Monthly Archives: July 2011

Faith, Day by Day

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(This is an excerpt from the eleventh chapter of my soon to be released book, Grappling with God: The Battle for Authentic Faith. This chapter introduces the importance of living by faith day by day. This book gives an account of the life transforming work we do at the Center for Christian Life Enrichment.)

…I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances

Philippians 4:11b

 

Living by faith is not an easy road. Becoming more Christ-like stretches us in uncomfortable places, beyond our boundaries and over the thresholds of our old limits. We can no longer afford to be shut down in any part of our lives. To be like Christ is to be alive in all of it, in the joy, the pain, and the sorrow.

To live by faith is the process and purpose of this book, bringing together each of the stages of growth that we have discussed. We acknowledge that we are created to live in community; that our connections with others and within ourselves reflect the state of our relationship with God (and vice versa). We need grace and truth to open those places we’ve hidden inside where fear, sadness, anger, unworthiness, rejection, abuse, and abandonment have kept us from connecting fully with others. With grace and truth, we accept ourselves and each other just as we are.

Seeking to become more spiritually mature, we recognize the importance of our feelings. No longer satisfied to live in our heads in a world we think we can control, we risk feeling and expressing what’s in our hearts. Feeling more deeply our fear, sadness, and anger, we become more honest with ourselves and others, including God. Admitting our fears empowers us to develop the confidence to be open and vulnerable. Acknowledging our sadness and hurt, we affirm our hunger to connect with others. Learning to access our anger and express it responsibility, we assert ourselves in relationships without damaging our connections with others.

With purpose and intention, we embrace our responsibility to chose how we are going to live and who we are going to be. We give ourselves a sense of direction as we explore such questions as: where am I going, why am I here, what are my gifts, how am I going to give back… We commit to use our abilities and talents to love and support one another.  And, we know that questioning is necessary on the path to becoming more spiritually mature; that the paradox of abiding faith is also to have doubt.

No matter how far we’ve come, we remain works in progress. We continue to stretch and grow, experience setbacks and comebacks, and keep moving forward toward deeper truth, more authentic expression of our feelings, and greater connection within ourselves, and with others and God. In short, we grapple– wrestling with what it means to be human, to be in relationship, to be loved unconditionally by God.  The more we grasp and the tighter we hang on, the more God engages and invites us to fight the good fight.

In my book, Grappling with God, I will share about the time when my physical strength and athletic ability, which I had always prided myself on, suddenly slipped away from me, and I became more vulnerable than I had never been before. Watch for the early release tool kit offering a sample chapter and other resources to help you grow in your faith and love for God.

 

Faith and Doubt

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(This is an exerpt from the tenth chapter of my soon to be released book, Grappling with God: The Battle for Authentic Faith. This chapter introduces the importance of doubt and questioning in the development of authentic faith. This book gives an account of the life transforming work we do at the Center for Christian Life Enrichment.)


“Unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails, and place my hand in his side, I will not believe.” (John 20:25)

 

 

Here is the paradox: true faith—deep, mature, and abiding—is full of doubt and questioning. This is not an easy truth to swallow. After all, many of us associate doubt and questioning with a lack of faith, with nonbelievers and skeptics. True believers, we tell ourselves, accept things without question. On my journey to deeper faith, however, I found the opposite to be true.  Spiritual maturity is not believing only what we have been told because someone older and wiser has said it is so. Faith must be tested, wrestled and grappled with through questioning and doubts, until it becomes one’s own.

When I was a young Christian, a teenager of sixteen who had declared himself to be one of Christ’s own, mine was a simple faith. In the Young Life youth group, we met together to pray, sing, and study the Bible. My faith was experiential, defined by what I experienced within this loving and accepting community. I was full of questions. I didn’t know anything so I hungered for answers. In this state, I was truly like a child with an insatiable and sincere desire to know Jesus and become a better Christian.

It was a blissful, innocent time when a tiny faith seed had been planted in my life. That phase, however, didn’t last long. I wasn’t satisfied with just being a new Christian. I wanted to know the Bible, to expand my mind so I would have the answers. I didn’t place any priority on feelings. As I saw it, emotions were too close to the appetites and longings that could get someone like me into trouble. I decided to supplant what I felt with what I knew, becoming a voracious student of the Bible. This endeavor continued for years.

In my first year in ministry, I obtained the reading list from friends who were in seminary and devoured an entire year’s coursework on my own. I toted around thick books on theology, which I consumed like popcorn. I committed scripture to memory and learned the “right” way to interpret it. I devoted myself to Christian apologetics to prove the validity of the Christian faith and counter any worldly doubts or arguments to the contrary.  I wore my knowledge like armor.  I was a warrior who could win over most challengers and slay cynics with the sword of “truth.”

My goal was to master my understanding of Christianity, replace all doubt and answer all questions. I trusted only the Bible and those whose expertise in interpreting the scriptures was greater than my own. Unwittingly, though, I became a master of dogma. I understood theology, knew the Bible inside and out, and could quote scripture endlessly. Although I could explain doctrines and knew the creeds, it was not the same as personal faith. Dogma is someone else’s teaching; like a legal position on a certain issue. Dogma is knowledge devoid of relationship.

My perception of God was as limited and narrow as my view of the world. I didn’t dare question any of it for fear that at any moment I would find myself on the wrong side of God—just as I had worried as a child about doing anything to draw my father’s anger or my mom’s disapproval. Questioning was neither safe nor profitable.  What I thought God wanted me to do was trust what others said was true in the Bible and doubt everything else.

Even when I was in my thirties and began to surround myself with intelligent, thoughtful people who challenged my beliefs, I was terrified to look honestly at what I believed. I thought I should be through with doubting. My role was to answer others’ questions, not to spend a lot of time formulating my own. If the Bible said it, I believed it and thought I was responsible to defend it. If I felt a twinge of discomfort over something in the Bible—for example, God telling Abraham to murder his son, Isaac, or the genocide of every Canaanite man, woman, and child when the Israelites invaded the Promised Land—I searched to find an explanation until I was satisfied.

Cloaked in my knowledge, I hid from my feelings and from myself.  I tried to hide from God, too, hoping to stay under His radar; appeasing Him with good works, but never to draw too my attention to myself. This behavior went against what I said I believed. I knew from scripture that Jesus was “the way, the truth, and the life,” (John 14:6).  I could cite chapter and verse that proved God loved us, that every hair on our heads is counted. (Matthew 10:30) But I could never imagine a God who would be big enough and patient enough to allow me to doubt, question, and challenge Him. I was much too afraid of being punished and ostracized by the community to seriously embrace my doubts.

Watch for the release of Grappling with God and continue reading about my struggle to deepen my intimacy with God and meet my hunger for more of Him.

 

Pursuing Your Purpose

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(This is an exerpt from the ninth chapter of my soon to be released book, Grappling with God: The Battle for Authentic Faith. This chapter emphasizes the power of discovering and passionately pursuing our purpose in the service of fulfilling our life project.)


Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus. (Phil 3:12-14)

 

When I was a young boy I found an identity and a sense of security in athletics. Every football season I played as hard as I could, and more often than not I was rewarded with recognition for my accomplishments. By the time I transitioned from junior high to high school, however, I realized that football was not going to sustain me. The sense of community I derived from the team ended with the season. By late November or early December, I was alone again with no social connections.

What I experienced as a teenager, I realized much later, was a kind of existential panic; struggling socially and wondering what I was all about, what mattered to me. As I pondered these questions my life confused me. On the field, I was the roughest, toughest player, yet elsewhere I was the one people would come to when they had trouble. How could both parts be true: the hard-hitting football player and the sensitive kid? Only much later could I see that this two-sided conflict revealed my deep sense of pain and loss that stemmed from my upbringing. Unconsciously, I identified with those who had troubles and sorrow, although I could not fully feel or admit to mine. And, the only place I could act out my anger was on the football field. Unable to see that truth about myself, I vacillated each year from football to loneliness.

In February of my sophomore year in high school, a couple of guys who were also athletes on the wrestling team invited me to come to a group with them. I was blown away! It had been two years since I had been invited anywhere. Of course I said yes; I would have agreed to anything.

Their invitation was to Young Life, a Christian youth group. It was a straightforward “Jesus loves you” gathering with prayers and guitar playing. From that first meeting, I felt loved and accepted. Here was the sense of belonging I had always wanted. I spent the next couple of months participating in every Young Life activity I could: retreats, workshops, and Bible studies. By June, I had a profound experience which led me to make a commitment to become a lifelong follower of Christ.

My connection with Young Life was stronger than anything I had felt before. Not with the Boy Scouts, where I had become one of the youngest Eagle Scout in northern California. (Once I earned that distinction, I quit because I had accomplished my goal. It never occurred to me that scouting was a community.) Not in football, because I knew that the team and I would part ways at the end of every season. Not even within my family. Through Young Life I found my life—what I was all about. In other words, I found my purpose.

An Unchanging Purpose

Over the years, my purpose has not changed: to experience and then to radiate and share the love of Christ. How I’ve lived that purpose has evolved as I’ve grown and matured in experience and understanding. When I was in college, my vision of what it meant to be a disciple of Christ led me to devote about 25 hours a week directly to some type of ministry activity. (Given the fact that I was also a varsity athlete, it’s little wonder that there wasn’t much time left for my undergraduate studies.) After I graduated from college and following a brief stint of working as a carpenter, I went into the ministry. Through that experience I discovered another way to live out my purpose, with passion for helping people to overcome the blocks and obstacles that prevented them from taking in the love of Christ and maturing in their faith in God.

At the time I was unaware of what was driving my passion to help others. It wasn’t until years later that I could see how I was trying to heal myself from the abuse I had suffered in my childhood. Because it was hidden in my unconscious at the time, I projected myself onto other people who were deeply wounded. I tried to assist them in expanding their faith in God and experiencing a more meaningful relationship with Christ as a way of healing myself.

I began to understand how we could know in our minds that God is loving; however, if we did not feel loved by our own parents we would have great difficulty really believing that God could possibly love us. We cannot trust God if first we don’t acknowledge how violated we felt by the injuries—physical, emotional, psychological, or spiritual—inflicted by trusted caregivers. What we were taught and understood with our minds cannot override what we came to believe in our hearts as children.  In the end, we would default to what we felt was true as children and reject what we would later be taught as adults.

The work we do at the Center for Christian Life Enrichment is to help people make sense of their lives. We support them in making a more meaningful connection with themselves that allows them to experience their feelings and identify their deeper core hungers. As we are able to recognize our hunger for love, authenticity, truth, community, and intimacy, we are able to increasingly participate in a genuine community of faith. We make it a priority to support others in making peace with God and letting in His unconditional love for each of us.