I’m preparing to teach a story intensive in Arkansas.  One of the hard questions we will consider is what it means to live a life of faith.  Here’s an excerpt from my story guide.

Scripture recounts stories of the founders of faith floundering in faithlessness as they try to wreak some control in the havoc God seems to be making of their lives. Take Abram and Sarai for example. How many times did the faithful father of all nations cover his fanny by telling a king Sarai was his sister? What about the famous fertility incident, in which Sarah schemed to bring the promised child through her maidservant? The good news of God’s story of grace is that he does not allow us to remain long in our narrow narratives.

Let’s quickly review the story of grace as we discussed it in Chapter Three to see how our faith founders. God creates the cosmos, including us, in His image, with dignity and for delight, with differentiation and for dominion. In this beginning chapter of redemptive history, humans lives in a state of shalom, in which our worlds not only work but flourish – intimate relationship, productive work, and fruitful mission – all of the things we were made for – rule the day.

In the next chapter, Adam and Eve, succumbing to Satan’s suggestion, decide they know better than God what they need for life and beauty. They consciously rebel against God’s command not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Taking and eating, they immediately gain greater knowledge: they see that they are naked and they feel shame. In the ensuing moments, the Edenic world crashes around them and they turn to hiding, blaming, and shaming to try to restore the equilibrium lost.

In the Author’s kindness and wisdom, Scripture does not wait for the gospels to announce the good news. God intervenes immediately, searching for his lost couple in the garden, asking an astounding question, “Where are you?” The all-knowing God of the universe knows where his children are, but it is the nature of God to pursue us in our feeble attempts to flee His exposing gaze. God brings us out of hiding not to scold us but for the gracious purpose of inviting us back into relationship.

Even as God explains the curses on creation and humanity that follow as consequences of Adam and Eve’s sin, He announces the plan for redemption, telling a story of a coming chapter when Eve’s offspring will crush Satan. Immediately, God begins the process of restoring brokenness for His beloved children. In a preview of the story of the ultimate covering blood to be spilled, God kills animals to provide sufficient protective garments for Adam and Eve. In a further act of protection, he expels his children from the garden, lest they eat of the tree of life and live forever in the drastic state of the Fall.

Our Fall of Faith
What does this story have to do with our struggle with faith? Everything. We bear the branding of our foremother and forefather. Like Adam and Eve, we are not always content with shalom, with a world working in harmony and flourishing in fruitfulness. We can be tempted to believe that God is holding out on us, that somewhere someone is enjoying juicier mangoes than the ones we purchased at Walmart. (They probably are.) We grasp after false promises of greater shalom both when our world is working and when it isn’t.

When Adam and Eve’s world comes crashing down, they once again grasp for ways to save themselves from further humiliation, shame, and loneliness. When our worlds are wrecked, whether through our own doing or through external forces, we often turn to other gods that promise to restore shalom, if even temporarily. We try more: shopping, eating, yelling, or going to church. We try less: numbing, withdrawing, retreating, or hiding. Whichever route we take away from a life of faith: flight or fight, our faithful God pursues us and invites us to redemption.

Seriously, this is what you’ve been waiting to hear:
From Bruce McRae’s introduction to his translation of Walter Marshall’s The Gospel Mystery of Sanctification:
“Grasp the main idea, which he expresses over and over again, relying upon his vast knowledge of Scripture: ‘You are more sinful than you can imagine! The doctrine of Original Sin is true! You cannot reform your own flesh! You cannot become a better person by your own strength no matter how hard you try! But cheer up! If you are a Christian, you have come into union with Christ. Through faith in Jesus Christ you are forgiven. Through faith in Jesus Christ you are sanctified and made holy. Through Christ, you are new creation! The Holy Spirit lives in you! Therefore, pursue the life of faith in Christ with all diligence!”

1 O my people, listen to my teaching.
Open your ears to what I am saying,
2 for I will speak to you in a parable.
I will teach you hidden lessons from our past—
3 stories we have heard and known,
stories our ancestors handed down to us.
4 We will not hide these truths from our children
but will tell the next generation about the glorious deeds of the Lord.
We will tell of his power and the mighty miracles he did. Psalm 78:1-4

The Bible is a story, and it is full of stories. Psalm 78 gives us the command to tell our stories – the stories of the glorious deeds of the Lord. The Hebrew words used for story here and in other places in the Old Testament, mashal and chiydah, suggest puzzles, hard questions, riddles. Indeed, the story of the Bible and many Bible stories are, like our own stories, quite puzzling. What sense does it make that a sinless God would love a sinful people so much that He would send His sinless son to die for us? That sentence summarizes the gospel story, and it simply doesn’t make much rational sense.

When you think of the beloved Bible stories, a lot of them are puzzling – God tells Noah to build an ark for a flood that has not yet occurred; David commits adultery with Bathsheba but is presented under the title: A Man after God’s Own Heart; a man who stoned Christians is struck blind and when he regains sight he decides to spend the rest of his life suffering for the sake of Jesus Christ (the apostle Paul). Yes, biblical stories are full of paradox, seemingly opposite realities, and that should tell us that the same is true of our stories.
Another thing that the words mashal and chiydah suggest about our stories is that they can be both simple and profound. Psalm 78 suggests that stories contain two levels. On one level, the story relates events that occurred in space and time. Too often we stop telling stories at the surface level: we tell the story of how truly rotten our day (or our life) was, but we don’t pause to reflect on the second level. When we remember that our stories are authored by God, we pay attention to sign-ificant realities of our stories.
As Brent Curtis and John Eldredge point out in The Sacred Romance, God is not merely the author of the story but the central character: “Just what if we saw God not as Author, the cosmic mastermind behind all human experience, but as the central character in the larger story? What could we learn about his heart? The story that is the Sacred Romance begins not with God alone, the Author at his desk, but God in relationship, intimacy beyond our wildest imagination, heroic intimacy. The Trinity is at the center of the universe; perfect relationship is the heart of all reality.” If God is the author of our stories and also the central character, then our stories are signs pointing to God, showing us and the world something about who God is. As we study our stories, we begin to see that God is a hero who came to save, perhaps not in the time and the way we would have wanted. We also come to see ourselves as the beloved He has come to save. Behind the simplicity of every story is the profound reality of God.

Continues to be a good time to wander in Brueggemann’s The Message of the Psalms. Here are a few paragraphs on “new orientation.” Make sure to read the Psalms mentioned after the quote — if you’re like me, you can get stuck on just the words of the author and forget the Word of the Author!:)
“But obviously the move into disorientation is not the only move made in the faith of Israel or in the literature of the Psalms. While the speaker may on occasion be left ‘in the Pit,’ (as in Ps. 88), that is not the characteristic case. Most frequently the Psalms stay with the experience to bring the speech into a second decisive move, from disorientation to new orientation. That is, the Psalms regularly bear witness to the surprising gift of new life just when none had been expected. That new orientation is not a return to the old stable orientation, for there is no such going back. The psalmists know that we can never go home again. Once there has been an exchange of real candor, as there is here between Yawheh and Israel, there is no return to the precandor situation.
Rather the speaker and the community of faith are often surprised by grace, when there emerges in present life a new possibility that is inexplicable, neither derived nor extrapolated, but wrought by the inscrutable power and goodness of God. That newness cannot be explained, predicted, or programmed. We do not know how such a newness happens any more than we know how a dead person is raised to new life, how a leper is cleansed, or how a blind person can see (cf. Luke 7:22). We do not know; nor do the speakers of these psalms. Since Israel cannot explain and refuses to speculate, it can do what id does best. It can tell, narrate, recite, testify, in amazement and gratitude, ‘lost in wonder, love, and praise.’ (123-124, The Message of the Psalms, Walter Brueggemann) Psalm 76, 87, 103, 117 are examples that include new orientation.

I’ve got orientation on the brain. Yesterday I began the day attending high school orientation with our youngest son and ended the day 451 miles away from home where we will take my eldest daughter, second child, to her college orientation. Strange as it may seem, theology is often a good coping mechanism for DISORIENTATION for me. So no real surprise that my mind went back a long way to Tremper Longman’s teaching on the Psalms (How to Read the Psalms). He first told me about Walter Bruegemann’s categorization of the Psalms in terms of disorientation, orientation, and re-orientation. Here is part of what Bruegemann wrote:
“Creation here is not a theory about how the world came to be. That is not how the Bible thinks about creation. It is rather an affirmation that God’s faithfulness and goodness are experienced as generosity, continuity, and regularity. Life is experienced as protected space. Chaos is not present to us and is not permitted a hearing in this well-ordered world.
Elemental certitudes are known to be operative in the world. The nomos holds, and there is as yet no inkling of anomie. Experientially, of course, such certitudes have behind them previous awareness of disorientation, for that belongs to human experience. The process is continually dialectic. But formally, these psalms tend to disregard such previous experience and begin anew.
The function of this kind of psalm is theological, i.e., to praise and thank God. But such a psalm also has a social function of importance. It is to articulate and maintain a ’sacred canopy’ under which the community of faith can live out its life with freedom from anxiety. That is, life is not simply a task to be achieved, an endless construction of a viable world made by effort and human ingenuity. There is a givenness to be relied on, guaranteed by none other than God. That givenness is here before us, stands over us, endures beyond us, and surrounds us behind and before. The poetic speech of the Psalms is our best language for such givenness, which is not initiated by us but waits for us. There is a coherence that provides a context for our best living. Whenever we use these psalms, they continue to assure us of such a canopy of certitude — despite all the incongruities of life.”  from Walter Brueggemann, The Message of the Psalms.
Want to explore some of this?  Try reading these aloud and meditating on the glory of what God has done:  Psalm 145, 104, 33

No more Christian nice guy –

I just read a fascinating blog about a book that sounds intriguing: www.traylorlovvorn.com. In it, Traylor addresses the issue of “nice men who aren’t loving.” He asks women to comment on how that impacts us. For now, my mind goes to how I (and I think many other women) have been failed to live and love well as Christians because of our commitment to niceness.

I could write books about this (maybe someday I’ll write the women’s version of Paul Coughlin’s book☺), but for now, I’ll give one example of a time I failed miserably at love because of my niceness.

The VBS director asked me to carry on my four-year tradition of leading recreation. We live in Pensacola, Florida, and having no large indoor facilities, we sweat it out in a concrete courtyard in the searing June heat. I nicely informed her of the reality I was sure she had forgotten, “My baby is due four weeks before the scheduled date.” She nicely reminded me that I had led valiantly two years ago, weeks before my third child was due. “You have amazing pregnancies,” she nicely observed. And then she threw in the trump card, “I really don’t know who else could do it.” So I did the ‘nice’ thing: I agreed to do it.

Here were the not-so-nice outcomes of my niceness:
1. My baby arrived late, so he was only two weeks old when VBS began. I had to hurriedly nurse him between rec sessions, and dehydrated from the heat, I didn’t have much milk to offer. The easiest baby ever born quickly became the crankiest baby alive.

2. I was not nice to my other three kids. I was exhausted and irritable.

3. I was really not nice to my husband, who wondered what possessed me to agree.

On a much larger scale, I failed to live and love well as a Christian.
1. I subsumed God’s role as Author by writing myself in the role of recreation rescuer. I’m pretty sure God meant that role for someone else.

2. Along with that, I perpetuated idolatry, both my own and that of the director, by assuming I was the only one who could fill the position.

3. I was really only nice because I wanted to be liked and respected, not because I was seeking to love God.

Don’t get me wrong. I believe in volunteering for church and other ministry activities. Too many people use the excuse of “I am not called to that place” and leave the church high and dry for helpers to carry out the important but sometimes drudgerous duties that come with large visions and essential ministries. But in this case, I was nice to one person, primarily to serve my own needs, and in being so, I failed to love God and love others well.

This is an excerpt from a chapter I am writing on how knowing our stories grows our faith.  The first part of that chapter is about the struggle to surrender to the unknown (in other words to live in faith.)  The rest of the chapter took me to a story of my own difficult experience of going off to college and how God used that pain to bring me back to his heart.  Here is where I ended regarding my daughter:

I am now three days closer to my daughter’s departure date.  Writing about my tragic and yet deeply redemptive experience of going off to college has strengthened me to face her move into the unknown with greater faith.  God has reminded me of key stories of rescue.  As I think about my daughter’s new story, I have a certainty that comes from remembering redemption.

Much is still uncertain about her story.  She may struggle.  She probably will struggle.  Her struggles will be different than mine.  Perhaps she will be faced with the complexity of a difficult roommate; perhaps she will have problems with time management as she experiences the first romance of her life; she might even be homesick.

Then again, she is more likely to flourish.  She will embrace the academic challenge; she will enjoy the experience of a church that lives with a sense of story and mission; and she will discover the previously unknown wonder of viewing life from mountaintops rather than the shore.

Whatever happens, whether her first year of college flows with the harmony of sweet shalom or jerks along with the awkwardness of a girl learning to drive stick shift or even comes to a complete stop when she hits a wall, I know this.  She trusts in a faithful God.  God has bestowed her with a wealth of family and friends who will be watching out for her and calling her name if she forgets it.   Even if she does not hear us calling her home to herself, to turn and trust in God, God will pursue her until she does.  Because I remember a great story of redemption in my own life, I can lean into the unknown of a story for which I deeply care, my daughter’s.  Faith calls us to forgo our own plans for safety and security and follow God into the unknown and unfamiliar.  Hope draws us to remember the “rest of the story” to dream about redemption in the present.

In any story, well-developed, complex characters drive the plotline.  But our stories are unique because they bear the mark of God.  Scotty Smith writes,

“God is telling an authentic, non-spin story of selfish, broken people, who are in the process of being made new by Jesus.  That’s why Jesus has the lead role in God’s Story.  But He’s not the only character.  He’s making us characters too.  We are carriers of God’s Story – targets for hope who’ll serve as agents of hope, and candidates of mercy who’ll live as conduits of mercy.  Jesus is bringing restoration to broken individuals as a means of bringing healing to other individuals, families, communities, and ultimately, to the whole universe.” (Restoring Broken Things)

Because God has made us characters who are carriers of His story, we must carefully consider the people and relationships in our stories.  No person, no interaction with a person, can be random – each one, whether an apparently good or evil influence, has been written there by God to further His purposes.  Think of a question people commonly ask you – “How did you…decide to go to Washington state for seminary when you live in Florida?….know you wanted to be a carpenter when you grew up?  ….meet your best friend?”  The answers to these questions involve story, but they also involve characters.  Here is an example of a way to answer by naming the characters who were agents of hope in our lives.
How did I come to know Christ?

My brother and I were not raised in a Christian home, but through a series of circumstances, we ended up attending a Christian school when I was an 8th grader and he was a 10th grader.  My brother met Christians who invited him to Young Life and told him about confirmation.  He decided that he and I should be confirmed in the Episcopal church (where we had attended occasionally), even though we were both older than most of the communicants.  Then he began to take me to Young Life meetings.  At Young Life meetings I met older high school students who were attractive and compelling because they were kind to an underclassman.  I met three leaders, Judy, Millie, and Susan, who took an interest in my life.   One weekend at Windy Gap a very ‘cute’ man (in the eyes of a 15-yr-old girl) spoke to us about Christ.  I didn’t decide to become a Christian only because I had a schoolgirl crush on the speaker, though that was a draw☺!  I did say to God, “I want what these people have!”  As I think of how God led me to himself, I have a long list of names and faces that I remember:  Bob, Martha, Anne, Judy, Steve, and many more.

We should think about the names of the characters in our stories, beginning with our own.  We can begin by considering simply the names we are called, for often those carry a story.  I am “Elizabeth,” named after Queen Elizabeth, because my father was a Shakespeare professor who taught people about “Elizabethan England.”  Do you know why you are called what you are called? Many of us have nicknames, and some of us have been renamed.  The Bible gives precedent for the significance of given names and renaming:  Abram renamed Abraham (avram – “exalted father” to aviraham – “father of a multitude”); Ishmael (“God has heard”); Saul renamed Paul after his conversion.  Names of all sorts give clues to unique characteristics and to ways we are being transformed into the likeness of Jesus.

Think about it:  What are some of the names of people who have been agents of hope in your story?  How were they involved in the plot of your life?

What are you doing with culture:  condemning, critiquing, copying, or consuming?  Read this from Andy Crouch and think about it…

“The academic fallacy is that once you have understood something – analyzed and critiqued it – you have changed it.  But academic libraries are full of brilliant analyses of every facet of human culture that have made no difference at all in the world beyond the stacks.

To be sure, the best critics can change the framework in which creators do their work – setting the standard against which future creations are measured.  But such analysis has lasting influence only when someone creates something new in the public realm.”

Andy Crouch, Culture-Making

Crouch mentions four possible approaches to culture:  condemning, critiquing, copying, and consuming.  In the paragraphs above, he points out that while critiquing culture is a worthwhile process, especially as it presents opportunities to create new cultural alternatives, it is not enough on its own.  Think about how you have approached “culture.”  Do you spend more time condemning, critiquing, copying, or consuming?  In what areas might you need to alter your approach (or even repent!) to make a significant gospel-toned impact on your culture?

Story Feast:  Tuesday, August 4, 7 p.m.
Story Feast: A Picture of Grace:

We had so much fun with the music, I thought we’d try photographs. Bring a photograph, if possible, and a story to share. Here is one verse to ponder as you consider this topic.

“Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he really and truly is.”

1 John 3:2

We know the saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words,” but pictures also tell a thousand stories. Even the lack of photos from a season of our lives can tell a story.

Choose a photo and tell a story related to that picture. You can take this in lots of directions; here are a couple of suggestions.

1. Think about the picture in light of transformation, and even gospel transformation. How do you look different, both externally and internally, than when this picture was taken? What was the story of your life when this picture was taken? How is your story different now than it was then?
2. Psalm 145:1-2: “I will tell of your marvelous deeds…I will show your wonderful works. Tell the story connected to this picture. What is the setting (time, place)? What happened? Who are the main characters? Are there any marvelous works of God this picture shows?