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a stranger in a strange land no more: Romans 4

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Read Romans 4.   In WAVE, Sonali Deraniyagala writes of losing her two sons, husband and parents to the tsunami in Sri Lanka because she chose that day to vacation by the sea: “I can only recover myself when I keep them near.  If I distance myself from them, and their absence, I am fractured.  I am left feeling I’ve blundered into a stranger’s life.”   As usual with extreme situations, Deraniyagala has tapped into a universal truth.  We all feel at times like we’ve blundered into a stranger’s life.  Even though for most of us that fractured feeling remains exiled to the shadowlands of our lives, we can feel its presence.  It can haunt us, especially when we feel it pressing close.  Sometimes, the fractured feeling springs out of the hinterlands and confronts us head on.  It stands in the middle of our roads and refuses to get out of our way.  Because there are times when we all feel like a stranger to our own lives.  When that happens we remember almost with homesickness what it felt like to belong to our lives.  Why?  What’s going on?  And how do we fix it?  How do we feel at home in our lives no matter what the circumstances?

The first and most likely cause of feeling “disassociated” from our lives is the one Deraniyagala writes of: grief.  When tragedy strikes, an automatic coping mechanism is denial.  When something too awful to contemplate happens, we just don’t contemplate it.  We shut off the valve.  We are, therefore, in a very real sense not at “home” in the reality of our lives in that moment.  Sometimes real life is just too difficult to inhabit.  It’s a healthy short term coping mechanism, in the same way that when you first break a limb you have to immobilize it.  It would be silly to wear a sling if our arms were fine.  It would be silly NOT to wear a sling when we break our arms.  It’s part of the way we heal.  We bind the broken part of us up; we stop it from moving; we can’t, don’t and shouldn’t use it the way we normally do.

So if grief is the cause of our feeling like a “stranger” to our lives, the first solution is to normalize our feeling of disassociation.  We can remind ourselves that we are in denial.  We can tell ourselves that the sad thing that has happened will automatically make us feel “strange”, as well as sad, because we are going to have to process it in little pieces.  Our brains will have to “chunk” the information.  Bit by bit, the truth will begin to “sink” in.  At least we hope so.  Because, of course, denial is never meant to be a long term solution, only a short term one.

Eventually, we have to face the truth.  We all heal at different paces.  We are never to judge any one else’s healing process.  But when looking at our own grief, there comes a time to ask ourselves: am I being courageous in the face of this tragedy?  How can I integrate the grief with the rest of my life?  How do I face the reality of who I am in the light of my changed circumstances?  How do I accept this grief so that I can move on?  How do I avoid my desire to Miss Havisham this tragedy?

I wouldn’t presume to answer that question for someone who has lost a child.  But I can say that any divorcee with children knows the disorienting feeling of living two seemingly compartmentalized lives.   We’re a swinging single one minute and a harried parent the next.  If our children are teenagers, it can feel even more fractured.  One minute we’re lecturing our child on the dangers of friending strangers on social media, and the next minute some mustachioed stranger is sidling up to us in a darkened bar and asking if we come here often.  We’re tempted to respond: “Buddy, I don’t even know who I AM so I how do you expect me to answer the question whether I come here often… because I MIGHT have been here before, and I may have even gone out with YOU before –  you look oddly familiar – or is it just that you look ODD –  but the thing is, it wasn’t really ME that came in here because I’m a MIDDLE AGED MOM and we MOM’S don’t DATE!!!”

As you can imagine, that’s not the kind of response recommended by the dating books.  But it’s the one we’re sometimes tempted to give.  The dating divorcee dilemma is just one instance of another larger cause of feeling like a stranger to our own lives: we get that “strange” feeling when our lives don’t look like what we thought they should look like.  This can be just a different face of grief.  We grieve the loss of our dreams.  We impose oughts and shoulds on our lives, and when the two don’t match up we feel strangered.

But dreams were never meant to be oppressive.  If we wanted four children, should we really be sad we “only” have one? Think about it.  We can never really fully know another human being.  They will always surprise us.  So viewed that way, one child offers us infinity.  Or if we always wanted a spouse, should we feel like a stranger to a life where we get to go out and meeting interesting people every singel day?  Similarly, if we pictured ourselves as being married forever to the same person and growing old together, we will disassociate from a widowed or divorced life.  But we can we reframe that, too.  We can instead open ourselves to the chance that we might meet someone even more suited to us in middle age than the person we met in our twenties.  Or we can open ourselves to the idea that we can explore new worlds, both near and far, in a way closed to us when we were committed to caring for just one person.  And as for the compartmentalized feeling that arises from dating strangers one minute and then lounging comfortably with our children the next, we can start to see our lives as mosaics.  Or as an editor friend of mine put it last night, we can start to see ourselves as walking around in different “rooms” in the homes of our lives.  For some of us, our homes seem to include not just threadbare sofas in t.v. rooms but also exotic new landscapes.

In other words, when we let go of the “shoulds” of our lives, we open ourselves up to the “what ifs.”  It’s a lovelier way to live, and ultimately more satisfying.

But on a deeper more existential level, what’s going on under all this disassociation?  Why do we even get this “stranger in a strange land” feeling?  Why should denial of reality be a coping mechamism?  What is it about this”I don’t belong in this life” feeling that even emulates “coping”?  What I’m asking is:  why should it HELP to feel like we’re not at home in our lives?

Perhaps the issue is that on a very deep level none of us is really at home in our lives.  The title of Robert Heinlein’s famous science fiction classic, after all, comes not from Heinlein’s imagination but from the mouth of God.  It’s a phrase from the Bible.  Moses described himself as a “stranger in a strange land” because he lived in exile from his childhood home of Egypt; Moses had to flee because he murdered one of Pharaoh’s abusive guards in a fit of rage.  Exodus 2:22.  Similarly, when Abraham obeyed God’s call to go to a land God would show him, Paul writes that Abraham lived there as a “stranger in a strange land.”  Hebrews 11:9.  Those two examples illustrate two sides of why we feel like a stranger from ourselves on this earth, both stemming from the imperfect nature of this world.

First, we feel like a stranger to our lives because we sin.  We like to see ourselves as perfect, so when we live outside that paradigm, we tend to go into denial.  We think it’s not really “us” that could act or think like that.  On one level, we’re right.  It isn’t our best self.  It’s not the self who was created in God’s image that could lie, cheat, steal, commit adultery, gossip, be jealous, covet something that belongs to someone else or be selfish.  But the fact is, it IS us.  To be fully at home in our lives we need a way to own our sinful side.  The Bible describes us as beings made of heart, soul, mind and body.  To be at home in our lives is to integrate those selves.  It means to integrate the fact that we have a “human” side – no matter where we locate it physically – that is less than all we want.

We can’t make our sinful side go away, no matter how hard we try.  Nor do we want to just blandly “accept” it with a big “who cares?”  Because we do care.  Instead, the only way to live at peace with our sin is literally just that: to make peace with it.  In other words, to forgive.  A refusal to accept the concept of forgiveness is deadly.  I’ve seen it.  If we can’t accept forgiveness – our own, other people’s and God’s – then we will never be able to even acknowledge our sinful self.  We will always be a stranger to ourselves.   We will always disassociate, always dissemble, always live in fear that our real selves will overtake us like a monster we’d rather keep hidden in the attic. We will always viciously attack anyone who dares criticize us.  But if we can swallow our pride – no matter how bitter it tastes – we can humble ourselves to see the truth.  We are fallen people who desperately need the forgiveness of others.  We are imperfect people who desperately need our Creator to forgive us.  We are sinful humans who need to forgive ourselves.

This kind of forgiveness is freely available to us, as this chapter of Romans so beautifully declares..  That’s why David writes of the “happiness” of those “who are declared righteous without working for it: ‘Oh, what joy for those whose disobedience is forgiven.’”  Romans 4:5-8.  It is the joy of the one who expects to be exiled, who is instead welcomed home with open arms.  It’s as if we think we’re about to walk into a prison cell and instead are ushered through a gate into green pastures.  God promises us we can live at home with Him by “faith” alone.  It is “given as a free gift.”  Romans 4:16.  Jesus “was handed over to die because of our sins, and he was raised to life to make us right with God.”  Romans 4:25.  We are seen as “right” with God no matter how “wrong” we act.  This is free for us because God Himself paid the price.  God left His home and lived as a stranger in our world, so that we can be welcomed by Him as IF we were perfect.  Accepting that miraculous gift of forgiveness makes us so grateful we become people who can offer to others the same kind of forgiveness.  When we receive mercy, we become merciful.  We forgive others.  We forgive ourselves.  We receive.

It’s hard to live in a world of grace.  I know it should be easy.  It’s free, after all.  But somehow it’s so hard.  For me, personally, it takes daily reminders.  ”Oh, right.  I’m imperfect.  Oh, I forgot.  God forgives me.  Oh, shoot.  That means He wants me to be merciful to others.  Okay, okay, fine.  It I REALLY have to…. ”  And then we cross the Rubicon all over again and find ourselves on the other side of our self-righteous stuck-up pride, and we think: WHAT WAS I EVEN THINKING BEFORE???  We suddenly feel how lovely it is to live in a land of mercy.  It IS lovely.  Until…. we forget where the best home is, and we go back to our little lonely worlds of self-righteousness and pride, and the process starts all over again.

On top of resolving the homesickness occasioned by our sin, there’s a second step to feeling at home in our lives; it’s the one hinted at by the Abraham story above.  It’s the idea that even as sinners forgiven by God’s grace, we will still only feel at “home” in this earth to the extent that we can trust God.  Because God calls us to feel at home even HERE, in this broken imperfect world.  We resist that call.  We don’t think we should feel at home here.  We want to be at home in palaces.  We “deny” that we could be at home even in grief.  We want to live in our dream worlds.

Instead, God calls us to feel at home even in broken infrastructures, broken relationships and our own broken hearts.  The only way to do that is if we like Abraham can accept God’s promises based on faith alone.  Faith enables us to feel at “home” even in a strange world.  We can say to our griefs: “you are strange.  You don’t belong to me.  And yet I will own you because my God says that one day, He will wipe away every tear from my eyes.  My God promises that He will bring good out of bad.  My God says He will redeem every broken thing, even me.”  This is the kind of faith that enabled Abraham to believe God would make him the father of many nations even though Sarah had already gone through menopause.  For when we open our hearts to miracles, miracles happen.

Paradoxically, the moment we accept that we are strangers in a strange land – because of our sin, the sin of others, and the griefs occasioned by living in a fallen world where waves can rise up out of nowhere and engulf us – we do become at home here.  We become “homed” not by a bitter or fatalistic reframing, but by believing in the love of a God who promises to redeem us.  We become at home in unfamiliar landscapes because we know God is with us always.  We become at home in the odd places God calls us to go, because we live by faith not sight.  We embrace the strangeness of this world by believing that God will make even the strangest things melt into the most familiar and yet elusive thing of all: love.

But what happens when we fail?  What happens when we know all this, we may even believe it, and yet we still feel fractured?  That’s when all we can do is offer our hearts up to God and ask Him to help us.  And right then, no matter where we are, what we’ve done, or how many people despise us, a door opens in front of us.  If we walk through it, we’ll find a table set, a fire burning, and that sense of belonging we’ve always sensed existed but could never find on our own.  That’s because this door is a person.  The reason God can ask us to feel at home in even a broken world, is because the door itself was broken.  When Jesus said “I am the door,” He meant that His body would swing on nails like hinges, to usher us to the land of unbroken promises.  Love is strange.  It doesn’t look the way we thought it should.  It can look like something small, unattractive and broken.  And right there, when things look the strangest, is when Love springs out to greet us in all its unexpected, strange, beautiful, familiar, undeserved glory.

posted by Caroline Coleman in A Chapter a Day on March 11, 2013

real fairy tale endings: Romans 3

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read Romans 3.  Anyone who loves fairy tales knows what it is to have an insatiable appetite for them.  I used to read them from every culture, translated from every language, and written in every century.  There’s something so … magical about magic.  It taps into something deep inside us.  We’re drawn to it and wonder how to satisfy that deep longing all the time.

When I became a Christian in college, it was because I got sick of being restless.  I wanted peace instead of the insatiable.  I was too old for fairy tales.  I wanted real.  I sensed God was real but I didn’t believe in HIm.  So I asked for faith.  And God in His kindness gave it.  I read Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis and it made more “sense” of the world than anything I’d ever heard.  I read a tiny bit of the Bible each night and it must have blossomed in me.  Because one day I realized I actually believed what I was reading. I discovered that all that magic I’d always hungered for in fairy tales was real and accessible — and lighter and sweeter and more lasting than any human fairy tale.

Here in Romans 3 is the true magic that God offers to each of us, and that He gave to me merely for the asking.  It’s such a perfect summary of the good news that I’m launching straight in.  The chapter starts with a truth about human nature that any reader of fairy tales knows.  All humans are capable of great evil:  ”No one is good…  No one knows where to find peace.  No one seeks after God.”   But despite this negative truth, there’s freedom and beauty in here that takes only a moment to unpack.

Because we do “all fall short” of the glory of God.  Our world is full of evil stepmothers and bad fairies and tooth-smiling wolves, and all too often, despite our best intentions, we have seen that evil stepmother and she is us.   So for anyone who knows but can’t conquer her inner wolf, there is joy to be found in the next claim. Paul says ”God has shown a way to be made right with him without keeping the requirements of the law.  We are made right with God by placing our faith in Jesus Christ.  And this is true for everyone who believes no matter who we are.”  Paul says we get a free passage to the magic of God’s presence because Jesus was the one who struck out on the open road and left his home behind.  Jesus was the one who got hurled from the tower by the wicked witch when he tried to rescue the trapped princess.  Jesus “freed us from the penalty for our sins…. People are made right with God when they believe that Jesus sacrificed his life, shedding his blood.”

For us imperfect humans then all that remains is to bask in the magic.  For us there is joy, peace and thankfulness.  We can be ushered into the sweetness and light of God’s presence by faith alone.  There’s no room for boasting, because we’ve done nothing to be “accepted” by God.  No more tall tales.  That’s where the magical freedom lies.  For once in our lives, we are in the presence of love that gives all and asks nothing in exchange — except that we accept it thankfully.  Even thankfulness seems to be a gift.  When we realize what’s been given, thankfulness bursts out of us in such abundance that we find ourselves wanting to give Him everything, and we weep because he needs nothing from us at all.

Perhaps we resist believing in God because the pathway to Him sounds too good to be true.  But for once in our lives, why shouldn’t something so wonderful be for us?  Perhaps there really is a place where all our dreams can come true.  Perhaps there really is a place of freedom.  Perhaps there really is a place of acceptance.  Perhaps there really are arms open wide to receive every one of us just as we are without asking us to change first. Perhaps there’s a real fairy godmother whose magic doesn’t end at midnight.  Perhaps there’s a magic coin inside a fish that gives us three wishes that will create rather than destroy us.  Perhaps there is the kind of love that rises in our hearts until the brightest dawn of all breaks with the return of the Son.

Here is the true magic we’ve longed for every day of our lives, but this time it’s real.  Once upon a time there was a lonely girl.  And God came down and loved her.  He loves you, too.

And it’s all just a wish away.

posted by Caroline Coleman in “A Chapter a Day” on March 4, 2013.

paradise on earth: Romans 1

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Manhattan-20130130-00055

Romans 1 

“If this were a different story, I’d tell you about the sea.”  In this beautiful line from THIS IS HOW YOU LOSE HER, it’s as if Junot Diaz were saying: if this were a different story, I’d tell you about how all your dreams will come true.  If this were a different story, I’d tell you about how everyone will love you forever. If this were a different story, I’d tell you about how beautiful you and how beautiful the world around you is.

But the stories Diaz writes are stories of how we lose people – through death, disappointment, grinding poverty, racial prejudice and our own dumb mistakes.

We describe paradise as the embodiment of all we long for and yet in the same breath, we paint it as something unattainable.  We make paradise sound separate from us.  We make it sound as different as earth is from sea.

But does it have to be?

Why would we long for paradise if it were truly unattainable?  How do we even have a concept of paradise if it were so separate from earth?  Perhaps they’re completely different and yet closer than we realize.  Perhaps a paradox has somehow come true.

We see earth and paradise as existing in tension like a seesaw.  We think when we’re “bad” we’re showing our clay feet, and when we’re “good” we’re flapping our angel wings.  But God doesn’t see us in that disunity.  He sees us in our unity.  He sees as fallen creatures made in His image, redeemed by the death of His Son.  As C.S. Lewis put it: “all that is earth was once sea.”  God sees our earth and our sea.  He sees our glory and our flaws.  But the interesting thing is that while God is the only one with absolutely clear vision, He is also the only one who truly and completely loves us just as we are.

In contrast, we humans have a constantly shifting and distorted view of our glory and our flaws, and yet we struggle with loving ourselves.  When most of us talk, we try to give others a telescopic vision of our weaknesses and a microscopic one of our strengths.   But when we listen inside ourselves, those lenses are all too often reversed.  We forget our victories and instead feel our weaknesses too keenly.  We magnify the sides of ourselves described here in Romans 1:29-32.  We kick ourselves over things that cause us shame, guilt and regret.  It’s as if we are doomed to live in some nightmarish eye doctor’s office with the doctor peering far too close and asking, “better? Or worse?” while giving us only dark lenses to peer through.  ”Horrible and horribler,” is our only possible response.

That’s a seesaw way to live.  It’s a way of looking at earth, then paradise.  It’s a way of seeing ourselves as TERRIBLE then GREAT.  It’s a way of seeing our lives as meaningless then triumphant.  It’s a way of thinking we’re all alone in our misery and then all alone in our victories.

So how do we integrate the two?  How do we experience our emotions fully and yet not be crushed under the weight of them?  Is there a better way than just being “bad” then “good” then “bad” then “worse” then falling asleep until the cycle starts all over again?

Of course.

God invites us to get off the see-saw and live under grace.  He invites us into a paradise on earth.  He invites us to live in a world where we are loved as we really are.  He knows us better than we know ourselves and yet He calls us beautiful.  That’s because He looks at us and sees Christ’s perfection.  He promises to redeem the brokenness of our lives.  We find paradise not through our achievements but “from start to finish through faith” in Jesus and what He has done for us on the cross.  Romans 1:17. That’s the only way to get off the see-saw of good and bad.

And when we begin to see ourselves as God does, through the lens of grace, we no longer need distort our flaws and magnify our victories.  We can be honest about who we are, where we’ve failed, and where we long to go.  For we no longer exist to prove ourselves.  He’s proven everything that needs proving.  Instead, the moment we feel discouraged because we go down the “what’s the point of it all” road, we can remember that the point is to have a relationship with the God who loves us so much He died in order to make the relationship possible.  As Paul writes, we live and move and have our being in Him.  We were made for that.  We find our meaning through “belonging” to the one who invites us to belong to Him just as we are.   Romans 1:6.

Looked at through the lens of grace, our lives become a different story than the one we thought it needed to be.  It starts and end with God, and somehow in Him we find ourselves.   We’re not alone in that.  When we start to see with the eyes of God, we see how all of creation sings about Jesus.  Romans 1:20.  We’d see how the whole universe is “speaking” about God. We’d hear the stars, skies, rocks, snow, rivers and clouds delighting in God.  Like creation, Paul says that every human heart knows God.  It’s an astounding and beautiful claim.  He says people can “suppress” their knowledge of God, but they can see Him all around them.  Paul says God is “obvious” from the world God made.  Perhaps that’s why we hear people being defensive about their faults.  Romans 1:21.  They’re speaking out loud to defend themselves from an invisible judge and jury, but they don’t yet know that that judge has forgiven them.  There’s no call to be defensive.  God died to free us from all guilt and all shame.

The good news is that we don’t have to find paradise on earth; paradise came down to earth to find us.  Our earth is not yet paradise, not by a long shot, as Diaz’ stories portray so poignantly, but in the meantime God offers to “paradise” each of us.  He wants to “tabernacle” us or “home” us – to come and live inside each of us.  He wants, in effect, to “marry” us.

This is a different story, and God tells us that He wants to sea us all.  Trusting in Him will make all our dreams come true.  He wants us to stop trying to do things our way, and instead go about enjoying our lives, enjoying other people, and wishing upon every star in heaven and earth because God made them all, just as He made us.

posted by Caroline Coleman in A Chapter a Day on February 20, 2013.  Photo taken of a random door in lower Manhattan (with abject apologies for whatever else it says – I don’t speak that language…)

a fire on a beach: Acts 28

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There is a strange contradiction written into the Christian Ash Wednesday service.  The service begins with Jesus warning us to beware of “practicing our piety before men” – and then we kneel while the priest smears an ENORMOUS black cross on our foreheads.  We’re supposed to leave that cross on all day.  It makes every person on the subways and streets stare at us.  For some reason those ashes are oily – they stick – they smudge.  As the day progresses they go from shape of a cross to being just a big black mark.

So is that the very kind of false piety Jesus warns against?

Yes.  But as long as we know that, there’s no reason not to do it anyway.  Here’s what I mean.

Imposing ashes on our foreheads is a manmade tradition.  Therefore it’s inherently suspect.  Yes, I know.  It’s been around a long time.  Since the fourth century, I’m told.  But in the very “first” century, Jesus railed against people who imposed manmade rules.  He said those people weighed down others with “religious” rules that crushed them, and didn’t lift a finger to help them.  Luke 11:46.  So the first thing to note is that no one should EVER feel they have to get that ashy cross on their foreheads.  Anyone who says otherwise is just plain wrong.  And they can be – politely – ignored.

So once we know we’re free of any requirement to get that Ash Wednesday cross, we arrive at a different question.  Should we?  Could we?  To paraphrase T.S. Eliot: do we dare?

The litmus test for whether something is helpful in our quest toward living a life of sacrificial love is to look at the fruit it bears.  So here’s my short answer, born of personal experience yesterday.  I went to an 8 a.m. service.  I got my cross.  It was big.  It was bold.  It wasn’t beautiful.  I felt self-conscious.  And it wasn’t until I recognized that there was NO WAY false piety hadn’t crept into my heart in that I was free of false piety.

Here’s what I mean.

The moment I wrote in this blog that false piety will ALWAYS creep up on us if we walk around with a black cross on our foreheads – then I forgot all about the cross. The moment I realized that on SOME LEVEL that cross was making me proud, the pride melted away.

It’s kind of how grace works.  When we pretend to ourselves that we’re perfect, we become proud.  The moment we admit our imperfection, boom.  There’s finally room for God to humble us.

The interesting thing was that the moment I forgot about the cross, about 20 people struck up conversations with me because of it.  They were talking to me in the Writer’s Room (where, trust me, no one talks).  They were pulling homilies out of their knapsacks.  They were talking to me on the streets.  Two women were chatting with me in Alice’s Tea Cup (yes, with their mismatched china).  The doormen were asking about it at the club where I swim.  ”I should have gone to church,” a lot of them said.

“Oh, I only go because I NEED to go,” I replied.

“Who doesn’t,” they said back.

In other words – the moment that cross came to symbolize my pride, rather than my perfection, it became the very thing the cross is supposed to be:  a sign of God’s love for we fallen hopeless hapless lovable humans, who long to connect to each other but are never very sure how.  Apparently the key to connecting lies in admitting our pride to ourselves.

Which brings me to the Scripture for the day – it’s the very last chapter of Acts.  As usual with the book of Acts, I read it and was at somewhat of a loss.  It meanders around between Paul’s shipwrecks to his imprisonment in Rome and his lecturing people for being deaf and blind to God’s love and his availability to anyone who wants to hear of God’s love.  What is one to do with all that?  How do we summarize it?  What’s the takeaway?  How do we relate it to Ash Wednesday, a Pope resigning for the first time since the Great Schism, civil war in Syria, school bombings, trade partnership between the U.S. and the EU, civilians being bombed in Afghanistan, Iran’s new centrifuges, and six more people being hauled away for hacking into cellphones in Rupert Murdoch’s empire?

Well, humbly yours, I have no idea.  But here’s my takeaway.

When Paul is shipwrecked off the island of Malta, the locals kindle a fire for him in the rain and cold.

There it is.  It’s that simple.  Kindness is to build a fire for someone who is cold and wet.  That’s the kind of kindness we can feel with our eyes shut and our ears stopped.  A fire melts away the coldness in us.  A fire makes us thankful.  We draw close with all the other wet cold people.  We stretch out our hands to the warmth.

And that’s exactly how we feel God’s love.

God’s fire burns on every beach. His lighthouses are visible from every shore, every ship and every piece of driftwood.  There is no place that His light doesn’t shine.  There is no dark so dark that His light can’t reach it.  There are no chains He can’t break.  There is no beach He won’t walk onto to warm us.   His love and forgiveness and acceptance warm us from false piety to grateful humility, where we are reminded that dust we are and unto dust we shall return – except we won’t return to it, because He breathes life into us.  Why?  Because we put a cross on our foreheads?  No – because He bore the real cross, the blackest oiliest cross of all, out of total humility – which is another word for love.  That’s why we wear the cross.  It’s a sign we belong to Him – in all our humanity, in all our pride, in all our beauty.

posted by Caroline Coleman in a Chapter a Day on Ash Wednesday, February 13, 2013… and totally rewritten the day after Ash Wednesday, on Valentine’s Day…

how to trust God instead of preaching at people: Acts 26

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Acts 26.  A lot of people say that you should never talk about religion.  Hardly a day goes by without reading in the press or hearing someone say in withering tones: RELIGION IS PRIVATE!!!  DO NOT EVER MENTION IT TO ME!!!   EVER!!! Their energy makes me shrink back in alarm.

The problem, of course, is that when you feel streams of living water flowing through your heart, it’s very hard not to talk about it.  Also, when you do know God, and He is a part of your life, it feels weird NOT to talk about Him.  It would be like going through your day zippering your lip every time you wanted to mention your children or spouse.  You can do it, but it feels awkward.  Also, there’s that thorny issue of when God gives you a specific message to pass on. Jonah jumped on a ship in order to avoid passing on to the Ninevites God’s message that they were doomed – and we all know where that led.  Who wants to end up in the belly of a whale?  The prophet Jeremiah once tried not to pass on a depressing message he was supposed to give the Israelites.  Jeremiah 20:9.  It didn’t last very long.  Here’s his agonizing cry:

But if I say I’ll never mention the Lord
or speak in his name,
his word burns in my heart like a fire.
It’s like a fire in my bones!
I am worn out trying to hold it in!
I can’t do it!

I feel his pain.

Of course, sometimes if we want to tell other people off, or air our opinions, or explain in minute detail how they’re ruining their lives, that kind of stuff can burn in our hearts like a fire, too.  How do we tell the difference?  How can we tell when it’s a message from God that’s burning like a fire in our bones, and which is a message from yours truly?

As always, the Biblical answer lies with the cross.  Jesus, for instance, would agree with all those people who say not to talk about religion.  Jesus had equally withering words to say about religion.  Remember the Pharisees?  He called them whitewashed tombs, bleached on the outside and full of dead men’s bones on the inside.  The problem is that religion tells you that if you Behave in a certain way, you get a gold star.  All religions preach the same message: do X, Y, and Z and you will be acceptable.  You can work your own way to heaven, Nirvana, or wherever it is you want to go.  You can do it all by yourself.  Pull yourself up by your own bootstrap and then you can give yourself a pat on the back.  Jesus says that’s a lie. He says that pathway dooms its followers to hypocrisy, coldness and ruin.

Jesus came to give us Himself instead.

For instance, Jesus told his disciples: “Go into all the world and preach the Good News to everyone.”  Mark 16:15.  He didn’t say to preach religion.  That’s because the Good News is actually NOT a religion.  It’s a relationship with God based on God’s perfection not ours.

The problem, of course, is that we humans all too often DO preach about ourselves.  We may pay lip service to the idea that we’re imperfect, but most of the time we’re struggling to prove we’re pretty fine.  It’s not only a turn off, it’s untrue.   2 Cor. 4:5. We’re all a mess.   So how do we learn the secret?  How do we learn to share the Good News, not religion?

The Bible would suggest we ask what is loving.  For instance, it’s not loving to force our opinions on people.  It’s not loving to demand our own way. It’s not loving to preach at people.  It’s not loving to be rude.  It’s not loving to be boastful.  It’s not loving to approach people with an agenda.  1 Cor. 13.

Sigh. We know, we know.  But how do we DO that?

Do you see what just happened?  Even as I was writing this blog, religion crept back in.  I asked the wrong question.  I asked how we could love the way we’re supposed to.  That is religion.

The good news is that we can’t love like this.  We’re too… human.  Only God has love like this.  Only God IS love like that.

That’s why God doesn’t ask us to behave in a loving manner so we can be acceptable to Him.  He already loves us.  He just asks us to accept His love.  It’s that easy – and that impossible because it means sacrificing our pride.  We have to admit we need His help.  We have to admit we can’t earn our way to heaven.  We have to admit we’re whitewashed tombs.  We chafe at that characterization, but there’s freedom in truth.  When we stop pretending and accept who we are, we’re ready to receive God’s love.  We ask for forgiveness.  We become thankful for the cross instead of mystified by it.  And all that God is comes inside us and begins to change us from the inside out.

That’s why when it comes to sharing the Good News, we can let go of our agendas.    We can let go of the lie that it’s our Job to change Other People.  God spoke to us.  He wants us to trust that He loves every other person the same.  He will speak to them all – whether through the rocks, trees, clouds, movies, books, newspaper, television, his Holy Word, or us.  It’s all in His hands, not ours.

God asks us to start trusting Him.  Look at Paul in this chapter.  God uses Paul’s chains to give him an opportunity to share his conversion story – yet again.  The chapter opens with Agrippa saying to Paul: “you may speak in your defense.”  As the Scripture says, we are to be prepared to give a courteous respectful answer to everyone who asks us the reason for our hope.  Agrippa asks.  Paul gives him an answer.  Paul is courteous.  He is respectful.  That’s because Paul is on to God’s way of working.  Paul says here that he hopes everyone who hears him will come to faith.  That means that Paul knows perfectly well that while Agrippa and the other authorities may be listening to him with a hard heart, there might be a servant somewhere stopping for a moment to lean on his broom in the shadows of a column.  That servant might be listening with an open heart.  He might be weeping.  Paul has realized that in God’s eyes that servant “getting it” is worth all the kingdoms of the world.

God wants us to relax into Him.  That’s Christianity.   It’s peaceful.  And when we get that, when it finally sinks in that we CAN’T earn our way anywhere, we start to lean over our own brooms and weep.  There’s such freedom in accepting the truth. And when we finally give up our religion, who knows what doors God will open to share the Good News of His love?  Every day becomes an adventure – in trusting Him, not ourselves.

posted by Caroline Coleman in A Chapter a Day on January 24, 2013

no pointing fingers: Acts 25

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Acts 25.  In “Silver Linings Playbook” every character is delighted to use the insanity of Bradley Cooper’s character to make themselves look better.  ”Okay, sure, I may be a little, shall we say, OFF sometimes,” each character implies.  ”But am I BIPOLAR?  Hardly.  Am I CRAZY?  I think NOT.  Have I ever tried to MURDER someone?  Nope.”

Each person in the movie wants to put herself in a position of moral superiority.  But the movie implies that when we do that, we’ve become blind to the point of craziness ourselves.  Instead, we are nudged to ask: how can we love other people – and by extension ourselves — without judging?

It’s a good question.  How can we?  All too often we echo St. Paul’s indignation in this chapter of Acts at being unfairly accused.  ”I am not guilty!!!!”  Acts 25:10.

The only way we can get indignant about our innocence, however, is when we are very, very selective about which of our actions we choose to look at.  We’re geniuses at this kind of selective morality.  We hone in with laser-like focus on those few areas where we have even a chance of claiming perfection.  Like sharpening our pencils, for instance.  We’re pretty good at that.  Or are we?  I came across ten unsharpened pencils this morning and had to stuff them in a drawer.  Okay, so maybe that’s not a great example.  Perhaps we can say we are terrific at walking out the door without forgetting our keys – whoops.  Scratch that one, too.  When it comes down to it, the list of what we do perfectly is miniscule.  But that doesn’t stop us from revisiting it like a favorite song.  Even worse, we find ourselves engaged in the unattractive task of turning around and judging others for not having a sparkly (short) list that looks exactly like ours.

Why?  Why do we care?  Why do we want to look so good anyway?  What’s our problem?

I’m not sure we know.  I mean, I know we can come up with reasons.  We can count on all our fingers the list of why.  We want to earn love, respect, promotions, honors, degrees, acclaim and admiration.  Fine.  But why do we want all that?  Let’s go deeper.  Why do we even WANT the moral high ground over anyone?  Why this drive for perfection at the expense of others?

The Biblical answer is that we all want to be like God.  Sound familiar?  It’s the refrain the serpent used to trap Eve: if you eat from that apple, you’ll be like God.  But why did Eve fall for that?  Why didn’t she say: “who cares?  I don’t WANT to be like God.  God is God.  I’m good with being Eve.”  Or better yet, why didn’t Eve say: “God loves me.  God walks with me and my man in the garden in the cool of the day.  I’m already made in His image. And that’s good enough for me.”

I don’t know.  But she didn’t.  And neither do we.  We DO want to be like God – or at least to be like what we think He is like.  We do want to be perfect – according to our own definition of perfect.  We want to walk to heaven on our own two feet – or roll our wheelchairs – or hop on one foot.  Whatever.   “I can do it by myself,” is one of the first things we say as toddlers, and we’ve been saying it ever since.  We spend our lives pushing away the helping hand that we all too often need.

It’s a lot of work pretending to be perfect.  It’s exhausting pretending we don’t need  any help.  It’s also doomed.  So we resort to a few other tricks.  We point fingers at others to try to distract everyone from our own faults.  We rarely fool others when we do this, and we certainly don’t fool God:  ”You didn’t think, did you, that just by pointing your finger at others you would distract God from seeing your misdoings?”  Romans 2:3 (the Message).   Well, we did actually.  But if God really is the all-seeing all-knowing one, it’s not the best strategy.

God longs to help each of us.  God is love, and love by definition is a verb of giving. But God makes it very clear that a condition for His help is that we have to stop pointing our finger at other people.  Isaiah 58:1. Why?  Why is it so important to stop pointing out that we’re not bipolar, psychotic, sex-addicted or a jailbird?  And if we are any of those things, why do we find ourselves coming up with another list of Nots?

The answer is that those it’s irrelevant.

The ground at the foot of the cross is level.  If we humble ourselves there, we find God lifts us up and sets us on our feet.  God let the fingers point at Him on the cross, so He could extend to us instead the hand of forgiveness.

All we have to do is accept it with thankfulness.  And when we can’t do that, or don’t want to, and find ourselves judging others with vile abandon — God’s hand is still there.  His hand is always waiting.  We can feel the press of His fingers all day long.  God’s fingers nudge us in the direction of giving up the moral high ground and taking instead the mantle of grace.  It’s the only playbook worth reading from.  Because it’s only when we’re standing on level ground that we find our true balance.

posted by Caroline Coleman in A Chapter a Day on January 23, 2013

I can’t find my way home: Acts 22

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Acts 22.  It wasn’t until I had finished half of my latte that I realized the songs playing in the coffee shop had a similar sound.  They were mostly female vocalists, slightly folksy, heavy on the guitar, but with a modern rock flavor.  How, I wondered, had someone come up with such a perfect acoustic rock playlist for a morning drinking coffee in the morning in a coffee shop?

Then I heard a soothing voice say: “Sirius XM Coffee House.”

No wonder the music fit.  They were playing the coffee house station in a – wait for it – coffee house.

We like it when things fit.  We like our belongings to fit neatly on their shelves.  We like our clothes to hang nicely in our closets.  We like our food to sit just so on our plates.  We like our books to fit our worldviews.  We like our friends to laugh at just the right places in our jokes.  We like family members to get along.  We want people to react in a way that makes sense.  We want people places and things to belong.  We want to belong.

But things don’t always work out that way.  Sometimes people don’t make sense.  Sometimes we don’t make sense to ourselves.  We find ourselves feeling more Fox News than Lite FM.  We can feel a little more acid rock while everyone else is NPR.  We laugh in the wrong places.  We make what we intend as a joke and realize we’ve just hurled a spear.  We walk into a room full of people we know and feel like we don’t belong at all.  People we once loved sometimes seem like perfect strangers.

Saint Paul here in Acts 22 tells a story of how God melted his heart out of bigotry and made him realize God loves everyone – only to find his listeners react not with joy but with hate.  Human reactions don’t always make sense.  Paul explained how God taught him that God loves ALL people, not just his chosen people, and his listeners reacted by screaming: “This man is not fit to live.”

It’s a strange turn of phrase.  This man is not fit to live.  Really?  Who IS fit to live?  And why do we humans think we can pass judgment on this issue?  We shouldn’t, but we do.  We pass this kind of judgment quickly  without even thinking.  We’re especially prone to do it if we lose our temper – and I personally think anger is just a manifestation of hurt.  Someone hurts us – and we want to hurt them back.  It’s “natural.”  As I overheard a man say into his cellphone this morning on Broadway: “never send an email when you’re angry.”  It’s good advice.  But it made me smile, ruefully.  You can guess why.

There is a very real sense in which we are all strangers in a strange land.  We search and long for home.  ”I can’t find my way home,” Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood were whining on my ipod this morning.  Three homeless people meet and argue every day in a heap of rags outside the entrance to the Writer’s Room.  ”They have nowhere to go,” a man who worked in the building told me yesterday.

“Yes, they do,” I said.  ”They go here.”  Everyone needs a place to go.  Everyone wants a home where they feel they always belong.  But most of us spend our days with a vague sense of uneasiness, feeling like we somehow haven’t quite arrived home.  We feel like we’re missing something but we’re not sure what.

That’s why there’s all this talk of Roman citizenship in this chapter of Acts.  If you want to unpack any verse of the Bible ask a simple question: how does this relate to the cross?   This talk of citizenship is evocative of how God came down to offer us all citizenship.  But instead of having to buy our citizenship at a great price like the Roman commander, God offers us His own citizenship.  It’s like those friends of mine who give each other their place in the New York City marathon – you can run in my stead, they say, because they know how hard it is to get a spot.  Every one of us is excluded from citizenship in heaven because the law condemns us.  There is not one of us who keeps the law perfectly.  Try not coveting.  Try putting God before all else.  Try loving your neighbor as yourself.  If heaven were only for people who followed the law, heaven would be empty of all save God.  For only God is good.

So God bought our citizenship for us.  He knew we “lived in this world without God and without hope” and He loved us too much to leave us in that state, excluded from the thing our hearts most longed for.  Eph. 2.  God bought our citizenship “by ending the law.”  He satisfied the requirements of the law so that we can go to heaven through his free gift of grace.  No one earns their way to heaven.  Instead the only way is to have our “sins washed away by calling on the Lord.”  Acts 22.  God’s gift of salvation falls down on us like “a very bright light from heaven.”  The intense light blinds us.  It opens our eyes to a whole new Way.  It melts us from the inside out, showing us God paved the Way home for us.  God was the one true citizen of heaven who was persecuted, hounded and killed to satisfy the requirements of the law, so that we can go to heaven without having to earn our way.  We don’t have to try to “be good.”  God did it for us.

And when that truth sinks in, we discover that wherever we are is home, after all.  It’s coffee house music in every coffee house.  We belong to our one true home no matter who excludes us.  We are accepted even when our jokes are unacceptable.  We run the race set before us even when we’re too tired to get out of bed.  We may not be fit to live, but that’s not the standard.  We are citizens now.  No one can take that away from us.  We are members of God’s family.  It’s not based on anything we do.  It’s irrevocable because it was bought with God’s own body and blood.

So what?  What’s the point of all this?  It sounds good to say that Jesus is the door to our home, but what does it mean?

It means that the whole world is upheld by what we mistake for weakness.  It is upheld by the one who turned the other cheek.  Sacrificial love – as opposed to selfish entitlement – lives at the heart of who we are, why we’re here, and how we can become the people we’ve always wanted to be.  The point is to dive down deep into the gospel and search with our breath held until we find the love at the heart of it all and come up gasping for air but triumphant.  We clasp onto the truth.  We press in close.  Jesus died to give us a helping hand.  Heb 2:16.  Is it no wonder we are surprised by joy when we do the same for others?  When we offer a helping hand to others, we find our hands are reaching in the direction of the cross.  It’s a seemingly left handed Way, but when we try it we discover it’s the only right Way, the true Way, the Way to the home we’ve always wanted but could never find on our own.

by Caroline Coleman in A Chapter a Day on January 11, 2013

on feeling like you’ve been dropped into the middle of your own story: Acts 21

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Acts 21.  When Jason Bourne wakes on a fishing ship at sea he’s riddled with bullets and empty of memory.  He has woken up in the middle of his own story but he can’t figure out what the plot is.  His amnesia about his beginning makes it hard for him to figure out the middle of his story let alone the end.  As he says to his new girlfriend Marie when they talk in a diner:

“I can tell you the license plate numbers of all six cars outside. I can tell you that our waitress is left-handed and the guy sitting up at the counter weighs two hundred fifteen pounds and knows how to handle himself. I know the best place to look for a gun is the cab of the gray truck outside, and at this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Now why would I know that? How can I know that and not know who I am?”

Why do we know the things we know?  Why do we thirst?  Why do we get lonely?  How do we recognize the color blue?  Why do we often drive people away when we most want them near?  Why do we like to dance?  Why do we yearn?  Why do we weep?  Why do we laugh?  Why do we get hungry?  Who are we?

In our lives we, like Paul here in Acts 21 sail for one destination.  We pass another.  We land in one port and stay a week.  We kneel and pray and say our farewells.  We move on. Some people meet us warmly.  Other people misunderstand us.  Some jump to conclusions.  Sometimes people yell at us.  They can attack.  They can look right at us and yet mistake us for other people. What’s the story?  What’s going on in all the details of our days?

“You are breaking my heart,” Saint Paul cries here when the believers beg him not to go to Jerusalem.  Paul already knew the end of his story.  God had told Paul he would be jailed in Jerusalem and die.  Paul accepted God’s plotline; he accepted God’s will.

For when the Author of our story gives us the plot, even the things that seem not to fit suddenly make sense.

God comes and speaks to each of us in our own language.  He speaks the hidden language of our hearts.  His word gives us the story we can sense in the rustle of every leaf and the bend of every flower.  Once upon a time, God was Father, Son and Holy Ghost.  One day, an evil villain led a rebellion against the author of time.  The villain wanted to be God. The villain was banished.  God created our world.  He made us in His image.  The villain came to our world to steal, kill and destroy.  The villain bound us in chains of pride.  The villain made us each captive to his lies about how we don’t need God or anyone else.  The villain told us each we could be God.  We sensed he was wrong but we were powerless to release ourselves.  We’d crossed the Rubicon and we couldn’t get back.  So God Himself came down to redeem us.  He set us free by dying for us on the cross.  He took the nails in his own hands to release the nails on each of our coffins.  That is the beginning of our story.

What we do next is up to us.  We can enter into God’s story.  Or we can remain in captivity and rebel against Him.  We break God’s heart when we turn our back on Him.  We make Him weep with joy when we return.

God always meets us warmly.  He never misunderstands us.  He never jumps to conclusions.  He never yells.  He never mistakes us for anyone else.  He always wants us to stay.  He wants us to enter back into our one true story, our real story, the story of how He longs to give us all the happily ever after we’ve always hoped for.  We’ll be restless plotless wanderers until the day we meet our author.  Once we’ve met Him, we’ll be marching down the pages of a timeless tale that speaks in every language to every heart of a plot engraved on the palms of God’s hands.

posted by Caroline Coleman in A Chapter a Day on January 10, 2013

pools of dead energy: Acts 19

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It wasn’t until I moved that I discovered my old apartment had been full of pools of dead energy.

“Why are you moving,” people asked.  Their question bewildered me.

“I don’t need all the space,” I would say.  ”I’m almost an empty nester.  My daughter’s at boarding school.  My son’s heading off to college.”  They would remain silent, perhaps nod.  My answer didn’t seem to satisfy them.  I would try again.  ”The maintenance sky-rocketed because real estate taxes in New York went up.”  Again, they would look unconvinced.  I wasn’t sure why.

And then I moved.  My new apartment is snazzy and shiny.  The previous owner is a gifted decorator – and my new best friend – and I gave away everything and anything that didn’t seem as snazzy and shiny as her kitchen and bathrooms.  If I hesitated about whether I really needed something, I gave it away.  My daughter and I have a “love it” rule when we go shopping together.  Unless we both love it, we don’t buy it.  I tried to apply the same rule to setting up my new apartment.  If I didn’t love something, out it went.  I told myself someone else would love it.

As a result, the new apartment has only things we cherish.  Everywhere I turn are only needed things.  Each shower has one shampoo, one conditioner and one soap.  Each closet has only clothes we wear.  Each shelf has only shoes that fit.  Each medicine cabinet has only unexpired antibiotics.  The pantry holds only food we actually eat.  Each shelf has only phone chargers for phones we actually still own.

One of my first visitors pointed out I might have overdone it.  He walked in and discovered the living room was down to a single lowly love seat.  ”You sure you didn’t give away TOO much,” he asked.

But here’s the thing.  When you clear out the clutter, two things happen.  First, you discover that what’s left appears new.  And second, you’ve made room for something else, something better, something you’ve always wanted.

Because I discovered that the old apartment had collected what my friend Christina Culver calls pools of dead energy all over the place.  I hadn’t known it.  I hadn’t realized it.  I hadn’t even felt the stagnant waters until I moved to dryer ground.

And yet on some level I must have felt it.  Hadn’t I wanted to move, after all?  Perhaps the reason my friends seemed unconvinced by my explanations was that they sensed in my voice a hidden reason, a deeper reason.  Had I needed to let go of the past?  Had I needed to shut the door on old memories to make room for the new?

Or perhaps I had needed to remove all the what ifs from my life.  I love shows on hoarders because their excess – open the door and out spills so much junk they can’t even turn around – reminds me of myself on a smaller level.  I am the Queen of What Ifs.  What if ten teenagers decide to sleep over?  I have ten pillows.  What if there’s a hurricane?  I have an LED lantern.  What if we revert to the time before electricity?  I have six boxes of matches.  You don’t even want to know how overstuffed my suitcases are when I travel.

But God doesn’t call us to a life full of back up plans.  He calls us to a life of immediacy.  He wants us to live with joy.  That means He wants us to dwell in a place of beauty and love which can only be achieved by depending on Him every moment of every day.  The bottom line is: God wants us to rely on HIM to meet our needs.  When Jesus becomes the air we breathe, we discover anything else feels like trying to survive on carbon monoxide.  We can’t  smell how deadly it is, but we sense we’re not getting what we need.  God calls us to abandon all the what ifs.  Instead, He asks us to rely on Him for the what is.

The things in our lives we cling to – all of our what ifs and maybes and just in cases – hold us back from the life of joy and peace God longs to give us.  Like the crowd who gathered round Demetrius in a rage in Acts 19, most of us don’t even know why we collect these things around us that weigh us down.  As Demetrius put it – even though he was trying to make the opposite point – idols made by human hands are not really gods at all.  By definition – how can they be?  We’re not God.  So if we made it, it can’t help us.  Worshipping manmade things only diminishes us.

And more than our possessions, there are worse things we hold onto.  We cling to past hurts.  We nurse our wounds.  We remember the lies people have told us about ourselves.  We hear the sneering voices that told us we weren’t good enough, lovable enough, or just plain enough enough.  Instead, we like the new believers in Acts 19 can make a pile of all our contingency plans and bad habits and false beliefs and burn them up.  We can cast out the old on a collective bonfire to make room for the new.  We can instead accept God’s truth.  We can hear the voice say that God loves us just as we are.  God knows us and loves us still and He will meet our every need and satisfy our every desire.

And the reason God can do this for us is that God Himself stepped into the deepest pool of dead energy of all.  Jesus went to hell – and back – for us.  He stepped in over his head in order to lift us up to dry ground.  Jesus covers our every flaw.  Jesus heals our every wound.  The cross covers our every imperfection with the perfection of Christ.  We are not enough — and yet in Christ we are more than enough.  He completes us in a way nothing in our hearts or our closets ever can.

God knows that we can’t just give things up.  He knows we will merely replace the old bad habits and thoughts with new ones – and cling to those just as tenaciously.  Instead, He asks us to step out of the pool of the dead and into the river of life.  There we will find a light that fills us to overflowing, enabling us to love others the way God loves us.  The only way to pure joy and peace is to walk hand in hand with the One who made us, who loves us, and who longs to fill us with His Holy Spirit.  All we have to do is listen to the joyful voice that calls us to let go and surrender.

And grace like rain will fall down on us, transfiguring the old, just as the light in my new kitchen transfigured the blue glass bowl in the picture above that my mother gave me years ago, that her grandfather had given her in turn.  I’ve always loved it but I never had a place for it before.  Just so, God makes a new place for us.  He redeems all the broken things of our past and makes even our scratched up selves glow like pools of living water.  It’s the miracle of a new life, of a new home, of moving to a place where God can make even the handkerchiefs that touch our skin heal us and others of every disease.

That’s why we move.  We move because we listen to that silent something in our hearts that says: it is time.  It is time to search for the river of life and dive in headfirst.  It is time to believe that God made our hearts to yearn for His light, His love and His Way.  He makes all things new every day – even our dried up stagnant hearts.  He asks that we abandon all anxiety and instead live in a new home with Him, a home full of trust and thankfulness and Love.  He wants us to depend not on other flawed humans, or on controlling our surroundings, or on ourselves but on Him and Him alone.  And in Him, we dwell in safety.

posted by Caroline Coleman in carolinecolemanbooks.com on January 8, 2013

what would it look like to NEVER criticize? Acts 11

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(read Acts 11)  Never criticize.  Ever.

That’s the opening advice of How to Win Friends & Influence People, and it’s a show-stopper.  The moment we read it, we feel protests rising up in our throat:  BUT, BUT, BUT…

But what?

But how would the world function if we didn’t tell it what to do?  How would our friends, family or employees function if we didn’t tell them how to behave?

Dale Carnegie’s point is simple.  He says criticism doesn’t work.

More than that, he says it boomerangs.  Not only does the criticized person get defensive and rationalize their behavior – they will probably condemn us in return.  Witness the self-characterization of Radovan Karadzic at his recent trial for genocide in Bosnia.  He calls himself a ”mild, a tolerant man with great capacity to understand others.”  To hear him speak, we should be inviting the man accused of massacring 6,000 men and boys to babysit our children.

So what’s the alternative to criticizing?  Dale Carnegie says to work on ourselves and to try to UNDERSTAND the other person. He says trying to figure out WHY people do what they do is “a lot more profitable and intriguing than criticism; and it breeds sympathy, tolerance and kindness.” Or as my favorite tv preacher Joyce Meyer puts it: “mercy always asks why.”

So how do we put that into action?  What would it look like to never criticize again?  Is it possible to always ask why?  I’m truly fascinated, as I’ve been frustrated about my critical spirit for years and would LOVE to see it melt away.

The opening half of Acts 11 has a telling description of what’s wrong with criticizing, and a helpful – but hard – alternative.  Luke writes that the Jewish believers “found fault” with Peter – “separating themselves from him in a hostile spirit, opposing and disputing and contending with him.”  Acts 11:2 (Amplified Bible).  The passage suggests that when we “find fault” with others, we are “separating” ourselves from them in a “hostile” spirit.   In other words, the passage suggests that criticism diminishes community instead of building it.  More than that, it suggests a critical spirit comes from – wait for it – a superiority complex.

But we don’t have a superiority complex.  Do we?

Apparently we do.  Dale Carnegie says everyone feels superior to everyone else in some way.  And every time we criticize, we are giving into the lie that we’re better than other people.

Peter offers an alternative.  He reacts to criticism with patience.  He spends eleven verses explaining his actions to his detractors.  Luke writes that Peter “began at the beginning and narrated and explained to them step by step the whole list of events.”  Acts 11:4 (Amp Bible, brackets removed).  To hammer home the point, the Bible repeats for US those events, line by line, step by step – even though we have literally just read the same verses in the previous chapter.  It’s as if Luke, the author of Acts, is painstakingly showing us what it looks like to be patient in the face of criticism.  It’s actually boring to read, as we have JUST read it – and it was probably boring for Peter to have to say.  But that is the point.

Being patient when criticized means to take the time to explain something that seems so obvious to us we’re tempted to react with irritation.  We so often think: how can you not KNOW this???  And why should I have to take my precious time to explain the obvious?  But what would happen if, instead of being impatient, we were patient and kind?  What would happen if, when someone said something that sounds offensive, rude, mean or critical, we were to ask:  what did you mean by that?

The rest of the chapter corroborates the powerful benefits of this alternative to criticism.  The chapter moves to Barnabus, the epitome of encouragement, and says he was “full of joy” and “continuously exhorted, warned, urged and encouraged the people to remain faithful” to God.  Barnabas presents a positive alternative to criticism – warning, urging and encouraging.  The key, however, is to do this kind of urging with love and joy instead of hostility.  For as we are told in the “love chapter” of 1 Corinthians 13, love is never “touchy”.  1 Cor. 13: 5.

Wouldn’t it be great to not be touchy?  When we’re not touchy, we can ask people to explain.  We no longer feel hostile.  We can dig deeper and ask questions.  We can empathize.  We can sit in someone else’s chair – wear their shoes – walk in their moccasins.

We can.  We could.  We should.

But honestly – who does?  Who can – all the time?  We know we should.  We know the world would be a different place.  We know that.  But how can we NEVER be touchy?  How can we ALWAYS be patient?  It seems impossible.

It is impossible.

And here’s why the gospel of Jesus Christ is called the good news.  First of all, it’s good news because God knows we often have a critical spirit toward others, and He knows we are often touchy when others criticize us.  That’s why He died on the cross for us.  He forgives us for all that.  His love makes us truly sorry for being that way.  His love can so fill us up that we find ourselves not being as touchy as we were, and not being as critical.  It’s a process.  The journey doesn’t end overnight.  But the more we feel loved by God, the more we love others and ourselves.  In other words, the more we take in God’s kindness, the more kind we become ourselves.

Because recognizing God’s love and understanding the cross means we have taken in that none of us have any right to criticize anyone else.  The cross means we all fall short of the glory of God.  Are we better than anyone else just because for one hour we’re sitting on a hard bench in a stuffy church trying to stay awake?  Of course not.  The gospel – or good news – is that sitting in church, preaching to others or reading the Bible does NOT earn your way into heaven.  Nothing does.  No work of man – NOTHING – acts like a rung on which we can climb our way to heaven.  THAT is the good news.

Why is it good?  Because it means that we can let go, and let God, as they say in AA.  And if you know anyone who’s “worked the program”, recovering alcoholics among the most embracing people you can meet.  Why?  Because look at their “first step”.  It doesn’t say “you’re all that, and follow these rules, and boom, you got what it takes baby.”  It says: you’re hopeless. You can’t do it on your own.  You need God’s help.

Their first step is EVERYONE’s first step.  They’re just lucky enough to know it.

The gospel of Jesus Christ is the only antidote to that critical spirit that rises up in all of us.  More than that, the Bible teaches that true repentance comes ONLY from the Holy Spirit convicting us.  The Spirit whispers lovingly in our hearts that our behavior has grieved God.  Karadzic doesn’t sound sorry.  He may not be.  But if Karadzic believed God loved him, and he started asking God to show him his fault, the world would find Karadzic weeping and apologizing.  Because God never excuses sin.  But He speaks the truth in love – and calls us to do the same.  Worldly repentance is just annoyance that we got caught and leads to death.  Godly sorrow is intended to lead us to true repentance – and forgiveness – and new life.

So instead of criticizing others, God calls us to ask why and to pray for them.  Instead of criticizing ourselves, He asks us to ask why we do what we do.  We’ll find we stop being so hard on ourselves, not just others.  It’s a kinder way to live.

If you read Dale Carnegie’s book, which you should because it’s AWESOME, he goes on to explain what it looks like to not criticize.  It looks effective.  It looks loving.  His isn’t an overtly Christian book.  It’s just a true one.

Because the gospel is true.  We’re not better than each other – not in the ways that actually count, and not compared to the perfection of God.  We’re all jealous, rude, boastful, selfish and prideful.  And the reason we don’t need to be touchy when we are criticized for being this way is that we ARE loved.  God knows our hearts better than we do ourselves – He literally made out hearts.  He knows even our critical, superior spirits.  And yet He completely loves us.  He sees us through the lens of the cross.  He sees us as forgiven new creatures because His son paid the price for all our crimes against humanity.  And if we accept that, He’ll free us from the impossible burden of trying to “be good” and carry us to heaven in His arms.  And as we’re rising up, we’ll look around and hope we see everyone else we’ve ever met rising with us.  Because we finally love them – really love them – and don’t just pretend to.

And maybe Jesus won’t even be carrying us.  Maybe if we really, really took in how much God loved us, we would become so light we would float.

posted by Caroline Coleman on October 24, 2012 in A Chapter a Day – carolinecolemanbooks.com