To Live Like Ben Lived

"Follow my example as I follow the example of Christ." 1 Cor. 11:1

Two years ago I sat with friends expressing a zeal and hope for revival in their little Christian school.  They longed for spiritual renewal and prayed for it.  As I sat back enjoying their enthusiasm and vision, a thought popped in my mind: revival comes with a cost.

I really wasn't sure where the thought came from and I certainly did not voice it aloud. I didn't want to put a damper on such good fellowship and vision.  I locked the odd thought away and largely forgot about it.

Until a year later when I learned that a student in that school, a bright and shining young man of faith, Ben Schoonover, had been diagnosed with cancer. My heart sunk and my mind wandered back to that strange thought.

Don't get me wrong. I am not suggesting that God struck Ben with cancer because of the prayers. For God had already appointed the number of days Ben would have.I just know that God is working all things together as a tapestry: the good, the bad and the ugly.

And cancer is ugly, but not the way Ben lived it.

Under the shadow of a terrible prognosis, Ben wrote:

"My fear is not of death, I know where I'm going. My fear is that those who are watching these events and if it happens that I pass away as we all do will take this as a circumstance of God not pulling through for someone. Just because God doesn't take care of my tumor does not mean He left me. It means that my time for glorifying Him here is done and He would be taking me to a place with no suffering, no pain, no sickness. God chose to save Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. He may choose to save me, but He may not. But I know this is what God set in front of me for whatever reason or higher purpose, so I approach it with confidence in Him and His plan. No one should look at it any different. He plots my course and I run my race, however long or short or rocky or smooth. He put me here, and I know He will take me when the time is right." 

Yesterday around 9:30 am Central time in the US, seventeen-year-old Ben Schoonover passed away. It leaves us all with an ache deep in our innermost parts to imagine that the world can still go on after the loss of such a bright light of faith.

Ben had come to Hungary on a mission trip with his church.  We had seen God's hand upon him. He loved God. He loved others. He loved well. He was the kind of person who gave each of us hope for the next generation.

We are all left wondering, "why?" But maybe the answer is not as elusive as we think.  When Ben faced true tragedy -- a tragedy that he could not explain, he did not get bogged down in the "why?" Instead, that faith he had always talked about became almost tangible and he taught us all something in the way he lived right up until the moment he embraced his Savior.  From the people in his school to those who met him half way around the world, we are moved and changed and challenged by this young man's life and faith. Revival, indeed.

Now as we ache and hurt and miss Ben, it's our turn to avoid getting bogged down in the "why?" and truly live like the people of faith we are called to be. It's time to live like Ben.

Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians "Follow my example as I follow the example of Christ."  Ben could have said the same thing.  So let's follow Ben's example because he truly followed the example of Christ.

Let's live through our loss of Ben faithfully, because we know we will see him again.

Spiritual Therapy

"I'm fat, dumb, and happy!" I jokingly said to my daughter as I put her to bed one night.

"You're not dumb," she replied.

I looked at her and responded, "Uh ... gee, thanks."

 As a result of her backhanded compliment, I started an exercise regiment. Nothing too serious. I am NO athlete by any stretch of the imagination. But I remembered when my father was in an car accident last year how the physical therapists had him do simple exercises for a short time everyday. It was less about the amount and more about the consistency.

An amazingly it works. People coming out of back surgeries who could hardly move were in a few months walking around.  Little movements take us in a direction and when done consistently can take us far.

Oswald Chambers said that "fifteen minutes a day makes anyone an expert" over time. So in this spirit I have begun my fifteen minute powerwalks each day. It is my physical therapy and it's moving me in the right direction.

But as I've started exercising, I've began to think about the spiritual application of this principle: Spiritual Therapy, so to speak.

What spiritual exercises am I doing each day?  Am I doing anything to move me in the proper direction?  Am I taking time apart to read and really think about His word, not just do the obligatory read a verse and run.  Am I pouring out my heart in prayer, or just saying the obligatory, habitual grace prayer over dinner and goodnight prayers with my kids.

Maybe I am in need of some good, solid spiritual therapy.  Nothing fancy, no frills ... and it may look like nothing to rest of the world, but it will set me moving in the right direction. And who knows? Maybe Oswald is right and one day I may even become an expert -- both at powerwalks and spiritual things!

The Power of Parental Presence

"...in your presence there is fullness of joy" --Psalm 16:11

Last Sunday my daughter did not want to do her homework. She is usually a very diligent student who generally makes good grades, but on Sunday she was just one big whiny mess. Her brother had finished his homework in twenty minutes. But she refused to buckle down and get hers done.

My daughter learns in Hungarian. That basically means I can be of little help to her when it comes to homework -- a situation she is always all to eager to point out. But on Sunday she just kept whining: "It's hard. I can't do it... wah, wah, wah." I am sure all parents know the schpeel.

Finally, I just sat down on the couch next to her. I had her read the assignment aloud to me. I could not understand but a couple words in the reading comprehension exercise. I just sat there and listened. I directed her to the first question. And she readily answered it. And then the next and the next.

Before we knew it we were done and on to Hungarian grammar. Here I could be of even less help. But I sat beside her as she worked. Within fifteen minutes it was all done.

And then she hugged me.

As I thought back on the day's events I pondered what had happened. My daughter did not need me to give her the answers. She really did not even need much direction. All she needed was a parent's presence. And that simple presence was enough. That made me wonder if there wasn't something uniquely powerful in a parent's presence.

Perhaps I disregard the value in just sitting next to my kids while they do what they need to do and I don't really realize the importance of it.

And perhaps it's not so different with our Heavenly Father's presence too. Just as my daughter thought she could not do what was placed before her, we often whine and complain to God. We want Him to waltz in and give us the answers. We want Him to change things. But what we want and what we need are two different things.

He has prepared us for today's homework. He has equipped us for the task. And what we really need is quite simply to sit in His presence as we get the job done that He's called us to do.

Unlike me, He fully understands the power of His parental presence. The problem is I too often disregard the value of His presence or deny the fact that He is present at all if He fails the act in the way I think He should.  But His presence is not proven by His miraculous intervention or His succinct answers. It is proven by what He did and where He has chosen to dwell. Christian recording artist Michael Card put it well in his song Could It Be?:

Could it be, You make Your presence known so often by Your absence?
Could it be that questions tell us more than answers ever do?
Could it be you'd really rather die than live without us?
Could it be the only answer that means anything is You?

Maybe it's time to stop whining about the answers and start realizing His lack of action is not really an indication of His absence at all. It is an opportunity for us to experience His presence for what it really is: to simply enjoy a good hug from Him after doing exactly what He's equipped us to do. And there is great power in experiencing His presence in that simple way.

The Fallacy of the "Love God"

Valentine's Day, the day of LOVE recently passed once again.

To tell you the truth, I largely missed it this year. My husband, being the amazing man he is, remembered it in all its glory.  But I was so caught up in day-to-day challenges that until he whipped out the candy and cards, I forgot all about it.

I think Valentine's day is overrated. It plays into the tendency of our modern age to deify human attraction, romance, in a nutshell the secular idea of love. It is a god, that which we believe will make us complete, fulfilled, satisfied and happy. And unfortunately, it is a false god much like that which is discussed in the first of the ten commandments.

Wait a minute! Some may say. God is love, right? So what's wrong with deifying love.

The problem is that which we are de-ifying is not really love. It may be affection. It may be lust. It may be codependency. But love it is not.

So to be cliche, I must ask, "What is love?" I mean the way God sees it and puts it into human terms.

There is a famous biblical discussion about love between Jesus and Peter in John 21. In this interlude, the risen Christ keeps asking Peter "Do you love me?"  The first two times he uses the word "agape" which means to love something in a way that does not depend on reciprocation or innate worthiness. Peter answers that he does love Christ, but he does not use "agape" he uses "phileo" which is brotherly love or affection. Peter's denials of Christ on that fateful night of the crucifixion testify all too loudly in his conscience for him to use any other word for love.

Finally the third time, Christ simply asks Peter, "Do you love (phileo) me?" And Peter is grieved. Peter came face to face with his own inability to love properly -- to love well.  After all, if you cannot love Christ well, then who can you love?

But this is a moment of great significance -- a moment Christ has painstakingly engineered over the course of Peter's discipleship.  Christ brought Peter to this point that Peter might understand his own inadequacy in the area of love.

Because that's the very place where true love can begin.

We are all so willing label things "love" that are not love and then build our own alters to it, pretending that we worship God.

God is love, indeed. But He is real love, the kind of love that is ignited in us only when we first are brought to understand our own inability to accomplish it. For we, like Peter, will only ever learn to love well, to agape love, when we allow our hearts to be grieved by the reality of our own inadequacy and therefore rely on our Lord's ability love through us.

God-Blindness

"You shall have no other gods before me."--Exodus 20:3

This first commandment seems kind of antiquated.  Western society today likes to laugh at any concept of God, categorizing such as silly superstition, uneducated, and certainly unscientific. So the point of this commandment is moot, right?

Ironically, as averse as society is to God, we are all to eager to build gods for ourselves: the primary god being the self.

We seek ... no, we demand instant gratification!  That is the most important thing. We want all our pleasures satisfied and will worship at the alter of that which satisfies the quickest, though certainly not the completest. And so we ardently pursue cheap imitations of God.

There are those who believe God has no interest in our pleasures -- that he is the totalitarian disciplinarian, marching around with the proverbial hickory stick in hand ready injure those who pursue such vain endeavors.  CS Lewis argued quite the opposite, however.  He suggested that perhaps our problem is not that we seek our own pleasure, but that we are too easily satisfied. "We are half-hearted creatures, fooling around with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea," he wrote.

Our pursuit of pleasure is perhaps not the problem as much as the fact that our perspective is askew. We do not see things as they are and therefore seek to satisfy our desires with things that can never satisfy. We therefore make gods for ourselves out of worthless imitations.

That which we make out to be the gods of our lives become the lenses through which we perceive the world around us. Those lenses skew reality so we fail to see what is really important. That's why a mother can abandon her child for the god of drugs or alcohol, or sometimes even the "love" of a man who will only throw her away.  That's why a father can abandon his family in pursuit of "happiness" with another woman.

Idols blind us.  Regardless of whether it comes in the form of money, sex, success, ambition, or even ministry and service to God, idols blind us.  And ANYTHING, no matter how good the thing, that takes our attention away from our relationship with the true God is an idol and will skew our perspective -- render us blind.

"If your power to see has been blinded, don't look back on your own experiences but look to God." Oswald Chambers exhorts. "It is God you need.Go beyond yourself and away from the faces of your idols and away from everything else that has been blinding your thinking."

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Brats of Grace

"But his delight is in the law of the Lord and on His law he meditates day and night." Psalm 1:2.

The law. It's gotten a bum wrap in our day and age. Modern western society tends to see it as oppressive, authoritarian, an enemy of true freedom.  And, unfortunately, the sentiment has seeped into how we understand faith and God as well as how we raise our children.

Granted, both nations and religions have abused "law" in many ways over the human history which fuels the case against it.  Legalistic churches condemning the down and out portrays a stark contrast of what Christ called the church to be.  And so we ridicule "law" and champion "grace" to such an extent that we have cheapened what grace truly is.

The psalmist rhapsodizes over and over again about his love for the law of the Lord. He has a passion for it. It is precious to him.

We tend to turn up our noses at it, commenting "Well, I'm glad I live the age of grace."

But in doing so we miss the point!  The law is our friend, precisely because it condemns us.  Without it, we would be clueless as to how bad off we really are.  Without it, we could pretend that we are good enough.  We could evaluate ourselves according to our own deeds and feel quite smug and self-righteous.  And we are prone to these very attitudes.

We need the law because without it, we CANNOT understand grace.

I believe there is a reason so much of the Bible is Old Testament -- life under the law.  Law is the very foundation to understanding grace. Without the law there is no grace.

But the modern Christian era tends to want to ignore law in the name of grace and this paradigm impacts all areas of our life, especially how we parent.  The trend in past generations was toward authoritarian parenting and there was plenty of baggage that came with with that.  In reaction to that, we've thrown out strong adherence to rules in exchange for a kinder, gentler style of parenting.  Today, parents do not say "no" to their children.  There are not absolute rules, and misbehavior does not have consequences.  Children are free to question their parents with the ugliest attitudes imaginable. Backtalk is accepted even at the earliest ages and respect has gone the way of eight-track tapes and celluloid films.

We may think we are teaching our children about grace with our unconditional acceptance of their bad behavior, but I would argue that we actually may be creating barriers to their very salvation.

Think about it.

The child who has a clear cut set of reasonable rules that when broken incur consistent consequences (punishment) understands earlier and more clearly that sin has consequences or that "the wages of sin is death."

But the child who faces no rules and/or no consequences for misbehavior has no frame of reference for this foundational concept of faith.  How can he grasp the idea that Jesus took on the consequence of our sin when he has never experienced that sin or bad actions have consequences?

In my years of teaching in Hungarian public schools as well as doing kids ministry, I've witnessed the trend toward permissiveness and in Christian circles it is often framed in terms of teaching loving grace.

But in truth we are doing our children no favors if we try to teach them grace without first laying a clear foundation of law.  By this I am not talking about the authoritarian parenting of generations past, but rather clear-cut reasonable rules that we can enforce with consistency.  Rules that establish the principle that sin has its consequences which cannot be escaped.

Because then and only then can we truly begin to teach our children of the spectacular mysterious gift of God's grace.

The Psalmist had it right. The law is not our enemy. It should be our delight because it brings us into the fullness of His magnificent grace. And that is worth meditating on, both day and night.

How Evil Could You Be?

"...deliver us from evil" --Matt 6:13


What does the face of evil look like? Does it bear the rectangular mustache of Hitler or does it hide behind the long, bristly beard of Bin Laden?

Or can evil lurk in that image we see each morning in the bathroom mirror?

How evil might each one of us be -- given the right circumstances?

In describing Hitler and Stalin, the great evils of his time, CS Lewis insightfully wrote: "You and I are not, at bottom, so different than these ghastly creatures." Could that be true? It is worth pondering.

We live in an age where a great deal of evil is minimized by our social customs and even  excused under the auspices of psychology and medicine.

For example, if a child is rude and disrespectful to you and is forced to apologize, what are you supposed to say?

"Oh, that's okay."  Or "It's alright."  Or "no problem, don't worry about it."

What are we teaching kids?  It's not alright to treat others poorly.  The apology does not make the behavior okay.  Treating others badly is a problem.

Perhaps a more appropriate response would be "I forgive you."

We downplay wrongdoing even on the adult level, but we have found more sophisticated ways to make evil behavior palatable and void of responsibility.

In 1991 in Virginia, a 41 year old woman was acquitted of drunk driving after claiming "diminished responsibility" due to her PMS. In England, a barmaid who murdered her co-worker in a fit a rage was convicted on the lower crime of "manslaughter" after claiming severe PMS diminished her responsibility.

Yes, I understand the whole chemical imbalance and hormone thing. Yes, I've experienced a bit of it myself.  But is that an excuse for sin? Does it make sin okay?

A few weeks ago I visited a friend who struggles with a bipolar disorder. She is very open about it. And I have to say  she manages it extremely well. Still the disorder impacts every aspect of her life. But she has not used it as an excuse for sin.

She has taken responsibility which in her case means meeting with a therapist each weak who adjusts medication regularly. She has to make conscious choices when everything inside of her is driving her to run away.  When all feelings tell her to do things that would destroy her life, marriage, and family, she must choose to fight and avoid situations that might even lead to temptation. And she does it. She fights a hard battle each and every day, tirelessly. She does it because she knows what is at stake.  Her prayer of "deliver us from evil" is a very real and tangible one.

Humbled by how she lives her life, I had to re-evaluate how I respond to my own mood swings which are just a result of being female. How often do I allow the fact that I feel edgy and miserable inside to become some sort of license to snap at my husband or children.

 The fact that  I feel bad does not give me a right to treat others badly. (Yes, I know the blog will come back to bite me, but that does not make it any less true.)

And men are not off the hook.  How often do we let things like stress (whether we brought it on ourselves or it was thrust upon us) to be our excuse to treat others badly?

Do I really think that because I feel overwhelmed and stressed that it's okay to yell at my kids, be rude to my spouse, slap the dog ...etc.?

It sounds ridiculous, and yet we've bought into it. So how far are we willing to take it?

Hitler had a troubled childhood, does that somehow atone for his sins?  What was in Bin Ladin's chemical makeup and childhood upbringing that crafted him into the image of evil that he became?  Do those things invalidate his countless murders?

Considering how bad we are at taking responsibility for how we treat others, if we found ourselves in either Hitler's or Bin Ladin's same circumstances, would we really be so different than they?  It's a chilling thought.

And with that thought, we can properly look at this line of the Lord's prayer: "Deliver us from evil."

Indeed we are capable of all kinds of evil and we can thank God that he has preserved us in so many ways.  Still we allow evil to creep into our lives and even embrace it.  We've allowed certain sins to become familiar friends, so much so that we hardly even think about asking forgiveness for them anymore.

No wonder Christ taught us to cry out, "Deliver us from evil."

Let's rekindle the desperation of this plea and recognize how we've given evil a foothold in our lives.  Let's stop giving ourselves a license to sin in the name of stress and pms and start crying out forgiveness and help. For God wants to help us bear those firey emotions -- that we may not to leave those we love most as scorched victims of our wounding words and deeds.