek to rid ourselves of unhelpful, even evil practices we must replace them with helpful and virtuous ones.  Jesus put it this way: "When an evil spirit comes out of a man, it goes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it. Then it says, 'I will return to the house I left.' When it arrives, it finds the house unoccupied, swept clean and put in order. Then it goes and takes with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there. And the final condition of that man is worse than the first."  


In other words, we must not merely seek to abstain from evil but to adhere to the fruit of the Spirit: to love, to joy, to peace, to patience, to kindness, to goodness, to faithfulness, to gentleness and to self-control.


With this notion of holiness in mind, we sought to both fast and feast each week of Lent, to abstain from evil and to do good.  This week's theme is "live simply, so others may simply live."  We are trying to give up superfluous spending so that we may increase our sacrificial giving. 


I believe this direction holds much promise and we feel much more excited about Lent due to this refined understanding of holiness.  We believe that sacrificial living is just that: both sacrificial and also truly alive.


May God bless you this Lent season as you seek to be as alive as He!


PS: For funky-fun song about simple living click here to listen Keller Williams' "Keep It Simple," a favorite of mine.

Thoughts on Creativity in the Image of God.

"In your relationships with one another, have the same attitude of mind Christ Jesus had: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own   advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a human being, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross! Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father."

Philippians 2:5-11    

As some of you are aware my wife has started a new blog and vocation to use the gifts and talents God has given her to create (you can check out her blog here).  I have seen the joy that this new work has given her and it has inspired me.  There is something remarkably beautiful about seeing this woman create.  However, like anything of worth, it is often hard for her to do the very thing she loves.  And, if we're honest, we all have the same struggles.  Why is that?

Throughout the age of the church perhaps the biggest theological debate has been over the problem of evil.  This is a debate that still stirs us today and can be summed up in a simple question: "If God is good, then why do bad things happen?"  If God is all the things that make Him God (omnipresent, omniscient, all-powerful, all-knowing, Holy, Loving, etc.)  then why or how could His creation look so, well, ugly sometimes.  The ground was not even done cooling before Eve sunk her teeth into that Pandora's box of a fruit.  Couldn't' He have seen this? Couldn't He have prevented this? Why even bother in the first place?

I will not pretend to have the answers to these questions.  Men much wiser than I have grappled with them only to be left defeated.  Yet, I believe I know at least a piece of the puzzle.  God is daring.  Creation always has been and always will be risky.  To literally give of yourself to make something unique, to truly write something beautiful, takes sacrifice.  God gave us His image and in doing so, He knew what He was risking but I believe He knew it was worth it too.  He was willing to give what ever it took to finish His work.  He knew that man would have the capacity to be like Him and He was willing to share His glory, and yet almost before He could finish calling His work good, it no longer was.

Going back to my initial question of why we struggle to do the things we most love, it may be that deep down, in the God-image part of us, we know that it may cost us everything.  We know that their are things out there, that if we let them, we will love so much that we will die for them: peace, equality, food for the hungry, and so on.  And we just aren't sure that we are truly ready to sacrifice.  It is frightening indeed to face the end of ourselves and not know, I mean KNOW, how it will all pan out.  Praise God that He does not leave us alone there in the fear; He has shown us the way.

As I said, creation cost God.  But it would soon cost Him everything.  In the incarnation, God becoming flesh in the man of Jesus.  He lived amongst us for several reasons, but most of all, to restore the Father's prize.  I love how human Jesus is at times.  In the Garden before His betrayal, He felt most pointedly the sacrifice He would have to endure and for a moment wished it didn't have to be.  And on the cross, in agony, crying out to His Father, the same question many of us in the the dark night of our soul have been too afraid to ask, "Why have you forsaken me?"

In Jesus, God lost everything: His glory, and His life.  Yet in Jesus, we gained everything: His glory and His life!  That, my friends is truly beautiful indeed.  Beauty is not free, it may cost us everything, but it has always been and always will be worth it.