As summer begins to wind down, kids not only have to begin thinking about towing the line during the day in class and preparing for the next day at school at night, they also have to prep for the challenges of their academic lives and the often monumental task of deciding their place in the world among friends, teachers, peers, and even bullies. Parents, too, feel the pressures of creating a solid and nurturing environment for their families and sometimes forget that, with each season of back-to-school, learning opportunities abound for them as well.
Beginnings bring a recurring sense of renewal and hope. Back-to-school is no different. For the adults packing the lunches and sending the kids off on the buses, the opportunity exists to remember and renew our own sense of learning.
We can take what Proverbs 15:5 (NIV) tells us about being open to teaching opportunities: “A fool spurns a parent’s discipline, but whoever heeds correction shows prudence.” In reflection, we should remember what we learned from our own parents and take some of those lessons to our own children and families.
As we send our young adults off to their first year of college and new kindergartners off to their first classroom experiences, we can take moments to remember when our own lives were being shaped by others and when our biggest goals in life were to absorb what we were learning in school and in church. We can ask ourselves if we are teaching what we learned and imparting our wisdom and experience to those who need it.
As a young man, I knew coaches who required that their players accomplish certain things over the summer break: eat right, exercise every day and show up for pre-season training ready to work hard. The ability to receive direction while setting goals and following through on these directives at a young age is imperative to success in all things. This brings me to the following verse that children and parents alike are familiar with. Colossians 3:20 says, “Children, obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord” (NIV). We heard it so often in Sunday school and from grandparents and aunts and uncles who would scold us using this verse that we might not even actually truly hear it anymore for its true meaning. But, we must apply the positive lessons that we learned as children to teach the children that now depend on us for their growth and successful development.
This is a new year full of new opportunities. We should all go into this back-to-school season with open hearts and minds, understanding that we all play a role in the development of future generations.
Proverbs 20:24
A person’s steps are directed by the Lord.
How then can anyone understand their own way?
Last week, I wrote about how important it is for us to venture out of our comfortable lives and get to know the world.
This can be a very powerful experience if we open ourselves to it. Think of the sense of awe we get from going out to see some impressive natural sight like the Grand Canyon or a meteor shower or a starlit sky. Just witnessing such things can bring home, in an instant, the power of God. It’s God in that beautiful sunset we catch for the first time in months out of our car window as we sit in traffic. It’s God in the first big snow when the city goes all white and work is called off for a day. We can experience the awesomeness of God in so many ways when we take a moment to step away from our regular routines.
The point of adventure is not just to make God more apparent but to bring us closer to God. When we take on adventure, we are literally walking towards God with every new step.
Adventure isn’t just about getting away or relaxing or even acting as that unifying force I mentioned last week. It is about consciously turning ourselves towards God and seeking Him out in a new place.
As Proverbs tells us above, we don’t direct our steps, God does, and taking an opportunity to experience new things acknowledges that. It opens us up to allowing God to direct our steps, allowing us to further seek out God’s purpose for our lives.
August is American Adventure Month, which makes it the perfect time to start thinking about injecting a little adventure into our lives. Now is the time to take that road trip you’ve been putting off or to fly off to some exotic land for a little thrill and some new experiences.
As any of us who have spent too many long months working without a break can tell you, life needs variety. When we fall too long into routine, we often forget to challenge ourselves. We forget to learn more about ourselves and our neighbors. And, we forget to place God first in our lives.
This is the real meaning of adventure. Although we associate the word with Indiana Jones or James Bond, or maybe Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, those Hollywood-style movies really have nothing to do with adventure as we see it in our everyday lives. Adventure doesn’t have to be chasing down long-lost ancient treasures or flying off to outer space. Adventure, for a Christian, doesn’t need to be anything more than finding a means to disrupt that routine in our lives that is keeping us from seeing ourselves clearly. That kind of adventure can be as simple as driving home by a different route, stopping by a new restaurant or shop, or taking on a new hobby.
Try that just once this week and see what you come across when you do it. God loves to put a sign right in front of us but just out of view from our daily experience. Taking the long way home can put you in the way of all sorts of adventures: new relationships, new purpose, new opportunities. There may be someone just waiting for you to turn right instead of left when you leave work next Monday, a person who is waiting to connect, to get some help, to find Christ with you.
I’m not making this up. The meaning of adventure is, in fact, just that humble. It is nothing more than an “exciting or unusual experience,” according to dictionary.com. Adventure starts small, but the results skyrocket from there.
As summer winds down and we head into the fall season, we need this kind of shaking up in our everyday actions. When we don’t break our habits, we can get addicted to living by routine, and we can get very crafty at avoiding the exciting and unusual in life. It just feels easier to come straight home from work, to stay in on a lazy Sunday morning, to take in a movie on the weekend with the family instead of reaching out for something that will challenge us.
Those choices can be a real comfort when life is stressful, but they take away much that is fulfilling and enriching in our experience, and they remove the chance to connect to our world as we are meant to. Because of modern technology, our world is increasingly becoming isolated and divided. People are starting to look at their neighbors as complete strangers, and worse sometimes, as enemies. People aren’t interested in “love your neighbor” these days (Mark 12:31), they are interested in telling them to knock off the noise so they can hear the TV better.
This stuff isn’t idle talk. There are consequences to our fear of adventure. Recently, I wrote about how critical it was for us to act as the peacemakers in these tense times. And part of our duty as emissaries of peace is to go out into the world and extend ourselves in the search for unity. Essentially, if we want to “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation” (Mark 16:15), we have to adventure out into that world, taking on new situations, in order to spread God’s message to everyone.
I’m sure you get along well with the people in your house and in your church. I’m sure you also get along well with the people at work and in your neighborhood. But, as Christians seeking peace in the world, we have to do better than that. We need to venture further, taking in what is “unusual” to us, what is “uncomfortable” and new.
We need to “go into all the world,” just like Paul and the other apostles did, so we can teach and learn peace with all those around us.
In 2 Corinthians 11:26, Paul says, “I have been constantly on the move. I have been in danger from rivers, in danger from bandits, in danger from my fellow Jews, in danger from Gentiles; in danger in the city, in danger in the country, in danger at sea; and in danger from false believers.”
Paul knew something about adventure. We’ll never know all the trials he survived to act as an emissary for Christ. In our time, we don’t have to live up to that incredible standard, but we have to be willing to follow its spirit. We simply need to fill ourselves with a sense of adventure for that which is a little farther than our comfort reaches. We need to go into the world, even if it is just a few blocks farther than we normally walk, and try to make a connection with the adventures we find.
Modern life, with all its conveniences, has left us detached, left us on islands to ourselves. This leads to the sort of ugliness we see on the television these days, where our own countrymen and countrywomen don’t understand our perspective, where no one can seem to agree, even on simple solutions.
We have to remember what English cleric and metaphysical poet, John Donne, said several hundred years ago:
No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
We have to be brave and sail out a bit from our safe harbors, adventure out at sea, until we can see where we connect with the mainland. We don’t have to live dangerously like Paul, but bravely enough to face whatever challenges are in the city or in the country, in the rivers or on the sea.
It is only by such effort that we can heal and find comfort with the world. Because if we don’t, if we continue to let our tectonic plates shift away, well, to paraphrase Donne again, America will be very much the less for it.
2 Corinthians 12:7-9
Therefore, in order to keep me from becoming conceited, I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.
1 Peter 4:19
So then, those who suffer according to God’s will should commit themselves to their faithful Creator and continue to do good.
When I talked about drawing back previously, I mentioned that some events just make it hard to see God. Perhaps it was the death of a relative or a moment of failure in a career when that promotion seemed a sure thing. Maybe it was a time when the bills came in and the money wasn’t in the bank to pay them, or maybe it was an injury, a moment of real pain, that threw everything into doubt. Just like everyone else, I’ve known loss, and I’ve felt lost because of it. I’ve felt my share of pain where I’ve “pleaded with the Lord to take it away.” As I said last time, there’s no shame in admitting it.
We’ve all experienced bruises and broken bones, scrapes and scratches—real and metaphorical—from childhood onward. These are the pains that have weighed us down. We’ve all been pushed down, and we’ve all struggled to get back up.
With the Olympic Games in Rio upon us, I’ve been thinking a lot about the power of overcoming pain and how athletes go through that process to reach their goals. Any of you who know me know I’m a big sports fan. Sports and exercise are part of my release, part of how I motivate myself to conquer the problems I have in my life. I know many of you are the same. We love the moments of triumph, the last second catch that wins the game, the home-run in the bottom of the ninth, the shot at the buzzer: all the incredible feats that snatch victory from an almost certain loss.
What we rarely think about is the pain these athletes—and we ourselves—go through to reach such incredible high moments. This is not just football, or the obvious physical games. When you watch our young gymnasts compete for gold in Brazil, think for a moment about how many hours of pain they have worked through in order to land that perfect dismount. Think of the strains and sprains they have endured. When you see one of our runners cross the finish line first or extend themselves to jump the farthest a person has ever jumped, think about all the times life knocked them down and they got back up.
If athletes suffer pain to reach Olympic glory, how much more does a Christian soul suffer to be fit and ready for heaven? I don’t mean to say God chooses to punish us or harm us to train us. But I do know that God is the balm that heals. But, all the same, life throws some hard lessons our way, and we’ve got to be tough to overcome them. When we get pushed from the godly path, it’s not God who did the pushing, but to reach His glory, we have got to be strong enough to get up and get back on it again.
Which brings us to Paul. The thorn in his side is so famous, I hardly need to explain the context. We know he suffered, and we know he overcame and continued to believe. But what we don’t linger on is that he pleaded to have it taken away. He begged to be free of the pain, and God didn’t take it away.
Why is that? Why wouldn’t God come down and simply remove that thorn, pluck it right out, and let Paul go on with his business? In fact, why doesn’t God come down right now and take away our sense of loss or our setbacks or our injured hearts and bodies? Why doesn’t God just make it easy?
God answered that for Paul, and for us. “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Paul’s pain showed him the truth before God’s greatest mystery: that He is perfect in weakness. It’s the reason our Lord had so much sympathy for the lepers and the blind and the poor. It’s the reason He came to many of you. God comes to us when we are broken, and He proves Himself in the process of healing.
Peter mentions in the verse above from his first epistle, that when we suffer, we have to recommit ourselves as Christians. Essentially, he’s telling us to keep pushing harder, to let the sprain heal and get back out on the mat or on the track, to keep pushing ourselves and our faith. We can’t just ignore pain, we’ve got to conquer pain, to turn pain into a motivator that brings us back all the stronger—all the more dedicated—to God. None of those athletes would be at the Olympics if they let pain keep them from their goals. They saw the glory waiting for them if they pushed a little harder through the tough moments; they could see the triumph that comes to a conqueror who won’t give up. And that made the victory sweeter in the end because it wasn’t easy.
Three verses earlier, Peter tell us, “If you suffer as a Christian, do not be ashamed, but praise God that you bear that name” (4:16). That tells us that when we think of conquering, we have to remember to conquer shame first. There is a sense of failure that comes with struggle sometimes, that we aren’t good enough because we feel pain.
We’ve got to get our minds around the idea that pain is a part of progress. Building muscle requires we put stress upon those muscles to make them grow. At times, that can be painful, but the end result is more strength and more overall health. It’s the same with our spiritual muscles. We become stronger in our faith when we are challenged by life. Every time we conquer an obstacle, our spiritual muscles get stronger, even if we feel a little spiritually sore afterward.
Remember that lesson as you watch our men and women take to the podium in Brazil this year. These young people have conquered a great deal to get there. And as you climb the stairs towards the Kingdom of Heaven, you will have done so too.
Acts 17:27
God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. (NIV)
A couple weeks ago, I compared our journey through faith to the superhero sagas we see on the big screen every summer. There, I mentioned the moment when the hero inevitably draws back and considers giving up before plunging into the final battle. They become lost at the worst moment, with the whole world on the line, and only they know how to find their way back. In our own lives, we often struggle not with monsters like we see in the movies, but with understanding our limitations and how to proceed in life.
We’ve all lost faith at one moment or another. We’ve lost faith in ourselves and in those around us, in family and friends and coworkers, and even, for a time, in God Himself.
There’s nothing shameful in admitting that. Many of the greatest Christians in history have had such moments of despair and drawing back. They become great because they rose to the challenge and conquered that moment, not because they had it. We are not perfect, and we are all going to struggle to see God’s plan sometimes, particularly in the difficult moments in life. We draw back before the holy triumph, just as heroes on the screen do, struggling with a moment of doubt before returning to our mission.
Just like the heroes on our screens, we always do come back to faith. Why is that? What is it that drives us to return to the battle for our soul every single time?
In Acts 17, we find Paul explaining the true God to a group of Athenians, who “are ignorant of the very thing they worship” (17:23). He’s speaking with a mixture of pagans and Jews in the marketplace, the busy intersection of life, and he has caught everyone’s attention by explaining exactly why God created us. As we see in the passage at the top of this post, the reason was so we would “seek” Him, so we would “reach out for Him and find Him.”
Any person of faith knows that seeking is central to the identity of Christians. We seek God in all our actions, and beyond that, in all the actions around us. We seek God in the news and in our communities. We seek God in our families and in our personal decisions. Faith, in essence, is the seeking of God.
“Faith is the only internal guarantee that we have that helps us through a life of constant change. We are who
we are, no matter what, through good and bad–because of faith.”
–Excerpt from my book, Faith: Learning to Live Without Fear
Of course, like anyone seeking, we sometimes struggle to find what we’re looking for. Our eyes are imperfect, our vision of events is limited. In seeking, sometimes we look into tragedy or failure or poverty or death, and we simply can’t see God in it.
In such moments, we doubt. Like our superheroes on the screen, we have a moment of crisis. But, Paul has already told us how this ends. He’s already laid out the reason we can’t stay away, the reason we pick ourselves back up and start looking all over again: “He is not far from any one of us.” This is why we always come back to faith. God does not expect us to understand all His actions, nor to see Him in all His complex designs.
But He has made Himself so common in everything around us, we cannot help but return to Him eventually. If we can’t see Him in the lightning, we see Him in the rain, and if we can’t see Him in the rain, we see Him in the rainbow afterward. This is just another way of saying He is in everything. It’s our poor eyes that can’t always see Him, but He’s still there.
That’s how we keep coming back to God. Though we may fall short in one moment, it is in the very next that we find the answer. Just beyond a tragedy is another holy triumph.
This is why, when we see our heroes on screen, we never worry too much over their stumbles. We know the victory is just around the corner. We’ve seen this movie before. We know they will find belief again, and with belief will come the answer that solves it all, no matter how scary those villains look and how certain those villains are of their own victory.
So it is with God. Though we might draw back today, we know we will be witness to more of His glory again tomorrow. To conquer our need to draw back, all we have to do is seek, because God is never far away.
