When I was in grade eight my parents took me and my older brother to the island of Oahu, Hawaii for vacation. This was the first time I had travelled anywhere that didn’t involve our tent trailer and a KOA campground so it was a pretty big deal for me. During one of our days there we travelled to the north shore to watch people surf the big waves.

Fun with Face Plants

My older brother and I waded out as far as we dared (about waist deep) to feel the power of the waves for ourselves. We found that if we were to jump just an inch or so off the bottom when a big wave was coming in, we would be picked up and literally thrown onto the beach. Though not an incredibly comfortable sensation, I found the power so fascinating and magnetic that I did it over and over.

Surf Seals

At one point, our parents on the beach directed our attention to a sea lion bobbing in the surf less than ten feet away from where we were playing. It was hanging in the surf and darting in and out seemingly as effortlessly and precisely as a hummingbird hovers in the air.

Sand Castles

That experience came to mind while I was preparing to lead the singing portion of the service at our church a month or so ago. The powerful and unpredictable surf is a natural metaphor for the powerful and mysterious nature of God. The sand represented everything in the physical world to me.

I Choose Seal

The point of the picture was that there is nothing wrong with building sand castles. That is to say there is nothing wrong with buying a house and car and investing for your retirement. Those are all good and necessary things that I spend a good deal of time working on myself. However, if they were to be the main goal of my existence it would make for a fairly meaningless life since we all know that a wave could crash in at any time and wipe the sand clean of any traces of my construction.

The point, as I see it is to learn to embrace the unpredictability of the surf (i.e. life) and above all else, to make sure that my meaning comes from things that can’t be obliterated by the rogue waves of life. For me that comes from pursuing things that are true and/or beautiful but I will save that for another post.

On a very basic level we are constructed in two parts. We are part physical (comprised of our possessions and postion) and part spiritual beings. In spite of the fact that we often live as if the things that are part of the physical world are the source of ultimate joy, on a fundamental level we know that they are not. For better or worse, we are genetically predisposed to need other people and to find our purpose and identity in the meaningful relationships with develop with each other.

Reverse Engineering Purpose

Deathbed confessions, forgiveness and reconciliations are cliched for a reason. They are what we do. Once all of the temporary stuff cannot distract us any longer we start madly seeking to repair all the petty grudges and misunderstandings that our pride has kept us from dealing with previously. Why would this matter? After all, the dying person isn’t going to be around to deal with anymore consequences from the malfunctioning relationship. Even putting religious beliefs and conceptions of the afterlife aside, it seems that people generally feel that reconciling broken relationships is important enough to dominate the last minutes of their time on earth.

In light of this, it would seem worthy of looking closely at the reason so many of us focus on relationships in our final moments in order to try to reverse engineer ways to make our lives more meaningful at some point before our deathbed. This is what I interpret Soren Kirkegaard to have meant when he said that we should design our lives forward and then live them backwards. We should look at the desired outcome and then make present decisions in light of, and with the aim of always moving towards, that outcome.

The Meaning of Life

The reverse engineering process for ultimate meaning and purpose is really not that difficult when it comes down to it. While it is often shrouded in false mystery, at the 20,000 foot level, the meaning of life acutally seems quite simple and straightforward. The language may differ from person to person but the general consensus (based on the actions of dying people everywhere) seems to be that the meaning of life it to be fully known and yet still fully loved by other people while at the same time fully knowing and fully loving other people.

This is not possible in the perfect sense of the word “fully” but in the practical sense it is very possible. It can be represented by the learning curve we see so often and shown below where the first 90% of a learning goal is attained quite quickly while the last 10% takes considerably more effort. For example you can learn to play the basic guitar chords in a few hours while reaching the status of the Edge or Eric Clapton would take thousands of hours. As an aside, that figure may be on order of 10,000 hours if Malcolm Gladwell’s theories are correct.

The same process applies to meaning and purpose in life. The most meaningful, and subsequently fulfilling, relationships we have are the ones where we know the person most deeply. This depth of meaning is usually reserved for spouses, family members and lifelong friends. These are the people that we generally have put in our 10,000 hours together to become “master friends” to stretch the analogy to its limits.

The Veil

Lately I have been thinking of how to stay focused on what I know really matters and avoid getting hung up of the physical things that I know are temporary and I thought of an analogy that I found helpful. Imagine all of the physical things of this world as a veil covering a face. At first glance the veil looks substantial because the face underneath is providing shape and animating it. So the reason that the physical comforts of this world look substantial is that they cover things that really ARE substantial. The portion of the veil made up of financial security is positioned directly over the very real need for hope for a positive future. Instant gratification and present happiness covers the need for lasting joy. Sexual pleasure covers the need for unconditional love. And so on, and so on…

The reason I believe we so often fall for the veil version of these things is the effort and risk involved with pursuing the real items. It takes more work for a man to commit to a wife and let her know him on the deepest level than it does to have a one night stand. There is also a risk that the relationship may fail leaving deep wounds. However, the relationship has the potential for infinitely more joy and and lasting goodness than the one night stand ever could. The relationship takes more time and investment but once established, yields daily dividends in fulfillment and joy. The key is to live in the moment while understanding our future destination and constantly steering towards it using the choices we make. If we can learn to constantly bounce between the 20,000 ft level, where it is easy to see the source of true joy, and the trenches where that joy is fought for and experienced, we will like Paul have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation.

This is all sunday school stuff I know but what struck me the other day was a picture of Jesus on the cross as the graphic image of just how badly God wants to be in relationship with us. That picture is hard to look at, not just because of its graphic physicality, but because of the horrible injustice it represents.

It displays what can only be called embarassing vulnerability. After all, Jesus had no guarantee of reciprocation from us when He accepted the cross, but still He was up there…what was it…pleading? Why does it seem so much like pleading in my mental picture, and what is He pleading? Repentance isn’t right, the cross doesn’t seem like a sermon to me. It feels more like the desperation of unrequited love.

In the picture, it feels like Jesus is begging for us to let Him fulfill the expectations that the law puts on us. It is like He can’t bear to see us straining under a load too heavy for our fragile frames and He is frantic to relieve us from it before we are crushed. So frantic that He would accept being crushed Himself for just the chance that we could be saved from the same fate. No guarantees, just the possibility that our suffering could be avoided by His sacrifice.

That picture makes me feel like my feet are setting roots into solid granite, even melding and becoming one with that impervious rock. It makes me believe with every normally doubt-filled fibre of my being that truly nothing could separate me from the love of Christ. Something about it also makes me want to spend more time with God, not because I want to live forever and not because I want to avoid hell, but because I just want to be around the goodness of that kind of pure love. I am grateful just for the chance to just BE near it. That is to say, to just exist next to it. Today will be remembered…

Have you ever been sitting in a church service, have a perfectly inspired time planning what you want to do to be more…whatever it is you want to be, only to be sideswiped by a dump truck full of guilt. Like Biff there, just driving along out for some good ol’ fashioned bullying and next thing you know, you’re buried in crap.

The guilt is usually not directly spoken but instead the implied elephant in the room. That guilt is also almost unequivocally the result of bad theology. It is a theology that states (usually not directly) that though we were saved by grace we must now perform works to stay in God’s good books. It is the theology that turns our “gifts” into “responsibilities”. Who wants a present if there are strings attached? It’s like buying a kid his first bike and attaching a note that says you got him a paper route too. Kind of takes the bloom off the rose doesn’t it?

One of the most sinister twistings of theology has to do with basic spiritual disciplines. Basic theology teaches that God reveals Himself to us through general revelation (i.e., the Bible) and specific revelation (i.e., listening prayer, perfect moments, prophetic flaming trees etc.). So we know that to develop our relationship with God, we can read the Bible and we can pray and we can meditate on things He is teaching us. So why is it that what I have learned over the years is that I have to read my Bible and pray otherwise God will get distant and angry. It is almost like He is a pouty junior high girl friend and I have do to something really spectacular to win back His affection. This is some seriously twisted and dysfunctional garbage.

The truth is that a relationship with God is more like a marriage (isn’t there something about the church being the bride of Christ somewhere?) than a junior high infatuation. I have been married to my wife for going on seven years and during those years we have spent a lot of time together. We have on occasion been apart from each other for a while when I have gone away for work or she has gone on a trip with friends. After those separations, we weren’t angry with each other, and we weren’t nervous to see each other, wondering what the other person would think of us now. Instead, we are always excited to see each other, catch up and spend more time together again.

In relationships, we draw on all of our history as the foundation for each present moment. Every interaction is based on the things we know to be true from all of our previous interactions together. Our relationship with God is no different. The more time we spend interacting with Him, the more secure our relationship will be. When we spend some time apart it is important to remember that it doesn’t erase all our history. When we inevitably come back to spend more time with God, He is as eager to reunite as we are, just like my wife and I are both eager to reunite after time apart. Guilt has no part in that situation. It makes no sense in that context. What does make sense is finding a quiet place free of distractions, and taking some slow easy time to catch up on everything that has happened since we last talked. That sounds better than a dumptruck full of guilt doesn’t it?

The song comes from one basic concept and a number of scripture passages. Simply put, the song is about the fact that God doesn’t take us out of the fight but he does want to take the fight out of our hands. A few years ago I heard a talk by Graham Cooke on Psalm 23:5 where God prepares a table for us in the presence of our enemies. Graham pointed out the absurdity of the picture of a battle being waged and God calling us to sit down for lunch. That made me think that it might take more courage not to fight, but to sit down, relax and let God protect us. To sit down at a table during a battle would actually require us to turn our backs on the fighting. That is a frighteningly vulnerable prospect.

The title of the song comes from Zephaniah 3:17 which literally promises that God is our, well… victorious warrior.

The sword reference comes from a combination of Hebrews 4:12 which talks about the word of God being sharper than a sword, dividing soul and spirit and the sword that is described as coming out of Jesus’ mouth in Revelation 1:16 while His face is “shining like the sun in its strength.”

The idea is, if we spend some time meditating on how powerful Jesus is, we will be more likely to turn our backs on the battle and let Him fight for us.

These days when I need a new ipod touch because my 4GB ipod mini is at least 3 years old and won’t hold all my media or I need those extra 10 minutes to sleep instead of packing my lunch, I am trying to ask why I feel that I deserve those little luxuries.  Can I justify them?  Sure.  Is it wrong to indulge them?  Probably not.  But do I need them?  No.  So when the budget is tight, and I’m wondering if I have enough to give some away, the answer has to be an unequivocal yes.

Consuming less is the most environmentally friendly thing we can do and what we do with our new-found excess can involve some of the most Christ-like decisions we could ever make.  However, I always have to remind myself that it is not about guilt.  It is about freedom from the things that so often own me.  When I start to feel guilty for every dime I spend, I know that I am trying to change too much too fast.  Like the rest of life, this is a process and it is about incrementally moving towards living the life I want to live as the person I want to be.

So let’s help each other.  Any suggestions on how to consume less?  I would love to hear them.  Here is a link to a cookbook that my mom has used for years and our family is going start using to try to reduce our grocery bills a bit:  more-with-less cookbook

I also posted it on my media page.

I believe that the bible is the word of God and accept all the messiness that doing so entails. I believe that God wants to communicate to us through the bible and because of this, He made sure that as it was recorded and subsequently copied and translated, no mistakes were made.

The reason that I cannot accept that the bible only contains the word of God is that a bible that contains some truth is as good to me as a bible that contains no truth at all. If the bible only contains some truth then the only tool I have for extracting that truth is my own intellect. This means that the God that I decipher from the book will only be as big as I can understand. I need a God that is bigger than I can comprehend or I need no God at all. After all, I already have someone as wise and powerful as me to trust my life to.

The truths that someone else chooses from the bible may also be different from the truths that I decided were really true. A careless (or worse still deviously careful) misinterpretation of a select subset of the truths could quite easily be made to say pretty much anything. Many of histories monsters have done just that. It would be quite possible for one person’s subconsciously agenda-laden interpretation to completely disagree with someone elses oppositely-skewed views. Two opposing viewpoints cannot both be true. How do we decide who has adopted the true theology?

The only way to have any hope of understanding the universal truth of the bible is to view each book, chapter, verse and even word as a part of the whole. When we come to a verse that we do not understand we can interpret it using many other passages on the same subject. In this way we can hope to understand what God’s overall message is on the subject at hand. Even using this technique we will all make many mistakes by failing to overcome our own bias or weaknesses. However, with the complete bible as our guide we have an unchanging foundation to return to and a basis for accountablity within our community. It is the only way that I can see for the bible to be an intelligible message from God and like many things with Him, it appears to be all or nothing.

Since Jesus was not excited about wealth nor did He spend any time pursuing it while He was in human form on earth then it follows that it is not an important component to our eternal joy. It also follows that whatever our eternal lives will look like is not beyond our comprehension or even experience now. Rather, the best or most real parts of our life now should give us glimpses and inklings of what heaven really is.

I believe that the meaning of life is to to be fully known and fully loved. On earth, my closest friends and especially my wife know me very well and still love me very deeply. In heaven I will be fully known and fully loved but it will not be a completely foreign experience for me. Instead, it will be the perfection of an experience that I am quite familiar with from the healthy relationships that I have had while alive. So my goal is not to hole up in a spiritual panic room and look forward to when my physical life is over so that my eternal life can begin but to truly seek to see His kingdom come here and now. Every time we choose to expose ourselves and share our lives with others we risk the pain of rejection but we also gain the potential for abundant (i.e. eternal) life here and now.