A lesson that's not necessarily rational

One of the toughest things about raising kids is imparting simple advice concerning control over the emotions. That sentence is enough to make you wonder what sort of parent I am. Let me break it down.

No one can make me rageful. No one can make me wallow in self-pity. No one can make me live in fear. These are all personal choices. But they don't feel that way. Helping my daughter understand that her brother and sister will do things that seem unfair but that she controls her own jealousy and self pity is something we revisit repeatedly. I can't expect her to one day get "rational" in that regard.

Now let me go from the particular to the general, theologically speaking. Sometimes those of us who read theology with peculiar interest tend to look for rational seams in everything. We don't understand why "those" people can't "get it." Biblically speaking, we humans haven't been getting it since the Fall in Genesis 3! The people of God's covenant weren't being rational in disobeying God. There were plenty of reasonable paths they could have chosen. But alas, the Scriptures are record of God's lovely and "irrational" patience for millenia.

I was reading some Lee Strobel The Case for Christ last night. What irks me about his books is not that he makes faith reasonable and rational. Its the assumption that a reasonable and rational faith is an easy faith to accept and live. Jesus is a historical figure, ergo, His claims are true, er go, the only reasonable choice is to become a Christian, er go all my life's yearnings will be fulfilled. Choosing to take up your cross and follow Jesus is a bodily action, not a philosophical decision. Now of course the mind is part of the body, but a lived faith is not something just anyone should claim to have.

I am on the way. I do not possess Christ. I am part of a lived faith that I embody along with other Christians.

Tags: Reason, children, faith, Scripture, Lee Strobel, The Case for Christ

Love?

If my life were a question it might be worded this way: “Is it in a man to love?” I want to believe in love with all my heart, with my whole life. But my personal history has hardly been an example of faithful love. Even as I have desired to be loved throughout my life and that desire has been left wanting, so my efforts at loving completely and with faithfulness have finally met with failure.

It’s been said that love is an overused word, that we really don’t even know what we mean when we say it anymore. It’s a code word for any number of things. For some people “I love you” falls so easily off the tongue that we question the depth of their sincerity. And it’s also true that words themselves fail to be taken seriously anymore as we humans drift in and out of relations with each other without thought for our proximity or the effects of any forms of language we encounter.

I also see people desperate for real relationships but unsure of themselves. There are few things more frustrating than a promise unfulfilled, and the ultimate promise is from God. The first part of God’s promise is that he himself shaped people in his image and called them (male and female)“very good.” He created them from earth so that in relation to creation and to himself they would be as he intended. God’s creation act is the first sign of promise. We are made for a reason. We are good.

Far from being exhausted with humans or fearful our weaknesses, God emptied himself and became a man to reconcile us to himself. Jesus set an example of love for his disciples in washing their feet, commanded that they love each other as he loved them, and then laid down his life in the Supreme act of love. This activity precluded one simple belief on God’s part. That we are capable of Love. That in spite of the possibility that we would choose otherwise God invests himself in us for a future joy, a future hope that he will right us.

Tags: proximity, love, humanity, fear, weakness, faithfulness, "Is it in a man to love?"