A Lesson from Father Abraham

I did not grow up in children's ministry and youth group. So, I missed out on felt boards and campfire songs among other things. When my daughter was two, we did not want her to experience the same deficit, so we bought a sing-a-long video of cheesy Christian songs. Great things about these songs is that, while they bring the cheese, they help you remember Bible stuff because you can't get the tune out of your head no matter how hard you try.

One of those songs was about Father Abraham. It goes "Father Abraham had many sons, many sons had Father Abraham, I am one of them, and so are you, so let's all praise the Lord." Then a body part would be called out like you were doing the hokie pokie, and the whole process would be started over. All of this highlights that Abraham is our spiritual father. No forgetting that.

Indeed, Genesis relates to us that God credited Abraham's (at the time Abram, I know) faith as righteousness. For many of us, that's where we think the story ends - there aren't any other verses of the song, right. Abraham became a pillar of the faith and lived a life of perfection because he is, after all, our spiritual father. If that's all we see, then we're missing the best part of the story.

A couple weekends ago, I had the opportunity to teach out of Genesis 17. Abram sins. Big time. Tries to make God's promises come to fruition. That's the thing about God, He gets touchy about his promises - if He makes them, then He's taking responsibility for them and our best efforts are to not get in the way. But Abram did get in the way and God let Abram stew in it for 13 years.

When God comes on the scene, first thing he says is for Abram to "walk before me and be blameless". Most I have read about this interpret the statement to mean that God wants Abram to do a better job obeying. He needs to be perfect. I disagree. God knows that is impossible.

This statement to Abram was an invitation. An invitation to come back. God was saying, "Abram, you screwed this up, you didn't listen and were impatient. You didn't trust me. But I love you. Come back. It was your faith and trust in me that made you righteous, see what happens when you wander away. Now come back and be perfect." God is extending grace to a sinner. Not the first time, and most definitely not the last.

God is extending grace. That offer does not stop once we enter our covenant with Him. This is something that I see Christians get wrong so often. We seem willing to accept the initial offer of grace, of the gift of Jesus, but somewhere along the line we feel like we have to begin to earn the favor of God. As if now that we are in the relationship we have to now earn God's continued love. Or, like Abram, we feel like we have to cover God's bases.

The life of a Christ follower seems to be one of tensions. There are two ways to tread on God's grace. We can just not care, determine that God is going to forgive us anyway, and do what we want. Disposable grace.

The other end of the spectrum is to feel like grace is not good enough. God needs help. So we have to look the part. Wear the mask. Act like we think God wants. Insufficient grace.

That second one was me. I KNEW about grace. I could tell people, quite convincingly, about God's grace. But I was effectively living as if that was not enough. God needed help. Thing is, if you are treading on God's grace, if you are living it out of balance, on one end of the spectrum or the other, it is going to blow up on you. For me I could not wear the mask any longer. Too tight. Too suffocating. Too frustrating that nothing was working. Too exhausting trying to make my own way.

Here's the thing, when God appeared to Abram, He already knew. You can't hide from the Eternal One. He knew what Abram would do when He made the original covenant with him. None of this was a surprise. Maybe it was a necessary part of Abram's learning to trust. Bowing on his face realizing he had just blown everything, expecting a firm rebuke, but instead getting an invitation to grace. Reading a little further in Genesis 17, God says "I have made you the father of many nations", it is already done. Your screw up does not change my plan.

That's my path and what I've learned about grace. I gave up everything. I was stupid and doing my own thing. Hacking my own path with a dull machete instead of walking the path Christ had already cut out. But God invited me back, to walk before Him and be perfect. Reminding me, or teaching me, to trust. Grace restores.

This experience of restoring grace is not unique to Abraham. It is my experience as well. My time in the desert is almost over. God is choosing to confirm my calling and restore my vocational ministry. It would be interesting to have God's foreknowledge and know now what He has made through me. Not until heaven.

My experience of grace has been humbling. Every step. I'm not perfect, nor will I be. (Abraham wasn't read on in Genesis). But I'm trusting, and that is exactly what God wants - for me to walk before Him so I can be perfect.

Love Is a Battlefield

Pat Benatar penned a song with those lyrics. In her song, she is talking about young lovers standing together against the heartaches of life. You can sense the desperation of her tone when you hear the song, almost like she is living in the anticipation that eventually something will come along to drive them apart.

Love being a battlefield reminds me of the church. If I am going to be completely honest with you, reader, then I have to say that through my experience of the last year, having to rely on God, having lost everything and being slowly restored, - like biblical Job or what the mystics would call having an experience of the Paschal Mystery - I can say that I truly understand the grace of God. My experience with it has been personal and life changing.

Before all of this I would have said that I understood grace. I would have been able to present God's grace to someone in a compelling way. (God's Riches At Christ's Expense! How clever!) But, I don't think lived my own spiritual life, or many times my interactions with people, in the authentic understanding of grace. Rather than believing that God loves me so that I can change, I effectively believed that God will love me if I change. Often, my treatment of people, or lack of compassion for them, what guided by this belief.

Brennan Manning has observed that the "church has become a wounder of the healers rather than a healer of the wounded." From my own experiences both given and received, this seems largely accurate. Richard Rohr notes it this way, that the majority of religion is more concerned with rituals, moralities, and group conformity rather than knowing ourselves and how the self that was created by God can relate to Him. So we tell people Jesus is the answer (which of course He is, but we leave it very nebulous what that means practically, probably because most don't know themselves), sin no more, get in a Bible study, and serve somewhere. That becomes the entry into the spiritual battle of most.

Love is a battlefield.

The spiritual life is a battle. Jesus demonstrated that. The Bible pictures it. Yet I think it is something the church forgets. Forgets that in a battle there are casualties. No one's spiritual path is going to be without hurts or setbacks. That is the reality of living in a fallen world and coming up against an enemy that rages to take as many as he can to their doom.

So on our battlefield, we shoot our own. Offering condemnation and arrogance. On our battlefield, we leave our wounded. Obviously they were not authentic or else they wouldn't have struggled and fallen. The body is supposed to offer comfort from the comfort we've received. God freely offers his grace and mercy and we are to do likewise.

I've always taken the teaching that "if anyone gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones who is my disciple, truly I tell you, that person will certainly not lose their reward" as literal water. I'm sure that is true. But is it possible that Jesus is talking about the living water of himself, his refreshing grace and his comforting mercy that we are also to offer his disciples? Certainly that is a legitimate possibility.

Living in the grace of God is changing my view of people and what they need, and I hope to be able to pass that perspective on to others as they walk their own journey and participate in the spiritual battle.

Thank you God for your never ending grace that has been greater than all the approval that I could receive from pleasing others. It has helped me break free of the bondage and lies of my fears. It has helped me not to be overcome by the awareness of my core sin, but to use that awareness to admit my dependency on the One Who Is Greater. It compels me to not repeat the patterns of my relational system. Grace is guiding me to strength and greater trust in the Most High. It is leading me on my journey toward living the life of love. All for Jesus.

In With the New

There is another apt episode of Seinfeld that comes to mind. Jerry is dating a woman who encourages him to express his emotions, particularly his anger. This is particularly tricky since Jerry is an 'even steven', never too far up, never too far down - usually just right in the middle. So, Jerry gets angry at his girlfriend's pestering. "That felt good" he said, and then the flow of emotions started.

He told Elaine that he loved her. Told George he was a good friend. Cried during a TV show while asking "what is this salty discharge coming out of my eyes?" Jerry went over the top with this new found skill. With the same girlfriend that wanted him to express himself, he started getting angry about every little thing. Ironically, she got tired of his constant expression of emotion and left Jerry.

He just didn't know what to do with his anger.

That's the challenge for the recovering passive guy. Well, at least this recovering passive guy. I've been told that I shouldn't dismiss my anger. That I need to feel it, process it, and then move on from it. My first reaction is that I don't want to be a husband that leads by intimidation or threat. I don't want to be a wife beater. In response (after the laughter), I was told that there is a long way from me even carrying my anger too far to being an abusive spouse. Not likely to happen.

Expressing my anger is a tough new challenge. Being angry upsets people. Being angry is confrontational. Being angry will require taking your mask off and letting people see the real you. But, no one ever got hurt being upset and I'm all about living mask-free, so I now allow myself to express my anger. But it is awkward.

My wife doesn't know what to do. She's been dealing with a people pleaser for 15 years and now she has to deal with someone with an opinion, who is not going to be pushed aside and dismissed. Someone who is now putting on the mantle of leadership and not just striving for the absence of conflict. It is a tough adjustment for her as well as me. One that is often hard for me to keep in mind - she has a new reality.

My trouble at this moment is that I don't know what to do with my anger. While I am experiencing it I don't know how to put it aside in order to sort through the conflict in a constructive way. It is hard for me to, in the midst of my anger, to confront the emotions that my wife is dealing with. This is my latest test on the strength journey. Can I put her needs above my own in the moment.

This is like having driving an automatic for your whole life, then having to learn to drive a stick. Changing gears. It's a better way to drive, better performance, better mileage, but it is tough to learn to change the gears at appropriate times (much less stop at a red light facing uphill!). I'll learn and I'll be NASCAR good at it, but for the moment it is very awkward and difficult.

Paint By Numbers

I am really not much of an artist. Either I have no skill in this area or have long since stopped trying to develop it. In 5th grade, my art teacher refused to put my project made of clay in the kiln, she felt it was just so bad that it was not worth the 'waste' of clay. Go figure, mom went without a clay toothbrush holder.

As I ponder how difficult is is for me to be artistic, it causes me to get annoyed at the dude on PBS I used to watch in high school who would create this beautiful and majestic mountain scene using nothing but a putty knife. Now that is deflating.

My one successful art memory that I have is a paint-by-numbers that I got for Christmas when I was probably around seven or eight. Painting is actually pretty fun. The image of the completed painting is etched in my memory. It was a tiger staring at you through tree leaves. The colors of the tiger contrasting nicely with those of the tree. Here is the problem with paint-by-numbers projects - it simply requires that you know colors and number and can pair them up. So none of the colors blend together, it is just a hodge podge of swirls, with each color distinct from its neighbor. Even though you knew it was a tiger, it had a lot of streaks in various shaded of yellow.

This is kind of like the picture of God that I had painted through my life. And it is possibly the most major change that I have had to make, peeling the layers and painting a new picture. If it's not the most major change, it is at least the most fundamental. Other changes within me would not be possible without painting a new picture.

I knew things about God. For other people, I could help them blend and understand, pointing their hearts in the right direction. To me that is so ironic. But in my life, everything remained distinct. My experience of God was painting by numbers, it was academic with very little heart, very little of myself, which is required of a real artist.

Not that heartless followship is what I wanted or thought was right, but I struggled to trust because of my poorly formed portrait of God. In my reckoning, God's attributes had no blending or relationship to each other. Yes I knew God loved me, but I held that distinct from His grace and mercy. I knew God forms us, sanctifies us, but I held that distinct from my own efforts. I knew this world has trials, but again, it was distinct from his love. Really, I could go on and on about how I had painted the wrong picture for myself.

Bottom line, love was based on performance. It could be lost or decreased depending upon your behavior. Not only with God, this perspective influenced how I gave and received love in all my relationships. Starting over required a new picture, no numbers to paint with.

Part of it required realizing that in coming, Jesus painted a picture of God that we could understand. He became the image of the invisible God, as Paul wrote to the Colossians. A verse that I understand in a new way. Look to Jesus. Because of his flesh, He understands frustration, rejection, and loneliness. For some reason I had tried to brush those things off, rather than embracing them as giving me the opportunity to walk the same road as my Savior.

Jesus loves his disciples regardless of their performance. Success or failure, His love did not waiver. It is not our performance that God is impressed by, it is the level of our trust. While I knew I was saved by grace, I was still caught in the trap of trying to merit God's favor. Rather than delighting in God, reaching for Jesus living inside of me, offering God my stillness, I was bent on becoming indispensable to God. Instead of ferreting out my root sin (which would indicate weakness and failure), I tried to hide it like Adam and Eve covering up with fig leaves. Like God doesn't know the truth.

Following Christ is not a role to play properly, it is a life dedicated to trust. Accepting His promises and realizing that He will come through on all of them, often despite our efforts. Trust means that there will be times of failure, letting God and others down, but that is what grace is all about. Trust is realizing that God wants to delight in my love for Him just as much as He wants me to delight in His for me. Trusting means yielding to the Spirit of Jesus living in me, allowing Him to know and develop my true self. That is my picture of God.

The Empty (inner) Circle

One of the things that I think God is directing me toward is working with church staffs. This is probably a long range plan, but I feel like I have learned an amazing amount about leadership and relationship systems that can be of help to those who maybe have not stepped back to examine themselves, their position in the leadership structure, and the stresses they endure and cause.

So just one element that I have to offer is a relational systems evaluation. My first question would be for each staff member/leader to tell me about their closest relationships. The quality of our inner circle relationships is a key foundation for successfully enduring the unique rigors of church leadership and pastoring. We need connection. An outlet. Support and comfort. Sadly, by the time all was said and done with regard to the collapse of my world, my inner circle was completely empty and that hastened the fall.

Some of the emptying was done for me. My wife and I had no connection. She had distanced herself from me and I had stopped trying. The person in the world that I would want to describe as my best friend, my supporter through thick and thin, was instead the person that I felt the most distance with. Rather than being able to offer support and guidance through the crests and troughs of ministry, my sharing sounded more and more like whining filling her with bitterness and resentment toward my job. This resentment was compounded by the fact that it was to my job that I turned more and more of my attention as the distance between us became greater.

Most of the empty inner circle was because of me. Pride is my root sin. In my relationships that expresses itself as a fear of rejection. A fear that if someone knew the real me, my real struggles, the real condition of parts of my life then they would certainly reject me. So I wore my "I'm fine" mask. Acted like everything was great all the time. If questions were asked, I became very adept at deflecting them. Turning conversations to the other. Listen and people will talk to you. That's not a bad thing until you start using it as a defense mechanism.

What I would look for in any pastor's answer to my question would be the proximity of the relationships to the workplace. It is not a bad thing to have some of your close relationships in the office. In fact, it is likely to happen, especially in an arena as relationally focused as church work. Yet, if that is the only basket that you have all your relational eggs in, that is a danger. Where do you go for an outside perspective of your system. To whom do you have relational freedom to talk about your trials without it being seen as interoffice gossip.

That was my problem. Every one of my close relationships was a church leader. Some who evaluated my performance and to whom I reported to. Truth is, I did make an attempt to reach out and share my marital struggles to one in my inner circle. This is where the pain of someone knowing my weakness was less than the pain of going on without help. So I reached out to one of the elders to whom I was close. Told him what was going on. Asked if his wife could reach out to mine. He did do that, but at the same time, he shared my struggle at an elder meeting and suggested that I was unfit to be a pastor.

Rather than an offer to walk alongside me, possibly even to mentor me as a husband or help me with my ability to perceive what I was contributing to the dysfunction of my marital system, rather than any of that my issues were shared with a large group of leaders. Looking back, even worse, no one did come to talk with me about it. It was kind of shoved under the rug and I was happy for it. There seemed to be a lack of wisdom or desire to confront me and help me.

In my state of unhealthy spirituality, the effect of that action on me was for me to revoke trust for any of my inner circle. I universalized. I became fearful of losing my job. I did not see the potential benefit that some light could shed on my situation. I'm not even sure the system that I was functioning in was capable of that sort of spiritual intervention. In that assessment I may be wrong, but it would explain why the question on the table was whether or not I should work there rather than what could we do to help.

Be that as it may, I am not attempting to transfer the blame for my actions to someone else or to some other group. The choices were mine and I take full responsibility for them. The fault is mine for not displaying wisdom in the variety of relationships I maintained. For believing the lie of the enemy and succumbing to my pride. For not trusting God and His promises.

But this is the sort of dynamic I would be looking for. Who is in your inner circle? Who do you reveal yourself to? Is there someone in your life who can ask you anything and will know if you are blowing smoke? What is the leadership system like where you are pastoring? Getting this right is a part of success that will last.