On Parenting

As the mother of a 16-month-old and another on the way, I've been thinking a lot of the kind of parent I want to be. How much do I shelter my kids from the world? How much do I let them learn things "the hard way?" How much do I protect them? What is my greater responsibility as a Christian mom ... making sure they know and love God at all costs or allowing them to make the choice for themselves, with the risk that they might choose a different path?

My husband and I grew up very differently, basically at opposite ends of the spectrum. I grew up the oldest of four in a Christian home. Dad led us in a devotion ("Family Time") each morning before breakfast, we attended church weekly, all my social activities centered around my church youth group. I wasn't allowed to listen to certain radio stations, watch certain movies or read certain magazines. Although I attended public school, because of my nature as a rule-follower, I never fell in with the "wrong" crowd. My biggest act of rebellion was going to Denny's with my friend Rochelle while I was supposed to be in Sunday School.

I am extremely grateful for the way I was raised. I'm thankful for the solid foundation and example that my parents gave to me. My husband's life journey was different. He began his relationship with God well into adulthood. Our vastly different paths to Christ have caused us to have vastly different views of what it means to be a Christian.

When Chris and I were dating, we'd sometimes talk about the future and the possibility of having kids, but the conversations never lasted long because we usually ended up in a fight. We viewed parenting differently. (I lean more towards sheltering our kids, while he leans more toward letting them learn from their experiences.) We knew that if and when we became parents, we were going to have to work extremely hard to come to a common understanding of the kind of parents we wanted to be.

Well, that time has come. And to my great surprise, the early days of parenting have thus far been ones of open, honest discussion, and mutual compromise.

The biggest surprise, though, has been my personal journey. Over the 2.5 years we've been married, I have found myself on a path of growth and transformation. I have begun to realize that up to the time I got married, my understanding of what it means to be a Christian was a narrow one. In my effort to "be" a Christian (a.k.a. follow the rules) I basically avoided the world. God, in his infinite wisdom, gave me a husband who is much more open to engaging the world, and He is using Chris to gently broaden my view of what following Christ in this world means.

On Chris' recommendation, I am reading a book right now that is literally turning my understanding of what it means to be a Christian upside down. (I'd highly recommend The Next Christians by Gabe Lyons to anyone, especially those with a similar background to mine.) Here are just a few examples of what Lyons says a Christian looks like.

A Christian:

... resists the urge to condemn everything that isn't explicitly Christian. He has a capacity find goodness, truth and beauty in most any creation. 

Instead of sheltering my children from secular culture (music, movies, books) that aren't overtly Christian, I should carefully and thoughtfully allow them to experience culture and teach them instead to discern the good from the bad.

If my daughter wants to read a book that all her friends are reading that has content in it that I'm uncomfortable with, instead of telling her all the reasons she shouldn't, I will read it too and then be able to engage in discussion with her about it. If my son wants to listen to a CD with lyrics that I dislike, I will listen to it with him and then have a common ground to seek his thoughts about it.


... models how to effectively engage and contribute to culture instead of training our children to avoid the "wrong."


No matter how much I want to, I'll never be able to fully protect my children from the culture we live in. They'll deal with it at some point, either with my guidance, or without it. I'd rather them learn to engage with the world's culture from a God-focused perspective while still under my guidance, rather than trying to navigate it for the first time entirely on their own.

Instead of teaching our children (either explicitly or by example) to condemn people we see exhibiting certain behavior, we use them as opportunities to talk with our kids about God's desire for us.


... does not expect non-Christians to conform to the same moral code as a Christ follower.


One of the things I never understood growing up was that non-Christians viewed God differently. I thought that everyone was coming from the same perspective I was and so I judged everyone, Christian or not, with the same measure ... the one I learned as a child. This caused me to be extremely judgmental towards non-Christians and all the lifestyle particularities they represent.

It's very important to me that our children are raised to exhibit grace to non-Christians. I want them to accept non-Christians as they are and view them with as much dignity and worth as God created them with.


One last thought that I found eye opening. (And I'm only a third of the way through the book!)


God's purpose for us is not that we live safe and comfortable lives separated from the world. A Christian's main duty is not to protect his children from worldly corruption. 


Chris and I strongly believe that we are called to raise our children to engage in culture and think critically about it. This means it's our job to carefully and thoughtfully expose them to the world, not shelter them from it. The risk, of course, is that our children will make a different choice than we want ... that they will get immersed in the world and lose their focus on Christ. As a new mom, the idea that my daughter or son might choose the world over a relationship with God is terrifying to me.

However, I'd rather face that risk and allow our kids to be who God created them to be than raise children who are little automated, non-thinking clones of Chris and me.

Speaking the Truth

This video has been making its rounds on Facebook. I hadn't watched it, just assuming it was another overly-hyped video that had gone viral around my Christian-saturated Facebook world. But so many people commented on it, that I finally sat down to watch it.

I'm so glad I did. I love it. This is TRUTH. And the part that I love the most is that it is spoken word. Poetry. Art.

I'm sure God is pleased with how this guy is using his gift. Preach it, brother.

I Don't Fight Alone

I have an enemy, of this I'm sure. He hates me and wants me to fail. And sometimes I feel like he's very close to winning.

It seems like the more I start to focus on what it is God's doing in my life, the more opposition I face. It's very hard to make any forward progress when I'm constantly fighting off attacks. I truly don't know how I'm ever going to succeed.

Why is it that life doesn't become easier when I'm on the right track? Honestly, I could use a little covering. Some sort of protection from the devil as I'm trying to learn how to fight.

I know this isn't the case, but I often feel like I'm all alone in this battle ... like God's sitting on the sidelines, cheering me on from afar. But I don't need a cheerleader. I need a teammate. I need a defender. Him by my side, in the arena, fighting with me.

Because I will be defeated on my own, I know this.

I wish I could see the real battle. I wish I could see, even just for a minute, what I know is the truth ... that God is fighting with me. For some reason, though, He's chosen to hide reality from us right now. And this makes it so hard to fight with strength, perseverance and courage.

I'm struggling to remember that what I think is reality, that I'm alone in this battle, is not actually real. It's a lie.

The truth is, I do have a Warrior by my side. I have a Defender. I have the King of the Universe, the Creator of all Heaven and Earth, with me in this.

I'm not alone. And the victory is already ours.

For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.
~Ephesians 6:12 

For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face.
~1 Corinthians 13:12

The Day My "Faith" Fell Apart

I wondered what it was going to take for me to post again. It's been six months since I last wrote. Nothing major occurred which caused me to stop posting, I just stopped. I was a new mom. I am a grieving daughter. I am a growing wife. And while all these things provided an unending supply of topics to post about, I didn't feel like doing it, so I didn't. And my blog went on an unannounced six month hiatus.

However, there is something I'm wrestling with that I need to write about. And I'll warn you, it's not going to be pretty. It might not even make a whole lot of sense. In fact, I'm mostly writing this for me, to try and put some semblance of order to the thoughts tangled up in my head. So if you're reading it, hang on.

And good luck. :)

---

This morning I realized something big. Monumental, even. Here it is.

I've been a "Christian" for what seems like almost my whole life ... (Excuse me while I interrupt myself. I put quotes around the word "Christian" on purpose, because with this morning's realization, my lifelong flimsy excuse for faith came crumbling down. And for the record, I'm not doubting that I'm a Christian, just trying to express how weak and broken of one I am.)

Anyway, here is what I realized. I've been a "Christian" for over 25 years and yet I have literally no idea what faith means, practically speaking. I talk about having faith, but don't know what it looks like to live out my faith. It's like all my life I've had this carefully built, but incredibly fragile front called faith, and once the facade cracks, suddenly it's obvious that there's not much supporting it underneath. And to be honest, that realization scared me. Everything that I thought I knew about life and God and faith is nothing if I cannot articulate why it matters.

My husband has been the catalyst for this realization. For literally the first time in my life, someone is challenging me to dig into my beliefs and "faith" and find it's roots. And sadly what I'm finding is that there's not much there. And honestly, that is a shock to me.

So after some tears and soul searching, he and I spent some time in Scripture, studying what the Bible says about faith. And although I know we are just beginning to scratch the surface, it feels good to finally, after 33 years, be putting some roots down to support my faith.

On the highest level, here are a few of the things I discovered:

• I am a highly emotional person, and consequently, my faith has been 98% emotion-driven. While emotions in and of themselves aren't bad, they have been the entire basis for my faith, and that's bad. Emotions are fickle and ever-changing. Pretty much the opposite of what faith is supposed to be. Therefore, what I have always ascribed to as faith is actually not faith, but a feeling. So I need to learn what real faith is and then figure out how to have it.

• According to what we found in the Bible, faith is, plain and simple, a stubborn belief in something with little or no evidence to support it.

So faith is my belief that Jesus Christ died for my sins. Faith is my belief that I will be with Him when I die (and that my dad is now.) Faith is my belief that He has forgiven me and loves me unconditionally.

Faith is not praying. Faith is not going to church. Faith is not reading the Bible every day. Faith is not what music I choose to listen to, how I spend my time or money, what car I drive or what I choose to eat. And it's not a lot of other things which many Christians call faith.

• Faith and obedience are very closely related. In fact, they're in a circuitous relationship. Faith is the means by which I am able to obey God. And obedience is the evidence of my faith. So basically, I can't obey God without faith. And if I don't obey God, I don't have true faith.

While I know this is the crux of understanding faith, when I try to think about what this means for me, my brain feels like it's ready to explode. I do want to work through this, and I will, but I am at my limit of logical, analytical thinking for today.

It's been rather heart-wrenching and emotionally draining to realize that something I thought was rock solid is actually quite flimsy. And in some ways, I feel like even though I've been practicing for years, I'm still at the very beginning of this whole Christianity thing, trying to figure out what it all means. Like I thought I was a couple decades in and suddenly I find myself back at the starting line.

Also I would like to publicly thank my husband, Chris, who is courageous enough to challenge 33 years of my thinking, along with much of the rest of evangelical Christianity. He is a brave man and I know God put Him in my life to call me to something greater.

I cannot wait to explore what that is.

MTV and Compassion

I know I already posted today, but gotta share this ...

Check out the conversation happening on Compassion's Facebook page!

Quite exciting, if you ask me. This kind of thing really fires people up! It's awesome to see so many people go from being lukewarm to fiery hot. Besides, as Paul says, "But what does it matter? The important thing is that in every way, whether from false motives or true, Christ is preached. And because of this I rejoice."

So let's rejoice!

(Oh, and then go donate $10 to Compassion. It could help us win $50,000!)

Holy #$%&!

Sometimes I find swearing funny. A well-timed curse word, especially from the mouth of someone who rarely swears, usually cracks me up.

This post about Christians swearing is funny. I especially like the part about Tony Campolo.

Matt Lepsis

I read this incredible story this morning and thought it was worth sharing.

Not only was I surprised at the story, but also at The Gazette for publishing something so blatantly evangelical.

I love how God is in the business of redemption.

Remember

I spent over an hour last night looking through my blog posts from the past 11 months. I got very sentimental. It was a little like reading my journal - remembering where I was emotionally during different events and experiences. As I was reading, I had a really weird, almost out-of-body experience, kind of like I was reading a blog about someone else's life.

It totally blows me away to look back and see how God moves in my life. I mean, it's almost as if He had it all planned out from the beginning.

Take, for instance, my job. I'm working in a job right now that suits me well. I truly enjoy it and everything about it fits my strengths perfectly. However, it took eight years and four other positions at Compassion to get where I am. Looking back now, I can see how God was arranging things from the very beginning, but many times during those eight years I questioned God's plan.

Another example is my living situation. I've never had the desire to live alone. I've lived with roommates since I moved out of my parents house to go to college. As soon as I moved back to Colorado after graduating, I shared an apartment with a roommate. From there, I moved into a house with several roommates. As they got married, I'd find new ones. A couple years ago, I bought a townhouse and had several roommates here. Last year, for the first time in my life, I started to get the desire to try living alone. It was right around the time I got a dog, and I was also at a place financially where it was an actual possibility. God consistently provided roommates when I needed them and the means to not need them when I didn't.

And finally there is the matter of my dating life. You know the story there. Or at least parts of it. Maybe someday I will write more about that, but suffice it to say, that is the biggest example of God showing up with a FAR greater plan than I could have dreamed of or asked for.

Recognizing the hand of God all over my life is a very humbling experience, especially when I feel like I struggle so much with hearing His voice. Even though I might not always acknowledge His involvement, He's always been there. He is truly worthy of all my trust, faith and hope.

I remember the days of long ago; I meditate on all your works and consider what your hands have done. (Psalm 143:5)

I Hate Politics

I'm sitting here on the couch in the middle of a mountain of political mail. For the last couple weeks I've been saving the flyers as they came in the mail intending to sit down and sift through them so I can educate myself on the issues and be an informed voter.

My intention was to remain as neutral and unbiased as possible until I could research the facts about each issue and form my own opinion. I'm finding, though, that it's almost impossible to form an opinion on anything without some sort of input from someone else - and by it's very nature that input will always be biased. As I sort through the mail, I see very passionate and convincing flyers on both sides of issues and I'm at a complete loss for who is telling me the truth.

I've discovered that I'm way too much of a feeler to enjoy politics. People feel so strongly about politics and get so emotionally involved they become irrational. It's going on right now on Compassion's blog. I hate how divisive political issues are. I feel like we are giving Satan a wide open door to pit Christians against each other and destroy the unity of the Body of Christ.

I'm putting all this mail in the trash. There is only one source of Truth and I'm counting on it to have some solid answers for me.

Hurry up, November 4th.

I'm going to go find someone to give me a hug.

Peace

I realize posting something like this is asking for a debate. But it moved me enough to post it anyway. I've never read a better explanation of why we should end the war in Iraq.

Support Your Troops
(This was written by Shane Claiborne after coming home from Iraq on a Christian peacemaking team.)

On the way home from the airport after returning from Baghdad, we passed a billboard that read: "God bless America and Our Military." Coming home has been a culture shock to say the least. The billboard has haunted me.

As the justification for this war progressed, the "logic" became increasingly difficult to follow as the "War on Terror" lost its steam having such weak evidence of Saddam's link to Osama or even the possibility of his regime's connection to Sept. 11. So the language moved to that of "disarming the weapons of mass destruction," only to find the unlikely presence of those weapons or the embarrassing truth that most likely Saddam got the weapons from the US. Now the language has become one of liberation (or as I say, counterfeit liberation for our team in Baghdad has told us of the graves being dug outside the children's hospital, and of their greatest fear that Americans will have seen the celebration of a few hundred Iraqi's on TV and think that this is the spirit of the 5 million folks in Baghdad who are solemn, angry, and skeptical).

What has become strikingly clear is that the strategy for hooking the US public support into the war is the extravagant deployment of hundreds of thousands of soldiers into the region. Public opinion immediately changed when they had a direct link to the conflict. The war now had a face (and the media has done their work of hiding the true Iraqi faces). People are no longer able to think theologically or intellectually or even rationally about the war, because their children are there and that trumps any other processing.

But the price of this tactic where people (many of them marginalized youth from neighborhoods like mine who see no other way to college but by joining the military) is so high, immeasurable, human beings becoming political currency. Not only is the cost in terms of the dozens of dead US soldiers and thousands of slaughtered Iraqis, but there is also a price for those who survive the war, who live in the ethos of the false celebration of redemptive violence . I now say: "I am not only against the war because I love the Iraqi people. I am against the war because I love the American people." "Successful" wars do not make for a safer world. Let's us look at the products of "successful" war.

One of the fruits of the 1991 Gulf War is a decorated US Army veteran named Timothy McVeigh. He wrote home from the war to his family and told them he felt like he was turning from a human being into "an animal... because day after day it gets easier to kill." And then he came home, horrified, crazy... the worst domestic terrorist we have ever seen. His essays cry out against the hypocrisy of the United States accusing Iraq of stockpiling weapons when we have stockpiled the same weapons for over 40 years, scorning the inconsistency of our government's outrage at Saddam's attack on Kurdish civilians after we killed 150,000 civilians in the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombing. He saw through the lies he had been told. McVeigh wrote this: "Do people think that government workers in Iraq are any less human than those in Oklahoma City? Do they think that Iraqis don't have families who will grieve and mourn the loss of their loved ones? Do people believe that the killing of foreigners is somehow different than the killing of Americans? When a US plane or cruise missile is used to bring destruction to a foreign people, this nations rewards the bombers with applause and praise. What a convenient way to absolve these killers of any responsibility for the destruction they leave in their wake. Whether you wish to admit it or not, when you approve, morally, of the bombing of foreign targets by the US military you are approving of acts morally equivalent to the bombing of Oklahoma City."

No doubt his mind had been brutally deranged by being taught the way of war... so he bombed Oklahoma City in hopes that complacent Americans who numbly watch war from their TVs could see what "collateral damage" looks like and cry out against "collateral damage" everywhere. Instead, the same government that taught him to kill, kills him to show that killing is wrong. - Dear God, liberate us from the logic of redemptive violence.

The only victor in war is violence. If this liberation is successful then violence is the hero, for it was only brought about by incredible bloodshed (I'd be glad to show you my pictures or tell you my nightmares). Every time our government chooses to use military force to bring about change in the world, they once again teach our children the myth of redemptive violence, that violence can be a instrument for good. This is precisely the logic we are trying to rid ourselves of, especially here in the inner city. My outcry against this war is rooted in my desperate love for the kids in my North Philly neighborhood. One of them had a girlfriend who was stabbed, and he ran down our street yelling I am declaring "war on that terrorist." War infects us. We begin to believe that violence can bring peace, in our world, in our neighborhoods, in our homes.

Martin Luther King says that he continually taught rejected, angry urban youth that violence and weapons would not solve their problems, but came to realize: "I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. But they asked, and rightly so, what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today - my own government." When I got home, the kids on my block had decorated the street with sidewalk chalk that read: "NO WAR - Forever." Therein lies our hope.

Dear God may we cry out to gangs and militaries, lay down your guns... may we pray with Isaiah that all soldiers and gangsters beat their swords into plowshares and study war no more, discover the path of the prophets. May Jesus be the Way, the Truth, the Life in our world of Shortcuts, Propaganda, and Death.

The Christians in Baghdad gave me so much hope in the Church. One day I told some of our Reborn Family that I was surprised to find so many Christians in Iraq and they laughed saying, "We were the first Christians, this is the land of your ancestors." I felt ashamed of my ignorance as I stood on the edge of the Euphrates. In our arrogance we act as though we birthed Christianity in America, when in reality we have perverted and domesticated it. As one Bishop inquired about the American Church's ambivalence to the war, I tried to explain that many Christians were not sure how they felt about the war, and some even saw it as liberation. He could not even conceive of people who followed Jesus believing that this war could bring peace. He just looked me in the eyes and said puzzled, "Then how can they be 'Christians'?" I could only weep with him. The words of one Iraqi mother echo through my soul, "What has happened to your Christianity in America? What has happened to your God of Love and your Prince of Peace?" In this age, many US Christians have let go of the cross to take hold of the flag. In fact, if you were to burn the cross people would stare at you, but if you were to burn the flag people would kill you.

I pray that we would once again dare to follow the Way of the Cross. As we instinctively pick up our swords like Peter, I pray we would heed Christ's warning, "All who draw the sword will die by the sword" (Mt. 26:52). Even before Pilate, the executed Jesus marks his Kingdom and his followers, "My Kingdom is not of this world. If it were my servants would fight" (John 18:36). Lover Jesus, we will trust in the way of the cross, even as the world calls us foolish. We will teach our children that it is more courageous to love their enemies than to kill them. We will teach our kids that there is something worth dying for, but there is nothing worth killing for. We will teach them that violence cannot bring peace, hatred cannot drive out hatred, and darkness cannot pierce darkness. We will support our troops by beating swords into plowshares with them. We will support our troops by providing sanctuary for them when they are Reborn, and pledge the Allegiance that runs deeper than nationalism.

May we continue to enact the Way of the Cross in our world, the way of Pre-Emptive Peace. I truly believe we are in a new era where we are not polarized into the traditional camps, of "Just War Christians" and "Pacifists" in the Church, of "Activists" and "Patriotic-Americans" in the larger society. We are discovering the "third way" of Jesus, a new paradigm, and many new people of conscience are bypassing the unspoken and exclusive rites of passage many of us have created "within the movement". Everywhere I go there are people who may not get arrested doing CD every month, but they are quitely mourning this war and whispering, "This way of solving problems is just not right."

War might seem to work for the powerful, just as robbing a bank might seem to work for the poor - but there is a better Way that leads to life. Nearly the whole world cried out against this war, and the incredible thing is that I believe that outcry was rooted in the understanding that Saddam Hussein is a wicked tyrrant and that there is better way to free a household from an abusive father than by burning down the house. I believe this global groaning for peace will only grow stronger, Perhaps in the days to come we will be able to dream the dream of the Other Superpower, the Beloved Community. And in the days to come every war will be an attack on an entire People crying out for peace. One of the hospital mangagers put it like this: "Violence is for those who have lost their imagination. Has America lost its imagination?"

One more sidenote...
There are so many alternatives to this war, and while it is important to get practical, I cannot explore these in detail here, but much of the world is dreaming together (I will be speaking to part of the UN next week). These alternatives, like the International Criminal Court (which the US opposed, because we would also be held accountable to the court) could provide an orderly structure to charge criminals like Osama and Saddam (and others I will not name!) without violating international law by imposing things like war and sanctions (For instance, Timothy McVeigh bombed Oklahoma City but we did not start an embargo to starve his family, or begin bombing his neighborhood.) But for these to work it will take great humility from the United States, the humility that comes with the recognition that we are only 5% of the world's population and that if we want to hold criminals and oppressors accountable, our international criminals and oppressors in powerful places will also be accountable to the international body. Domestically we claim to believe in democracy and justice. Do we have the courage to believe in global democracy? It is not that nonviolence has been tried and failed, but nonviolence has never been tried with as much passion and risk and money as war. Until the peacemakers have as much courage for peace as the warmakers have for war... nothing will ever change.

Can You Be Sexy and Modest?

Very interesting discussion on Anne's blog on modesty. Check it out and then come back because I have some questions for you.

This whole modesty issue is something I struggle with as a single woman ... knowing where the line is. And the line is very fine, I think, between sexy and slutty.

So how in the world does a single girl remain sexy and modest? It's HARD, in my opinion.

Summer is my favorite season. I love tank tops and shorts and sundresses. And yes, even halter tops and bathing suits. For me, this isn't an issue of modesty. I just love the sun. But that's because I don't think the way men think.

It's easy for me to forget what a struggle this can be.

What do you think?

Skip's Heart

My best friend got married young. I remember when she first told me about him. We were in high school driving up to Woodland Park and she couldn't stop talking about this guy. He worked in the mailroom where she worked. I met him a few days later at a Newsboys concert. And from that day on, Carolyn was Ted'n'Carolyn.

Ted is a close friend of mine. (The rest of the world calls him Skip, but he's still Ted to me. Probably always will be.) He's a Godly man, has a wicked funny sense of humor and is an amazing husband and father.

Anyway, God is doing something really cool in Ted's life right now. He's lighting this fire for social justice in his heart ... and it's so exciting to watch!

Here's his post from today.
I can't wait to see what God has in store for him next!

The Church of Atheism?

If you have a few moments today, read this article recently published in New York Magazine. It really got me thinking about the idea of church vs. Church. And I realized I really don't have a clear understanding of this whole concept. But I want to.

So what, exactly, is the Church? Or church? I'd love input from any of you more philosphically, theologically minded types because I'm a bit confused.

Here is a quote from the article ...

"The most successful movements in history, after all—Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, etc.—all have creeds, cathedrals, schools, hierarchies, rituals, money, clerics, and some version of a heavenly afterlife. Churches fill needs, goes the argument—they inculcate ethics, give meaning, build communities."

and another ...

"They aim to remove God from the church, while leaving the church, at least large parts of it, standing."

What is your reaction?
What, as Christ-followers, should our response be?
Or should we respond at all?

Suicide City

I was born and raised in Colorado Springs. When I'm flying somewhere and the person in the seat next to me asks where I'm from, I can usually anticipate the kind of response I'll get. I've lived here for most of my life and I know what kind of reputation this city has. There are over 90 Christian non-profits located here. Some of the biggest names in the religious right live in the area. This city has long been known for being a morally conservative, Republican city full of Christians.

There was a shocking story in our local newspaper recently. According to a 2007 report by the National Association of County & City Health Officials, Colorado Springs has the 2nd highest suicide rate in the country. We're second only after Las Vegas.

Does this bother anyone else like it does me?

We who claim to love Jesus Christ have obviously missed something. Something big. If we Christians are living the way Jesus intended for us to live, we are supposed to be known by our love. So somebody please expain to me why, in a city that is supposedly filled with people recognized by our "love," so many of us are struggling with such pain, despair, hopelessness, and loneliness that the only way to end it is death?

We've gotten it wrong ... this thing called life.

What if Colorado Springs was known for being a city where we love every person, regardless of their political affiliation, choice of occupation, race or sexual orientation? What if instead of making the news for our sickeningly high suicide rate, we made the news for our exceptional hospitality and warmth, environmental stewardship and charitable giving? Why can't this city become a place I can proudly claim as my hometown instead of feeling like I have to apologize for it?

Wrap your brain around this one ...

Is Jesus more pleased with a theologically-messed person who actually does the things he says, or someone who's got the right answers, but doesn't follow?

I've asked a similar question many times but never figured out where to land. Brant asks this after meeting a Muslim who loves and follow Jesus but does a much better job of actually articulating it.

Read his post and then help me figure this out.

The Meaning of Life

The Uganda blogging trip is wrapping up but the heart-wrenching posts just keep on coming. Here's some weekend reading for you ...

Crying for my Poverty

Do So Everyday

Meeting my New Daughter

And lastly ... THIS is what I call a sermon.


Sponsor a child.

Comfortable

My pastor said something that really struck a chord with me today:

"Satan has changed his tactics. He used to persecute the Church. Now he just makes the Church too comfortable."

I totally agree.

The Man with the Red Truck

I have a problem ...

See yesterday was driving home from work. It was about 4:30. The sun was getting ready to set in about half an hour. It was cold. The wind was blowing and it was snowing.

As I was pulling up to this light near New Life Church, there was a guy standing by the side of the road. He had shoulderlength hair and was kind of scruffy looking. (Although that's a pretty typical look for guys in this state.) Anyway, he was standing at the edge of the road and there was a truck a few feet behind him. He was holding out jumper cables. And he looked desperate.

The light was red, so I stopped and watched him in my mirror. He would motion to every car that went by with the jumper cables. Nobody stopped. I sat there at the light, trying to decide if I should turn around and try to help him. I watched probably 20 cars roll past him without even glancing at him. And when the light turned green, I drove away. And for the rest of the ride home (and the rest of the evening, actually) I felt horrible for not stopping.

So here's my question. Did I make the right decision? Because if I did, it felt pretty awful. Which makes me think maybe I didn't.

But I was alone. I'm a woman. If I had had someone else in the car with me, I would have stopped. If I had some pepper spray with me, I would have stopped. If I was a guy, I would have stopped. If he had been a woman, I would have stopped. I didn't stop because I was afraid of becoming the next day's headline.

I hate the fact that we live in a society where I can't stop and help someone because I'm afraid of what might happen to me. And how do I justify not stopping with the command in the Bible to help those in need? He was obviously in need and I had the ability to help him. But I didn't.

So help me out here. To you married guys out there, would you want your wife stopping to help a random guy who was stranded? Is it any different because I'm not married? Should I, as a single woman, have stopped? What really is more important ... protecting myself or helping someone in need? And how does my choice to protect myself fit with the verse about treating others as I would like to be treated? And putting others before myself? Should I have trusted to the Lord to protect me?

I'm seriously struggling with this. Any thoughts?

The One my heart loves

Place me like a seal over your heart,
like a seal on your arm;
for love is as strong as death,
its jealousy unyielding as the grave.
It burns like blazing fire, like a mighty flame.
Many waters cannot quench love,
rivers cannot wash it away.

I've been thinking a lot about spiritual apathy. It's something I tend to struggle with ... a complacency with where I am as a Christian. One of the most amazing things about accepting Christ's gift is the freedom that comes from knowing I will live eternally with Him. But it's so easy just to rest in that freedom. I'm not talking about slow-down-and-take-a-breath rest, I'm talking long term rest. Getting so comfortable with my relationship with Him that I begin to take for granted the fact that He loves me unconditionally and nothing I can do will ever change that. So I find myself, in fact, doing nothing.

Oh, I do my "devotions." I read my Bible. I pray about things I'm dealing with. I read lots of books. I'm in regular fellowship with other Christians. But what I find myself missing is the fire. The passion of being in love.

I know this is a relationship. I think the reason God created relationship between people is to show us how we ought to be in relationship with God. And I've seen this same kind of complacency happen between two people. They get comfortable in their relationship, start taking it for granted, and lose the fire they once had. I know there are a lot of things people do to keep their marriage alive. I'm not married yet, so I haven't experienced those personally, but might there be similar ways of keeping my Marriage alive?

So here's my question to all you out there in blog world. How do you keep your spiritual life fresh and alive? What (or who) energizes you on your spiritual journey? How do you fight against "the routine?"

Is this what Heaven will be like?