Why and How and Goodness

Last night I babysat for Evan and Heather.  It was more time for introversion, and I welcomed it.  Simple things like sitting on a porch, giving a baby a bottle and swaddling him up before bed, reading new books,  watching new movies, and breathing in and out....it helped to clear my mind. 

I left their place with a stack of movies that people have always been suggesting to me (which they own and are generous to lend) and a few books too.  One was Velvet Elvis by Rob Bell.  I have taken time to read it today.

Heather said that she firmly believes that certain things in the Christian life are learned by people at different times.  What would be revolutionary for someone might not hit another in the same way, and you are not better than another if you learn something sooner.  It was her very humble and admirable way of explaining why she was telling me to read the book...but also keep it. 




Rob Bell is a pastor who has had lots of attention in the last few years regarding the things he's said on paper.  I know lots of people who wholeheartedly support what he's said and others who are pretty consistently angry about him too.  As with many things in life we encounter while learning, I have chosen to thoughtfully pick out what I can see as valuable, and question some of his words too. 

It's a relief to me that this person is aware of the tension he constructs while writing.  Some would challenge his intentions in creating tension in the first place...to what end was this intended when it was first begun?  Again, I feel greatly relieved that he is aware of the tension at all.  For this reason it was not hard for me to read this book.

I actually really liked it.

He sounds sort of like Shauna Niequist who wrote 'Cold Tangerines' and 'Bittersweet'.  I think too that when he mentioned a woman named Shauna in his book, he was actually talking about her.  I think that, once upon a time, they were on staff together at Mars Hill.  They seem to be similarly fashioned in their approach to encourage life as a story.  I resonate with this too. 

  

One time, after reading 'Bittersweet', I wrote Shauna Niequist a message.  I told her in a brief way about the last year of my life and the people who read her book with me.  This is what she wrote back. 

Jessica--
What a message! Thank you.  You've made my day, and while I feel so heavy for the community mourning Kari and her child, I'm thankful that you've shared this glimpse of your life with me.  And you know, of course, how I feel about people who feel drawn or called to write: do it. Do it. The world needs more courageous, gutsy, fearless storytellers. Be one of them.

With love, Shauna

For a long time I've been meeting the tension in my own life with God with certain statements.  I talk with people about God being mysterious.  About God transcending American culture (what a relief) and that it concerns me when I see how little I know of Jewish culture 2,000 years ago.  'Christians in America are NOT at first glance, naturally and culturally aligned with the times when  Jesus lived,' I say.  And people who hear this nod in agreement.  But it's generally a very loaded thing to say.  I know I believe that statement, but I don't always know how to uncover more about it. 

I have recently struggled with how to understand and reconcile horrific things done in history in the name of God.  Where do you put the questions that arise?  So I've read books that confront these things...not necessarily the books that describe these horrors (those challenged the questions in the first place) but writing done by people who care to address the reactions instead. 

What do people who claim to live by grace SAY about the line of history that precedes them?  You can, I suppose, make it very simple or complex from the start.  Maybe you own it or you don't.  But I can feel how much of an American woman's Western perspective in 2012 I have, especially when teaching all day.  I hide my bias from students when teaching, but the questions still ring inside of me.  

 Velvet Elvis added to what I've been piecing together about this conversation.  

It really is never far away from me in the day.  I teach history all day in an intellectual manner, and while I tell stories about specifics in a timeline, I've got a bunch of musings swirling in my mind too. Things that are naturally interesting to me about history that I don't talk about with anyone.  But I wonder about them when I'm sitting at the desk grading papers. 

Strangely enough, while I struggle internally to piece these historical perspectives together, I have not felt that I am specifically doomed to establish my life as a Christian in the same way.  I have not felt that I have to be identified with these people who picket and judge and mislead and conquer.  But I have felt the enormity of the history.  And that alone has made me, even when claiming the promises of God at a heart level, feel very small. 

So reading books that reconcile this have begun to help.

Today I cleaned my porch and created space again for contemplation in seasons that come after the winter.  This day is perfect...all window are open and the sun drifts in through my apartment in varied times throughout the day.  Today this is my form of rest.  This morning I put things back in their place and wiped off the chairs and then, still in my pajamas, settled in to read the book. 

Here's what I liked about it....

The fervor of some of the stories in the Bible comes out.  Not just the action or the words, but the Jewish background that made it compelling from the start, especially to that first person from Jesus' time who laid eyes on these pages.  It helps me to understand the shivers I sometimes feel when reading certain things about our stories and God.

It made me look square in the eye at the things I really think about following God, who is a great mystery.  Often I say I want this and then I balk at its pressures.  Reading the book made sense of the process of uncovering mystery and living in the 'not knowing' with gladness.  I don't think I have felt gladness about the mystery of God for a long time.  The lack of knowing, at least in my life, has been something to either accept in human standards, or casually subdue.  No longer.

The words have weight.  How uncomfortable I have felt when the 'rah rah' super structure of any book on any topic whisks me through the pages without the need for a pause or a breath.  We are a culture that is fast.  But lots of good living comes when you sit with people and don't say things for a while or when you read and hear the author's pause.  Not for dramatic expression alone, but for reality to settle in. 

Though Three Cups of Tea has recently found its own criticism, the biggest thing I took away from the culture of people in that part of the world is that they are silent with you from the start.  And when they offer you tea, even in this silence, a lot more is being said.  Sometimes when I am teaching, I pause for silence, not to withhold instruction or mislead, but because we need it. We need the quiet in our ears as we think and study.  That silence hung on to me when I read Velvet Elvis. 

I found the section called 'Labels' appropriate for the disconnect I feel when I hear some people discuss Christian life.  Rob Bell says this...

"The word Christian first appears in the Bible as a noun.  The first followers of Jesus were called Christians because they had devoted themselves to living the way of the Messiah, who they believed was Jesus. 

Noun.  A person.  A person who follows Jesus.  A person living in tune with ultimate reality, God.  A way of life centered around a person who lives.  The problem with turning the noun into an adjective and then tacking it on to words is that it can create categories that limit truth.
...
So the labels ultimately fail, no matter how useful they are from time to time, because the life of Jesus is just that, a life that is lived by people who have oriented their entire lives around being true to Jesus' teachings."

My sister recently told me that the verse that she loves to remember before going in for a long shift at the hospital is from Colossians.  The one that says, 'Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men.'  She told me it reminds her that she is doing things for Jesus, and not solely for the patients right in front of her.  It helps her do difficult things with care.  How much I learned about my sister in that one conversation.  It's another example of the reality I'm talking about...what is being lived right in front of us that brings us to God.

Rob Bell goes on to give some examples of labeling...things that I have very much seen.  The things that make me sick.   He goes on to say, "Christian is a great noun and a poor adjective."  I find that I agree.

I found resolution in my concerns about missions.  Again in history I have read about it done beautifully and poorly and it helped me with the internal conversations people have about these issues when discussing them. 

"In the same way that something can be labeled 'Christian' and not be true, something can be true and not labeled Christian.  Paul quotes Cretan prophets and Greek poets....It's as if Paul is a spiritual tour guide and is taking his readers through their world, pointing out the true and the good wherever he sees it.  Notice what he does in the book of Acts.  He visits the city of Lystra, which hasn't heard of Jesus or the God Paul believes in, and he tries to figure out how to explain his Christian world view to them. 
...
Missions then is less about the transportation of God from one place to another and more about the identification of a God who is already there.  It is almost as if being a good missionary means having really good eyesight.  Or maybe it means teaching people to use their eyes to see things that have always been there; they just didn't realize it.  You see God where others don't.  And then you point him out.
...
Tour guides are people who see depth and texture and connection where others don't.  That is why the best teachers are masters of the obvious.  They see the same things that we do, but they are aware of so much more.  And when they point it out, it changes the way we see everything.
...
So the issue isn't so much taking Jesus to people who don't have him, but going to a place and pointing out to the people the creative, life-giving God who is already present in their midst.   It is searching for the things that they have already affirmed as real and beautiful and true and then telling them who you believe is the source of all of that.

And if you do see yourself carrying God to places, it can be exhausting. 

God is really heavy."

Then there was the section of the book that talked about being split with the knowledge of what God made you to do and how you actually do it.  Rob Bell is a pastor, which is a job I highly respect and would never want to have.  But sometimes this shocks me because the life of a teacher is very service-oriented as well.  We can very much enter into the pain of others as well.   And many of the pitfalls people describe in ministry are also parallel to the struggles of teaching. 

One day, a few years ago, I realized that most of my closest friends were teachers, nurses, or social workers.  Or they are in ministry.  Even people I met out of college.  I don't mean to say that you aren't service-oriented in another position.  That would be small thinking and the minute that becomes a valued truth, the world gets very stale and boring.  I believe that fully.  But I couldn't deny the trend I saw in my closest friends and I wondered what sorts of comments about work and why you work were acceptable to us all because of our common schedules.  And, on another level, how unhealthy that still could be for all of us without ever acknowledging it.  Expectations can be heavy things. 

I've been mulling over the idea of vocation once more.  This came to my mind a lot during my trip to Connecticut, when I was away from teaching and lots of teachers and our day to day.  I brought with me on this trip the book by Parker Palmer called Let Your Life Speak, which is something I first read as a senior in college. 

I read it first at a time in life when everything was opportunities and untried lesson plans.  About half of the book made sense.  These days the other half of the book makes sense.  What to do with your vocation is a strong question.  And I think it needs time.  And in an instant culture we are not very quiet about our vocation for very long.  

TANGENT: I have had the luxury of knowing that I want to teach since I was a little girl.  I used to study the teachers and their styles as much as the assignments they were giving me, and when I got into my own classroom, there was a thrill that didn't leave when I saw that all of the things I naturally wonder about could find their way into conversation and purpose with people. 

Along with that, and much less expected, was a healthy dose of accountability and responsibility.  I will say that the burden of teaching is often clear to me, and I try to tread carefully when dealing with people in my classroom.  Even the students with the most bravado are extremely fragile when asking the most casual question in the place of authority.   And clearly this is another tangent all its own, but one that feels important, as it aligns now in an almost paramount way with my views of life at school.  Respecting the pupil (so says Emerson) has illuminated for me the most heart wrenching and exhilarating aspects of my life as someone's teacher.  

So I feel that I've had more time than others to consider vocation.  But the pitfalls are always there, and I think no one is above being susceptible, no matter when you discovered that you wanted something that much.  Teaching profs at Bethel told us this..."If you don't like teaching, get out of it.  You're going to do a lot of damage to other people if you stay in it and hate it."  Shocking words to a bunch of idealists in the college classroom.  But something I will never forget.  Also this: "If you want to teach middle school and last, you can't have an ego."

I thought of all of this when I read Velvet Elvis today.  When you become too aligned with the expectations of others, you are unable to separate an identity from God with an identity from the work you do.  I have been guilty of this.  I found that it was not because my philosophy of education changed drastically, but because I got busy and caught up and forgot.

Right before going to Connecticut I realized how exhausted I was by 'shoulds'.  So this paragraph about pastors rang true...

"Superpastor is always available to talk to everyone and accomplishes great things but always has time to stop and talk and never misses any one's birthday and if you are sick he's at the hospital and you can call him at home whenever you need advice and he loves meetings and spends hours studying and praying and yet you can interrupt him if you need something - did I mention he always puts his family first?"

WHOA.  Commentary on many things...right? 

Insert instead...

...'if you are sick he goes to the hospital' with 'if you are sick she sets aside your homework in a timely manner and is excited to explain it again the next day'

AND

...'you can call him at home whenever you need advice' with the term 'e-mail her school account about homework'

....and you have....me.  At least me in March.  As I said before, Connecticut was a reset button.  But so was this...

"I began to sort out with those around me what God did make me to do.  What kept coming up was that my life work is fundamentally creative in nature.  And creating has its own rhythms, its own pace.  Inspiration comes at strange times when you create.  And inspiration comes because of discipline.  And discipline comes when you organize your life in specific intentional ways.  It means saying yes to certain things and no to other things.  And then sticking to it."

So then comes the conversation about Sabbath.  Bell says, "I have learned that the real issue behind the Sabbath isn't which day of the week it is but how we live all of the time." 

- "Sabbath is a day when my work is done, even if it isn't."
- "Sabbath is a day when I remind myself that I am not a machine." 

(Or in my fatigued terminology 'a grading machine'.  Sometimes it is necessary to go into a mode to get the work done.  But the statement preceding this also helps to close it all down.)

All of this connects in my mind to the questions I've got for teachers I am with.  Why do you do this work?  What is the motivation in you as you do this every day?  I see lots of people who are in it because God gives them joy to do it.  I see some who continually talk to me about their legacy (which I fear for them might be a futile thing that doesn't come...the goodness of life shown to us does not often come in the endings of 'Mr. Holland's Opus'.  Plus the day to day doesn't FEEL like that.) 

Some don't know why they are where they are.  Some want a bunch of kids to think they are cool, and that's the end of it.  (This is short-sighted!  I want to shout this most of all from the rooftops!) And some are a very authentic blend of a lot of what I just wrote...using time and honing the vocation to figure this out. 

Despite transcendental musings, I will say that I am sure I am a part of all of what was just read.  Hello, human nature.  The truth of this question about work, and the authenticity of living it honestly, is something I care very much about. 

So in Velvet Elvis, I was really struck by this though, in light of 'Why is our work our work?'

"I'm learning that very few people actually live from their heart.  Very few live connected with their soul.  And those few who do let the difficult work...who get counsel, who let Jesus into all the rooms in their soul that no one ever goes in, they make a difference.  They are so different; they're coming from such a different place that their voices inevitably get heard above the others.  They are pursuing wholeness and shalom, and it's contagious.  They inspire me to keep going."

And then to THIS, from C.S. Lewis.   So the brilliance of connections go on and on... Really, the point of all of this was just to say that I enjoyed reading a book.  On my porch.  On this perfect day.   

And now, in light of the why and how and goodness of it, I hope the book reads me.