Promise & Pleasure

Last night I finished reading Do Hard Things by Alex & Brett Harris at around 2:00 am since Elijah decided not to sleep last night. I must admit that the book wasn’t entirely what I expected, but it was still good. I suppose I expected it to be, well, a harder read. But I guess a book about low expectations can’t be too challenging in its structure and vocabulary, or else the target audience of under-achieving, entertainment-driven, lowest-common denominator teenagers probably won’t pick it up, and should they pick it up, that kind of audience probably won’t finish reading it.

What I loved about the book is that it was challenging, insightful and practical. It is populated with examples of everyday teenagers taking on significant tasks. But even more significant about the book is the challenge that it issues to tackle the most mundane, ordinary, small tasks of life, for these are the tasks that will ultimately determine the ability of any individual to embrace the larger-than-life challenges with confidence and competency. And the reality is that the ordinary tasks are what most of us - children and adults alike - struggle to complete with excellency . Read the rest of this entry »

I just finished watching the movie Bella upon the recommendation of the Rebelution Harris boys. Bella is a powerful, uncompromising, beautiful movie about the kaleidoscope of emotions blooming through broken humanity. Joy, sorrow, fear, compassion, mercy and more array a beautiful field in which to run. I don’t want to ruin the plotline of the movie, so I will steer clear of saying too much.

One of the most poignant themes in the movie is the way that the one of the main characters responds to an inconvenient intrusion in his life. During one scene in the movie a blind man asks the two main characters to describe the day for him. There is a brief description of flowers, and then, Nina tells him that it is an ordinary day, with people bustling to their next appointment as cars fly by. She tells him that it’s like a clock, always moving forward, a huge living clock. The man says, “I’d like to see that.” But when life becomes like the clock, we miss the beauty and potential embedded in the moments where life becomes inconvenient and unpredictable.

When Nina’s life appears to be crashing down around her, Jose abandons his ordinary day by pursuing her through a series of random acts of compassion. He risks his job, alienation from his family, and a confrontation with his painful past in order to comfort Nina in her brokenness and confusion. While I was watching this film it struck me how often I am guilty of ignoring similar providential intrusions. They may not be of the magnitude of Nina’s problem, but nonetheless, I’m afraid I often miss profound opportunities to make a difference in someone’s life for the sake of Jesus simply because I’m caught up in my ordinary day of appointments and responsibilities.

This was a fantastic movie. Take the time to watch it. The trailer is above.

My wife, Emily, gave birth to our son today at 10:53 am. We give thanks to God for His kindness and grace to us throughout this pregnancy, but especially today as he was delivered without complications. He’s a big sucker at 9 lbs 8 oz!

I came across a quote by Jeremy Campbell in The Liar’s Tale that seemed significant in light of the lengthy dialogue taking place in the post about epistemology below. Campbell says:

It is a creeping assumption at the start of a new millennium that the are things more important than truth.

As I read the healthy dialogue being volleyed back and forth between Zac and Jennifer, it seems to me that the elephant in the room is that at least one party is holding tightly to a worldview that values something (you fill in the blank) more than truth (I am sure the question will then be asked, “What is truth?” and “How are we to know truth?”)

Are we living in an era where people, particular postmoderns or post-postmoderns, value the journey toward truth - which they believe is ultimately unknoweable in a definitive, absolute sense of the word - more than they value truth itself? Do we value our subjective, relative experiences more than we value the truth claims of Scripture, especially when we find said truth to be incompatible or irreconcilable to our experience? This is a more important question to me than whether or not one can define or defend what truth, which is always under assault in both secular and spiritual circles, is because I’m convinced it is the preservation of some value other than truth that erodes the foundation of truth as revealed in God’s Word.

So the question would then be, if there are things that people value more than truth, what are those things that we value so supremely that we are willing to compromise truth in order to maintain our grip on them?

Christianity Today has a helpful series of exchanges between Collin Hansen, author of Young, Restless and Reformed  and Tony Jones, author of The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier. The tone of the exchange is friendly and Hansen is doing a good job extracting the real differences between young evangelicals on the Reformed front versus younger evangelicals in the Emergent camp. Jones seems content to talk more about friendship than anything else.

I think Hansen overstates things in his assumption that the difference between young Reformed believers and Emergent believers isn’t primarily theology, but epistemology. There is a growing amount of substantial evidence that would lead one to the conclusion that theology is a key difference between these two streams of spirituality (I hesitate to use the term Christian faith because there is enough about the Emergent conversation and their understanding of the gospel that the term Christian may too broad and perhaps compromising).

But Hansen makes a key distinction about epistemology that I found helpful.

Where we probably differ is not so much on theology, but on epistemology. That is, it seems the difference between the people you profile in Young, Restless, Reformed seem pretty darn sure that they’ve got the gospel right, whereas the Emergents that I hang out with are less sure of their right-ness. In fact, they’re less sure that we, as finite human beings, can get anything all that right.

Here’s another way I’d explain the differences. An American Christian today is beset by globalization, pluralism, and postmodernism (three terms that I use interchangeably). In other words, the world is a confusing mess. I think that conservative, evangelical, Reformed theology offers sure answers spoken in tones of certainty by authority figures. Emergent Christianity, for better and worse, offers more ambiguous answers (and even more questions!) in tones of less certainty — but, hopefully, at least with what Lesslie Newbigin called “proper confidence.”

Another question from our panel in the latest Relevant Magazine.

How do we escape the excess of culture? Read the rest of this entry »