Philip's Tunnel to Nowhere 3

Lately I’ve been reading Francis Chan’s Forgotten God: Reversing Our Tragic Neglect of the Holy Spirit, co-written with Danae Yankoski, which my mom had loaned me.  A couple of items I read Saturday toward the end of the book have particularly gripped my attention.

In a two-page biographical vignette, Chan chronicles how Dave Phillips was led to found Children’s Hunger Fund despite his own feelings of inadequacy for the task.  Early in their work, they received a call from a pastor in Honduras about a need for a particular medicine.  With little idea about even what that medicine was, they started praying.   A few hours later, out of the blue they got a call from a pharmaceutical company donating $8 million in that precise medicine!

We’ve all read plenty of what my former pastor would call “wowwie-zowwie stories”, where some amazing coincidence is cited as evidence of God’s power.   My intent in citing this one isn’t to throw one more on the heap; to the contrary, I struggle as one who’s heard all the stories, heard so many stories that I end up wondering how many of them are just apophenia.

But this one struck me because, as I wondered, “Why don’t I hear from God and get amazing coincidences like that?” it struck me that, in one case, I sort of did.   I remember how it felt to pray with that sort of faith.  Looking back it seems less amazing, but through late 2000 and early 2001 as I was praying for the people hanging out in the Harvard Square Pit, it seemed like the most off-the-wall notion imaginable to think that within a year I would be out there regularly as part of a street outreach.

So then…. what happened?  Why didn’t it end up as a thriving non-profit like CHF?  Was it because we stopped praying?  Not to my knowledge, no.  I remember praying ardently throughout the lifespan of H2O.

Was it because I wanted to see our efforts grow too badly, because I had a vision of people nationwide and was literally ready to quit my day job and travel around getting people on board — and so, because I wanted it so much, it became something based on human effort?  Is it not OK for our human passion for an certain goal to coincide with God’s will?  Somehow I doubt that.

I suppose the explanation all the mature Christians in my life offer is that God had some sort of lesson for me.   So what is that lesson?

Chan also tells a story about elders in his church becoming so enthralled by the work of the Holy Spirit in Acts 2 that they resolved to live it out themselves!  Apparently the Spirit pushed them to Un-American Commie excesses, because Chan writes,

We surrendered the keys to our cars, homes, and bank accounts.  The elders looked me in the eyes and said, “What’s mine is yours.  If anything ever happens to you, I will support and care for your kids as much as I would care for my own.  I will be your life insurance.”  And because they had a history of genuine sacrifices for the sake of the gospel, I believed what they said. (emphasis in original)

Now, I face a real temptation to turn a story like this into a sociological phenomenon, of jamming the work of the Spirit and Christ’s concern for the poor into almost a liberation theology framework.  I don’t think God’s constrained by how we human do-gooders think the Holy Spirit ought to be convicting the American church, by our desire to see him vindicate our righteous indignation.

But I don’t think that view is entirely wrong, either.  Where the Spirit works, concern for each other’s material well-being  results.  That fruit probably won’t lead us into the streets seeking to overturn global capitalism, but it should lead us to overturn the Darwinistic “looking out for number one,” “God helps those who help themselves” ethos in our own hearts.

If I don’t see that happening in my country’s church, is it right for me to speak out?

Let’s write a book!

As I flipped through the biography of Yankoski, and the ads for Chan’s other books, a crazy idea hit me: Maybe writing my own experiences of hearing or not knowing if I’m hearing from the Holy Spirit would be useful for others.  Maybe I should write, if not a book, at least an essay.  I could always scribble down a few thoughts,

Production of bold ideas has never really been a deficiency of my brain.  Production of impetus to follow through, well, that’s a different story.   It’s now Wednesday and I haven’t really thought about this idea since then.   But maybe I need to pray that, if God wants me to do something with these experiences involving the written word, that he would give me supernatural stamina to make it happen.

Epilogue: A two-paragraph review

This post isn’t to review Chan’s book, but it’s probably worth sharing my thoughts briefly for someone considering reading it.  I found the first portion a bit dull.  It’s hard to explain exactly why; it’s not like non-Charismatic pastor-authors emphasizing the Spirit are a dime a dozen.  Maybe it’s because I’ve been fortunate to be around intellectually powerful Christians (including not a  few Charismatics) who have put a proper emphasis on the Spirit without making him into a son et lumiere.   So Chan’s thesis is refreshing but not entirely novel to me.

Toward the end, though, I found myself identifying with an awful lot of Chan’s examples, and not just the two examples cited above.  As I thought more concretely about the Holy Spirit acting both to change me as an individual and to change the church, a natural excitement developed.  I paused in the middle of the afterword to finish off this post.  The name afterword, suggesting a throwaway chapter, does this section an injustice.  The point about not quenching the Holy Spirit’s action in others is brilliant!

So much of our cultural Christianity in the United States has developed from the Protestant work ethic, from the notion that saving for one’s future benefit is not just a privilege but a responsibility.  I don’t question the need for wise financial stewardship, but Chan seems to suggest that sometimes that’s an excuse for us to draw others back to our own self-centeredness.  Even if I don’t yet know how to tell when the Spirit is directing me to bold action in my own life, Chan’s book will make me more aware of watching for his leading in other people’s lives.

I feel like my life is traveling in circles. I feel like my brain is traveling in circles. It’s not an unpleasant journey, and in some very fundamental ways I’m blessed. But it sure is confusing. God has some purpose in all of it, but he hasn’t really shared it with me, and I’m sure that must be for the best.

Here are some things whirling around in my brain:

• Almost finished with the Chap Clark / Steve Rabey book When Kids Hurt. It’s inspiring and overwhelming. I want so badly to be part of pushing forward their vision, but by the week I have less and less idea how. I’m in their conclusions chapter, and just read the item on youth ministry. They seem to think youth min. people need to overhaul the model. But my old plan of becoming a professor of youth ministry appears to be dead on arrival precisely because I don’t fit the old model (or at least, because my resume doesn’t scream success under the old model). So a professor of youth min. writes a book advocating change, but institutions are apparently resistant to change. Like any other field, I guess.
• I’m looking forward to going to see a few bands I’ve never heard before play at a church in Madison on January 29. The only reason I even know about this show is because they were flyering for it at that benefit show I went to in Athens last Saturday. Still, fun and anticipation.
• I just checked out a new coffee shop in NE Huntsville. Nice atmosphere (except for the smoke alarm that needed a battery), relatively inexpensive coffee, less crowded than Olde Towne. I’d go back, but I’d take headphones and my own mug.
• Heard a patron there, apparently a veteran teacher, say something like, “People don’t realize that teaching is a calling.” Indeed.
• On the way home, heard an NPR story about outrage over the money college presidents make. Maybe higher ed is a great field to be in after all. Michigan, here I come!
• After that, heard an NPR story about a struggling school in Pasadena hoping for California to win some sort of “sweepstakes” grant. So maybe secondary education / guidance counseling isn’t a good field to be in.

Yeah, lots to think about.

January must be the fourth or fifth month straight that I’ve had a few days of a cold that’s just making me feel lousy. It worries me a bit, although I think it’s partially that my worries are impeding my defenses and partially that the lack of a conventional work schedule is giving me an excuse to sleep 12 hours a day and sleepwalk the other 12.

But I’m trying to use my down-time wisely, and I think God has a way of forcing me to slow down “doing” so that I can focus on growing spiritually. I wouldn’t want to claim that any of the following is special revelation that others should take as a word from the Lord, and certainly none of the following insights supersede Scripture or anything else one might hear from wise teachers. But I do think the following is some insight that I’ve distilled from various passages, sermons, etc. lately.

1. For me dying to self means setting aside my need for accomplishments. I won’t lie. I crave plaudits from others. I don’t spend my life running around after wealth or material toys (as seemed to be a big theme in today’s sermon at Southwood). I run around worrying that everyone considers me a terrible failure and a bum. I blogged about this form of idolatry a couple of months ago, but it’s going to take a long time for me to get away from it.
2. I can’t compare God’s work in my life to God’s work in others. This is a huge problem for me. I have sort of a recurring theme in my conversations with my mom. She’ll say something like, “God’s just got to bring you to the point of total surrender,” and then I’ll flip out in frustration. But it occurs to me, my frustration isn’t because I really think I’ve reached the point of total surrender. My frustration is because I don’t think anyone has reached the point of total surrender, but other people don’t seem to require this same “education.” I resent that they’re allowed to crave approval as much as I do, but still have productive, ego-stroking careers. Actually I just put together that this is the reason for my resentment, as I was typing #1. Well, my subconscious knew why I was resentful, but I just now reached enough awareness to type it up as a list item here.

   I don’t get upset that Mom thinks I’m not at the point of total surrender. I get upset that Mom thinks that God needs to teach me this lesson more than he needs to teach other people. But what occurs to me now — God forbid, maybe it’s my ego speaking, but I think there’s some truth here — is that the mission for my life somehow requires me to internalize this truth more deeply than most people have. At least that’s what I’m going to believe to stay sane.

3. Tremendous freedom comes when we don’t think anyone’s judging us for our accomplishments. I know that, “God helps those who helps themselves,” isn’t in the Bible, but the associated mindset has always been in the back of my mind as I thought about the topic of life-goals and accomplishments. Today I’ve been trying to imagine what it would be like to live an entire life literally not caring about measuring up or not measuring up. It’s really amazing. I think in the back of my mind, I’d always feared that I’d use true freedom as an excuse to just lie in bed all day, maybe getting up to check sports scores or engage in some stupid battle on Wikipedia or something. But I don’t really want to do that. I still want to do something significant to help people, even without the negative reinforcement of imagining God shaking his head saying, “What a disappointment!” to motivate me. Since that negative reinforcement is neither necessary nor helpful to motivate me, I should discard it.
4. Boasting in Christ is healthy, and isn’t the same thing as boasting about following Christ. I think I’ve mentioned how disgusting I find it when Christians make faith into a work and start to act superior just by the basis of their faith in Christ. Perhaps this revulsion has blinded me to just what Paul is saying in 2 Cor. 10 when he talks of “boast[ing] in the Lord.” Honestly, I’ve always thought this passage was a borderline ego trip. Maybe so, but I’m coming to see that boasting in the Lord means filling that craving for accomplishment with wonder about how God is working worldwide. If I’m really taking pride in God, so to speak, then it really doesn’t matter whether my role in that work is large or indetectable. I can die tonight and still feel proud to be a part of redemptive history, because God is still doing huge works.
5. I need to get back to where I was in 2000-01, praying for Harvard Square. Sometimes ignorance forces you to rely on God. Before I had any experience hanging out in the Pit, back when I thought that I was in constant danger of gutter punks beating me down for saying the wrong thing, I spent about six months praying. I thought my prayer was so outlandish that I couldn’t imagine how God could possibly want me to reach out in that context. I certainly had no clue that a few faithful brothers and sisters from another Cambridge church already had a method to reach out, or that I’d be joining with them in a few months, let alone co-leading the effort within a couple of years Reading Clark and Rabey makes the need of youth today seem overwhelming. All I know to do is pray. I need to get back to where I was in 2000 and 2001.
6. God can be trusted in the afterlife. I’m not going to develop this right now, but it’s something I’ve struggled with, and I received an insight today that made me feel a lot better. If this bothers you too, I hope you’ll get a similar insight.
7. Bitterness and other emotional pain is analogous to physical pain. This could be number 2A, because my friend Laura suggested it in an IM conversation after I shared item 2. I certainly don’t want to justify my own bitterness and other unholy attitudes, but they do serve a purpose. They make me aware something’s wrong, and given my tendency toward pensive reflection, it seems likely I won’t really rest until I’ve worked the proximate cause up to consciousness, like a splinter. Anyway, that helped me a lot with item 2 above, and it helps to think that these triggers are triggers for a reason, to make me aware of the underlying issue.

That’s all I got for now. Hope this is helpful to posterity.

It really annoys me when other people, especially Christians, believe that happiness is just a matter of deciding to be happy. I got told today that Jesus told us to love people, implying that we can make a choice contrary to feelings there, so therefore it follows that we can just decide to be happy too. Arrrrgh.

I turned off my automatic feed on Facebook so that this post won’t get pulled into there via RSS/Atom. I’m just not up to all the well-meaning comments and all that, and feeling needy, and burdening my friends. Funny enough, posting it on here is about the closest thing to a private journal that exists. (Of course I could make it literally private, but part of the fun is expressing these thoughts publicly, even if it’s only a nominal kind of publicly that no one will ever see. I’m a strange person.)

Over the years I’ve become pretty good at the parlor game, so I think I can play both roles here.

- I’m unhappy with life. I don’t think God answers my prayers or cares about anything related to me. Sometimes I wonder if I’m even deceiving myself to believe God is out there, but then I think of the evidence and am pretty convinced there is a personal higher power. He just doesn’t seem to want much to do with me.

- How can you say that? Don’t you know Jesus died for you?

- Yes, and to the extent that this makes for a happier afterlife, I’m genuinely grateful. But it’s all abstract. I see nothing relating this reality to the earth where I live and breathe. I certainly hope I can trust God for a wonderful afterlife and I want to believe in that, desperately I do, but it seems really disconnected from where I am right now.

- But God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life!

- Oh yeah? Then why does it seem like all the good, meaningful stuff in life is meant for someone else? Career satisfaction, finding love, having a wife and children, all of that is plainly intended for someone else. It’s like in the circles I run in, I’m reading someone else’s mail. And that mail says, “God intends all these wonderful things for YOU!” Only, I know it’s not my mail.

- Things could be so much worse! You have supportive parents, a good education, so many blessings….

- Oh, I don’t doubt things really could be worse. I could be born into incredible poverty in some preindustrial village in a developing country. I could be in 14th-century Europe dying of the Black Plague. I could be buried alive in the Mexico City earthquake of 1985. I can think of all kinds of situations that would be worse than where I am now, and I’m absolutely thankful I’m here and not there. So the sign that God loves me is that my meaningless life is less full of suffering than an alternative meaningless life might be?

- But your dissatisfaction with your life isn’t a reason to question God! The suffering you’re going through now is to prepare you for something great God’s going to do. Why, look at how much time Paul spent wandering around (Gal 1.17-18, 2.1)!

- Sure, maybe this is all preparation. And maybe from now until the day I die, until it’s all unquestionably finished for my earthly life, you can always use this as a catch-all answer. No matter what happens, who’s to say it’s not just preparation for something else? How would we test this hypothesis? Until I’m dead, we can’t! And even then, who’s to say I’m not a martyr, not like Jim Elliot dying some apparently pointless death only so that my murderers can come to faith years later? Your answers are too easy, because they’re not externally verifiable. If you have an answer for everything, then you have an answer to nothing.

And on and on I go. Even writing this out feels like philosophical masturbation because I’m not getting any closer to truth. Sometimes I feel guilty for questioning God who loves someone so unworthy as me. But, these are the dialogues I have in my head, so I suppose I’m not being unfaithful or somehow sinning to put them into words and post them where no one will see them.

(If you read this far, by no means do I intend my remark about “well-meaning comments” to dissuade you from posting feedback.)

I’m always looking for thought-provoking mp3s to listen to while I walk for exercise. Lately I’ve been listening to Smart City by Carol Coletta, which i gather is an NPR program about issues of urban development. This particular episode happens to feature Alan Webber, co-founder of Fast Company.

Webber says a lot of stuff worth listening to. One point that’s really grabbed my attention is the importance of iconic projects in moving from a plan to implementation. Since I’m someone who’s much better at devising plans than implementing them, this should be a topic tailor-made for my needs.

Around 20:00 Webber describes an experience working for the mayor of Portland, OR, in the 1970s. As he describes it, PDX back then was nothing like the annoyingly hip place it is now. A key step in its development of a pedestrian friendly, transit-compatible downtown was their success in luring the Seattle department store Nordstrom, which apparently even then had enough cachet to lead the revitalization of downtown.

The point is that one such “iconic project” can be critical to promoting a broader change effort. It’s really something I need to hear. Mind you, on a visceral level I think I’ve realized this before — for example, back in Massachusetts when we talked about getting a place for the Pit kids to hang out, this had the potential to be an iconic project. In more mundane aspects of my daily life, something like getting to where I can beat a live poker game soundly enough to make a modest living at it before I start investing effort to learn how to beat more advanced but potentially more profitable online games would be an example.

I will try to think a bit more about other places I can apply this lesson in my life. Back to the whole underground outreach topic, I think that’s one area where I can apply this principle. I just need to get involved in something local and helping bring it to some modest plateau perceived as “success” (which of course only really comes by the Holy Spirit).

Now i turn to one of the biggest disappointments about the Cornerstone Festival 2009. I should state up front, though, that it’s entirely possible that the disappointment stems from some misunderstanding on my part of the nature of the three different prayer tents, of some idealized memories of 2003 and 2004, or what have you. If i’m basing my remarks on misinformation, please feel free to set me straight.

In 2003 or 2004, as in 2009, i had a few moments at the festival where i felt pretty alone, and others where i just felt overwhelmed at the sheer number of different possibilities that God was bringing to mind. At those moments i recalled that there was a prayer tent and ducked in to seek prayer, and to seek to pray for others (which often helps with feelings of loneliness, interestingly). In the past, my recollection was that some individual met me within moments of entering the prayer tent and offered to pray. My recollection is that there was a prayer team of several individuals there, each praying for different visitors and other needs. Maybe most importantly, the general impression received was that prayer was absolutely fundamental to the festival. I’m not naive, and i realize that 98% of the attendees were mostly there for the music and perhaps didn’t really care that so much prayer was going on, but in any case it seemed very prominent for those open to perceiving it.

My impression in 2009 was very different. Both on Friday and Saturday afternoons i dropped by the “24/7 Prayer Tent.” On Friday it was empty, except for a couple awaiting a seminar or something. (They happened to be people i wanted to talk to, in a wonderful divinely-appointed coincidence, but that’s entirely beside the point.) On Saturday, one woman was praying and talking about a confidential matter in the back, and asked me to wait in the front with another couple who looked like they were seeking out prayer. I got to talk and pray with them for the half-hour or so i was there. The confidential conversation went on for that duration in the back, so i never got to talk to an actual volunteer of the tent.

Someone mentioned that the Boiler Room prayer folks were packing up by Saturday afternoon — Saturday was rainy and muddy, and a lot of folks got on the road early — and that seems to be at the root of the issue. Apparently the Boiler Room ministry of Kansas City was the impetus behind this particular tent, and i can hardly fault them for wanting to get back home in a timely manner or for being limited to the volunteer availability of their own folks. But that prompts some other questions. Was there another JPUSA-staffed tent with more prayer volunteers? Why was the Boiler Room tent called “24/7″ if it couldn’t be staffed consistently?

I certainly don’t say this to put down what the Boiler Room people were doing, because any prayer is great and i know they’re the paragon of a prayer-centered organization. But i got the impression that somehow, prayer was less foundational to CS09 than it used to be. If that impression is accurate, it’s a tragedy and it alarms me for the future of the fest.

It would not be wrong to halt all the music at the fest for 3 hours one night and gather at all the stages to pray. Really.

I have a few other of these vignette things to write — I thought about making the next one about the way they handled visual art at CS’09 versus five years ago — but instead here i’ll offer a short observation more at the core of what the fest meant/means to me.

On the trip up i was quite cynical, because of my experience with two previous Cornerstones as well as other similar underground ministry-related events (such as Source’s Urban Ministry Training in 2001). I always get very inspired by these things and come back on a spiritual high where i feel inspired to go do great things. Usually the “great things” is rooted in some form of networking, because i really do believe that half the battle is for underground Christians to know where each other are, especially when it comes to other people in their immediate geographical vicinity. So i come home thinking, “There really out to be some way for those of us around here to connect! I’ll try to reach out to some people and see if there’s any interest in getting together.” And i come home full of other ideas, too.

And then the spiritual high dies down. For one thing, i generally find that others aren’t nearly as interested in connecting or keeping in touch as i am. Well, that’s fine — perhaps i’m just unusually sensitive to the value of such connections or something. But i also find myself losing that fervor very quickly, because i’m just not i patient person. I wish i were, and it’s certainly worth pondering and praying about how i might develop more perseverance in these tasks. Until that happens, though, i know myself, and i know that building up that spiritual high is counterproductive.

So this year i was very tempted to start doing this again. I caught myself with all sorts of “big plans” brainstorms: We ought to get a bunch of Memphis churches together to create an arts center! I should go polling local youth pastors on the needs of young people here! On and on the torrent of ideas came, because that’s just how my mind works. But — call it antispiritual cynicism, or perhaps just pragmatic realism, i’m not sure which — my better judgment kicked in. The ideas aren’t dead, because after all i just documented a couple of the more interesting ones above. But instead of focusing on the ideas, i focused on what God was teaching me about my own role and about praying for stuff to happen, long before trying to act to make it happen.

So yeah. I don’t need to get frustrated with myself for not having the resources within me to drive some of this stuff forward. I just need to pray about it and accept that if God’s in it, the resources don’t depend on me. Cattle on a thousand hills, something like that.

I think this will really work better if i try to write several short posts than if i try to cram everything into one big post.

One of the pleasant surprises for me was discovering the public journals at the Alliance World Coffee tent. There must have been about seven or eight of them, and the entries ranged from frivolous or lighthearted to artistically impressive to very poignant. One author addresses a letter to his mom. We never find out why she left and didn’t come back. Another talks about the alienation of being gay and closeted at the festival. Skeptics write sharp criticisms (sharp warranted criticisms, IMO) about the feeling of commercialism that pervades the fest. I include a sentence about my own occasional feelings of loneliness there (fortunately, for only a small fraction of the whole time), and find that others have shared similar emotions. Other contributors draw a ship, a 70’s-looking Jesus poster, or whatever.

I think my time at the fest would be well spent just going through the public journals and praying over the people who wrote in them. I certainly plan to be praying for some of these people in the coming weeks.

Bushnell, IL – I’m taking advantage of the wifi provided by First Baptist Church of Bushnell to check in for a few moments. I’ll have lots of reflections and processing that I’ll try to document here as appropriate. For now I just want to share this thought.

On the drive here I was wondering why on earth I needed to go to C’stone. There are probably several reasons, but the real reason I’m here is to learn how very little I matter. I sincerely mean that. So much of my past motivation for some sort of underground ministry thing has been to provide an object for my personal quest for meaning, to find “my thing.” And more and more I’m being reminded that my presence just doesn’t matter. What I mean is, some of the same growth in certain directions that needed to happen five years ago, before I started wandering in the wilderness so to speak, has actually happened. While I was sitting on the sidelines, it happened! And that’s a very good thing.

If God wants my role in all this to be sitting on the sidelines clapping and encouraging, then I really need to be content and to take on that role with all my heart. Only as I accept my own smallness can I effectively tell the story of God’s greatness.