One of the realities of being a semi-regular correspondent with an audience returning day after day looking for something new from your pen is the fact that you will be writing during all the various states of the human experience. Christian writing on the internet has the tendency to sound as if it is always coming from the warm glow of the study, with drippings of devotional gold appearing on the page after hours of prayer and meditation. I’d judge that to be, almost universally, a myth, and I’m not much on mythologies in my Christianity.

There are times that one may be writing out of boredom, other times out of emptiness or despair, and even holding onto the crumbling edge between faith and unbelief. There will be times I will write from a season of joyful usefulness and other times I am writing in the slop of my own sinful pigpen.

That would be today. Reporting live and in person from a week that contained some of my biggest sinful binges this year, I’m Michael Spencer. Your Internet Monk. (Two hours from any priest to confess me and the Baptists will just tell me to take two church services and I’ll feel better next week.)

When I tell anyone that I have shocking sins, they are generally shocked. I am the one who is supposed to speak about shocking sins, but whose sins shouldn’t be shock-worthy. The implication is, of course, that the audience actually has a list of “shocking” sins- running a drug cartel, frequenting prostitutes, rooting for the Yankess- that come to mind when I say my sins are shocking. If I said, “I was a rotten husband,” they would sigh with relief. Thank God. Nothing serious.

I was a rotten human being for most of last week. I was also sick. Probably with H1N1. I just dealt with it, but the day I was most miserable was also the day my wife needed me to be the most attuned to her needs and helpful to her.

Calvinists love to preach that we are dead in trespasses and sins, and that’s a true and important component of the Gospel. What is unfortunate is that rather than letting the metaphor be, well….metaphorical, i.e. the life of God is not in us, well meaning enthusiasts try to make being dead the only significant fact in human experience. As is so often the case these days among the theological class, the failure to let all the Biblical images and metaphors live together without having a “there can be only one” party has serious pragmatic results.

The Bible uses disease and sickness as metaphors for sin from cover to cover. (In fact, given its prescientific interpretation of illness, sin is often seen as the cause of illness.) Sinners are sick. Fallen humans are diseased.

What’s interesting about this is that when we say someone is “sick,” we are often eliciting compassion and understanding. Rarely are we saying that a person is responsible for themselves and what they do in the same way they would be if they are healthy. Sickness is….an excuse.

Of course, metaphors have a focus and that is true with saying we are diseased and Christ is the great Physician who “comes to heal the sick, not the healthy.” Sin as sickness is one of the ways we understand what is happening in Jesus’ healings and miracles. Isaiah said that we are healed by his sufferings. All our diseases were placed on him says the prophet and the Gospel.

I’m glad about what I come to know about Jesus’ attitude toward me as a sick person. In a 1983 column, Dr. John Piper explored the sickness metaphor as an image of the community of Jesus. About Jesus as the great Doctor and ourselves as patients he said

Christ is walking among us. Not because we are so much fun to be with but because he loves to make house calls on patients who glory in his medical expertise. He is not partial to the healthy. But he has a special fondness for the homeliest, weakest, sickliest patients whose eyes sparkle when he enters the room….What a motley sanatorium we are! Paralyzed, clubfooted, humpbacked, pockfaced, nearsighted, cancer-eaten! But there is life at Bethlehem! The Doctor’s here! He’ll touch any sore without a flinch. And O, how it soothes. He spends time. He talks. He looks you in the eye. He takes your elbow when you rise. He asks how Jake is doing. He promises he’ll be back. And he comes!

Actual, physical illness amplifies the greatness of God’s compassion, and it also illuminates my wretched sinful condition. In illness, my sinfulness takes on cartoonishly monstrous dimensions. I become the Godzilla of sin.

By mid-week, I was miserable, feverish and feeling as if I’d been hit by a bus. These are the flu symptoms I recognize from the few times I’ve had the flu.

My first- sinful- thought is that I cannot miss work. I’ve never missed a class for being sick in 18 years. I’ve never missed a day of work for being sick, including being in my room to meet families on Family Day….when I had Chicken Pox. (I covered them in make up.) I’m feeding my idol of being essential, irreplaceable and absolutely necessary.

See. Shocking. It’s Halloween.

Mid week my wife needs me to be in charge of matters on an important day. I’m willing, but now that I’m sick, I’m doing everything with the attitude of a captured and tortured prisoner of war. Nothing is too small for me to immediately think of myself as the only person of worth on the planet. When she needs me to be attentive and sensitive, I am…..to me and the flu. Of course, I season this with some classic verbal idiocy, whining and pouting so that my sin isn’t just ordinary, but especially cruel.

I’m almost worse than useless for the situation we have to deal with that day and I make the whole matter far more stressful for her. Of course, all I can think about is the flu that seems to be settling into my chest.

And then, as my final performance, I come home and go to bed…..in order to get up the next morning and act as if the whole focus can now be off her and on me and the flu.

The next day, I’m supposed to help get the house ready for visitors if I feel better. I can barely make it to work, and when I come home, I crash again, offering no help. My flu eventually causes a change of venues for the visitors- my daughter’s home- and I am left alone to recover. I’m dimly aware that it must be hard to like me when I’m sick and as I start to feel better my suspicions increase that my wife, who has treated me as any sick husband should be treated and with more kindness, probably should have smothered me and blamed the swine flu. No jury in my county would convict her.

Sin and sickness. Sinners and sick persons. Jesus loves us as both. That’s more than I can comprehend. Because in my illness I am short-sighted, self-consumed, uncaring toward others, hyper-sensitive, dictatorial and immaturely manipulative. Once I’m over it, I want to put all my rotten behavior in the “Well, I was sick” file, but even I can’t entirely buy it.

I’m just a sick, rotten, selfish jerk. With a lot of repenting to do and a lot of sin to confess.

Sometimes, really, the Gospel seems too good.

But then, when I’m not sick, I’m still a sinner. I live in ways contrived to excuse my sin, avoid the truth and keep up a religiously acceptable front.

It takes the swine flu to show me, and remind me, that with just a small push, I’m very comfortable living in the mud.

Gracious God, our sins are too heavy to carry, too real to hide, and too deep to undo. Forgive what our lips tremble to name, what our hearts can no longer bear, and what has become for us a consuming fire of judgment. Set us free from a past that we cannot change; open to us a future in which we can be changed; and grant us grace to grow more and more in your likeness and image, through Jesus Christ, the light of the world. Amen.

A wonderful picture of the Father’s grace toward us. If you have been told that God is not like this, remember that in Jesus he is more like this than you could ever imagine.

Let go forever of the scolding, punishing God who demands perfection. Embrace the Father who blesses us and delights in us because of his over-flowing love.

Our school has a student work program, and one of the most popular jobs is working on the yard crew. Our boys love to work with the tractors, mowers and weed-eaters.

Especially weed-eaters. It’s a certain sign of spring when I hear the yard crew outside the window of my house, and I can hear the sound of 4 or 5 weed-eater motors revving up like NASCAR racers waiting the start of the race.

There’s nothing quite as empowering to a middle school boy as to be given a weed-eater of his very own. Armed with the machine, safety glasses and an orientation, they come marching across the campus taking on weeds and untrimmed grass like Sherman’s march to the sea.

If there was ever any tentativeness in these weed-eating workers, it all vanishes when they get their first taste of the power of the weed-eater. With a squeeze of the trigger, the power to eliminate weeds replaces the fear of what might happen in using such a dangerous device. Lazy middle school boys are transformed into the scourge of weeds and untidy lawns everywhere.

There is, unfortunately, a not so charming side effect of this transformation. In the ensuing attack on weeds and sidewalk scruffiness of all kinds, most of the other flora and fauna of the campus is put at some risk from overenthusiastic weed warriors.

So in addition to a tidy campus and well attended faculty and staff lawns, there are frequent attacks on flower beds, gardens and much loved decorative hedges and bushes. Small fences are no obstacle to a boy convinced that some stray sprig of wayward grass is attempting to survive the Day of the Weed-eater.

Flowers and other decorative plants are at real risk when the power of a gang of boys go out into the neighborhood to do good. They are armed and dangerous. The neighborhood will be improved.

With time and guidance, these eager young naturalists will learn to wield the power of the weed-eater with more patient and judgement. They will become dependable servants of the cause of an attractive campus. But there will be those first few forays into battle, and the results are predictably predictable.

So as I get older, I see many of my zealous brothers and sisters armed with the Bible, heading out into the church to do what they believe is a good work of killing weeds.

The results are predictably predictable.

Be less enthralled with your ability to trim the grass brothers, friends. Be less certain that you are qualified to tell the difference between a weed and a flower that has yet to bloom. Learn to use your power equipment carefully. You can do a lot of damage. All does not depend on you cutting down every unknown and out of place plant. You are not saving us from the arrival of the jungle. You are making things look better. It is an important job, but not to be taken overly seriously.

You can hurt someone with that weed-eater. it can tear up a tree or even a nice porch. It can mess you up. It has great potential for good, but it can cut down a garden in a matter of seconds. Learn to tell the difference. Be less fascinated by all that power and more committed to having the eye and heart of a cultivator.

There is a battle with weeds to be fought. Cut them down as needed. But be cautious, not self-righteous. You cannot make every edge straight. Most weeds will grow back. A weed-eater isn’t the right tool for every job.

It was the Pharisees that Jesus criticized for their weed-eater mentality. They were obsessed with separation. They were tithing their spices. They were experts in staying on the case until the weeds were revealed.

Jesus wants us to be gardeners, but we do have to deal with weeds. Did any gardener ever say “Let the weeds grow” except for Jesus?

Some of us have set our sights (sites) on being full-time weed eaters and we’re having a very good time. The body of Christ needs a few. But only a few. And be careful, please. Very careful.

There are other ways to pull weeds of course. Not nearly as much fun, but I have to wonder what Jesus would think of today’s “Sons of Thunder” and their weed-eating zeal.

Whoever is not against us is for us. Who said that? Someone trying to keep the weed-eating crew useful, and not a dangerous nuisance.

Pastor Matt Chandler gave this illustration during his sermon at a recent Desiring God conference. I think this illustration powerfully communicates the difference between moralism and the Christian gospel.

During my freshman year of college, I sat next to a 26-year-old single mother trying to get her degree. We began a dialogue about the grace and mercy of Christ in the cross. Some other guys and I would go over and babysit her child and try to talk with her. A friend of mine was in a band playing in the area and we invited her to hear him. She agreed. She thought it would be a concert. I knew better. It was shady and she agreed to come.

The minister got up and said, “Today I want to talk to you about sex.” And I immediately thought, Uh oh. He took a red rose, smelled it, showed how pretty it was. Then, threw it out in the crowd and told them to smell the rose. “I want you to smell it and touch it and feel the texture in it.” (There were about 1000 people there.) He then began one of the worst, most horrific handlings of what sex is and isn’t that I ever sat through. It was fear-mongering at its best.

I’m thinking, with Kim beside me, What are you doing? As he wrapped up, he asked, “Where’s my rose?”

Some kid brought the rose back and it was broken. The petals were broken. And he lifts it up. And his big crescendo is to lift up that broken rose and say, “Now who would want this?”

Anger welled up within me and I wanted to say, “JESUS WANTS THE ROSE! That’s the point of the gospel! That Jesus wants the rose. That he made him who knew no sin to be sin for us that we might become the righteousness of God. While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

In my classes, when you get it right- just right- I say “That’s What I’m Talkin’ About!”

That’s what he’s talkin’ about.

Chandler’s podcasted sermons will do you a world of good. Catholics: I bought your gear, you can have Chandler for free. Don’t miss him

Let me describe the essence of Christmas holidays in our house:

“It was there, so I ate it.” (Or in the case of egg nog, “It was there, so I drank it….and bought more….and drank it.”)

Anyone else feelin’ me on this one?

You’re standing in the kitchen eating a cookie. You aren’t hungry. You don’t need it. You really don’t even want it. You don’t like the taste of the cookie for cryin’ out loud!

But it was there, so you ate it.

Make fun of Rick Warren’s “Purpose Driven” thing all you want, but at least the idea is to have a purpose, as opposed to being ruled over by boredom and the need to chew on something.

Paul may be a deep theologian, but he could use some vivid descriptions when he wanted to. Like “Their God is their belly.”

(Anyone else hearing that line in a Scottish accent? Sorta rhyming with “babies?”)

Here’s your choice: The Trinitarian God of the Bible or your belly. Father, Son and Holy Spirit in eternal, dynamic, loving relationship with one another and the world….or your stomach. The God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the God of Scripture, the God of Isaiah and Revelation and Daniel….or your appetites.

But you see…it was there, so I ate it.

What’s “there?” “There” is “available to the senses.” “There” is “present now to satisfy me now.” “There” is real, not imaginary.

It was “There,” so I ate it. It didn’t even take a snake to talk me into it.

Actually, to tell the truth, a lot of us spend our lives looking for whatever is “there” so we can “eat it.” It’s so much easier than the risks of walking a different path. It’s so much more familiar and predictable and secure than the risks of faith. It’s safe, and the “belly” says “This is what you want. Trust me on that one.”

We’re a collection of appetites, and none of them- not security, food, sex, significance, glory, safety, money, pleasure, amusement- are God. None of them are reliable guides to the way of a disciple of Jesus.

Paul says to the Philippians, follow my example. Not your appetite.

Follow the way that I have pointed out to you over and over again with tears.

Look at the way you are living, and measure it against those who place no value on Christ, have no time for Christ and are walking away from Christ and his Kingdom. Aside from your rhetoric and the more obvious, easier choices….is there that much of a difference?

Look at where you appetites are taking you. Look at what they are telling you. Look at what thy are doing to you.

Instead of living like the citizen of the Kingdom of God; instead of living a life that is a sign and foretaste of the resurrection, you are living in such a small, appetite dominated circle that “It was there, so I ate it” can describe vast tracts of your life.

Of course, we swim in the waters of a culture that says follow your appetites; make them your gods. What better to trust than all your own “want tos.”

I’m not talking about “wretched urgency” here. I’m talking about vast tracts of life spent in front of a game, or porn, or food, or doing nothing. Just lots of nothing.

I’m not suggesting Paul was enemy of a nap, a game or a cookie. I am suggesting that when a nap or a cookie or another hour of video games or another movie are taking on unquestioned authority for how you spend large portions of your life, then we should hear Paul again:

Your appetite is not God.

“It was there, so I ate it” is not the life Jesus has given me to live.

It’s another life entirely. A sad, small life that trades the glory of Christ for a bowl of soup….or a cookie.

This post is inspired by a FoxNews piece updating the situation of disgraced megachurch pastor Ted Haggard. Haggard was a major leader in evangelicalism until he was brought down by evidence of sexual sin and drug use.

Dear Ted,

May I call you Ted? Not “Pastor Ted,” “Reverend Haggard” or any other ministerial name.

You may not feel like it, but you’re at a good place. Finally. It’s taken a while, but you’ve made it to the place where the Gospel of Jesus has its power. On the verge of the fourth Sunday of the season of waiting, you’ve made it to the place where all that can happen now is for a savior to be born to a virgin. Your savior, no less. Yours and all the other losers.

Yes Ted, honesty, your best gift now has arrived.

“Disgraced evangelical leader Ted Haggard says in a new documentary that he still struggles with his sexuality yet is committed to his marriage for the sake of his children.”

Struggles. YES!

“He now sells insurance and, in the documentary, says he isn’t successful. ” At this stage in my life, I am a loser,” he says.”

Loser. YES!

Ted, I hope I’m not telling you anything you don’t know, but all those years that you lived in the center of the evangelical circus, all those years you covered up your struggles and desires, all those years you were taught to lie, deny, obfuscate and yammer on and on with various high-octane versions of the evangelical revival story (complete with band and movie clips), you were far, far away from the truth.

You were living a lie and you were teaching a lie.

And some of the things you’ve said since your fall? How you were fixed with a few sessions of counseling? Not good, Ted. Not good. A very bad place. Avoid it.

Now, Ted, now…now you are starting to see the light. You can say “I was abused as a second grader.” “I struggle…..I’m a loser.” This is major progress.

My recommendation is to find a good group somewhere that will understand how you feel and what you’ve experienced. You see, the evangelical version of that you can say you strugglED and you WERE a loser, but now everything is all right because you prayed a prayer, got saved and got called to preach. You know that’s not true- you’re not all right. You’re a walking wreck and lying about it has just made things worse.

What you hid, denied and buried rose up out of the dark place where you stuffed it and took over your life. I know that feeling very well. You’re suddenly a person without integrity. The truth isn’t in you. You’ve lived a lie and now the truth is going to have its day.

So here you are selling insurance. I suggest you stay right there, or someplace similar, for a very long time.

I suggest you find some other “losers” and compare notes.

I’d like to affirm your instinct that just any place in evangelicalism probably won’t do right now. Some evangelicals will be good companions, but most won’t. You understand this, but let’s explain this to those still fascinated by the coffee bar in the common area.

Ted, gentle readers, is now living proof that “it” doesn’t work the way “it” is supposed to work. Ted is now a living demonstration that, darn it, we aren’t fixable. A good church with a kickin’ band? Great shoes and suits? Sermons researched by assistants and delivered with the proper film clips and jokes? Nope. Tear filled illustrations? Prayer groups? Sermon series on mp3? Book? Seventeen verses of the latest “I love you Jesus” song? A big smile?

All worthless for real sinners like Ted and yours truly.

No Ted, it’s resurrection or nothing. It’s Jesus does the whole deal or there is no deal.

I see that hand. What? Can’t we have transformation and victory now?

Transformation….yes. Transformed from lying to telling the truth. Transformed from this religious act to honest confession of sin. Transformed from this celebrity saint to this loser on his knees at the table of the Lord. “Even the dogs get the crumbs.” Yes, transformed so that the Gospel’s diagnosis and truth make sense in the deep, dark places of your life.

But fixed? Cured? “Victorious?” “Your Best Life Now?” No. The deepest disease of the soul isn’t sexual sin or meth or lying. The deepest sin of the soul is prideful autonomy, the very thing evangelicals demand in their celebrities. There’s only one cure: dying and rising. Until then, believe the Gospel with an open heart, and walk in the power of the Spirit- who keeps you on your knees depending on Jesus- until Jesus finishes the job.

By all means, Ted, find a community. Find a church that gives you the Gospel over and over and over again. A church that has no time for the evangelical circus.

But know that the community of “strugglers” and “losers” centered around the Gospel and the Table aren’t going to be there behind most church signs. Still, don’t give up. Jesus wasn’t lying about his church. It’s on earth, but you have to be willing to touch the leper, embrace the adulteress, include the sexual struggler, love the loser. You have to see the ugly, the broken, the lonely, last, least and lost to see that community.

And you have to see Jesus in the simple Gospel proclaimed, in the bread and the wine. In the things that don’t make megachurches anymore. In fact, you may be surprised where you find that community, Ted. Jesus is famously unconcerned with the kind of people he calls his friends. I hope you’re learning that.

You’ve been given a great gift in your honest struggle and confession of being a loser. You’re on the way. You’re on the road. Don’t whine about it. Don’t make the mistake of seeing the broad evangelical Disneyland as your destination. You’re at that point where George Bailey stood on the bridge. You can despair….and jump. Or you can know that God has sent his hope, love and good news to you in a barn, where shepherds worship in tearful silence; where a man receives a gift he never created; where a virgin says yes even to the unthinkable that grace can do the impossible.

Go there, Ted. Find that place. Go as a struggler, a loser, one with nothing. Go and know that this, and all it means and will ever mean, is for you. For you….a savior. A savior of strugglers, losers and worse.

your friend and fellow loser,

Michael

Read and think about it:

There is another reason I care deeply about the gospel of Christ, and it has to do with my dad. It’s a story I want to share with you.

My dad had an unusual life. He grew up in Appalachian poverty. He had an 8th grade education. He made little money. He failed at a lot of jobs, but did well at some things that didn’t pay much money. He was friendly and funny most of the time, but also tended to be bitter, angry, short-tempered and depressed. After his health collapsed and depression took over, he had a lot of bad days and a lot of good days. You just never knew.

My dad grew up in a large family, and his younger brother became a very popular preacher. There was a lot of Appalachian mountain religion in him: emotional, fatalistic, mysterious, full of a God that couldn’t really be known or loved, but had to be dealt with anyway. He was converted, but he also left his first wife and family, living for years in shame, anger and dread over what that kind of failure meant. He wrestled with whether he was a Christian, and always wept at prayer. (Hearing my dad pray at night before he went to bed is a memory that always stays with me, especially knowing he was praying for me.)

Because my dad considered himself a sinner and a failure, he didn’t go to church. His brother was the pastor, and the church was nearby. But as fate would have it, his first wife and his daughter were also there. So he didn’t go to church. He sat at home, exiled from the preaching of the Gospel. (I really believe if he had been there much he would have lived at the altar.) he wrestled with issues of shame and self-righteous anger. He loved God, but there was something that kept his joy far away. He seldom experienced the kind of joy in the Gospel that should be the food and drink of the people of God. He never, in my memory, took the Lord’s Supper.

He heard me preach about 5 times in his life. Of all the things in my life I regret, that one is at the top.

To hear this next part of the story, however, it is important to know that my dad read the Bible and loved God. I never doubted that he was a soundly converted man who knew what the gospel was all about. He saw himself as a Christian, though a rather self-defined one.

My dad didn’t read books, though he was very smart. I never saw a Christian book in the house. I never heard him listening to a TV or radio preacher, though they were available.

That was my dad. So the story is quite simple. I hope you will see why it affected me, and why I carry it to the pulpit every time I preach.

It was 1986. I was working as an associate minister at a large First Baptist Church. I got to see my folks a few times a year. Dad’s mental health was better than in the past, but he was in his mid 70’s now, and starting to look and act more frail.

We’d come back to western Kentucky on a holiday, visited with our parents and were with my folks the morning we were starting home. Dad went into the back room and came out with a set of cassette tapes. Six in a set.

He handed them to me. “The Cross: Your Victory Today.” It was a set of sermons on the cross by Dr. Charles Stanley at First Baptist Atlanta, Georgia.

“Do you know about this?”

I thought he meant Dr. Stanley…or cassette taped sermon series that you could order. I started to answer along those lines.

“No…do you know about this…what he’s talking about?”

He meant the cross. Did I know about the cross. My 70+ year old dad was asking me if I knew about the message of the cross. It was a new discovery for him, and he wanted to share it with me.

I’ve looked at these tape titles many times since that day. The titles were about Jesus saving work on the cross. Substitution. Taking our sins upon himself. Giving us his righteousness. Setting us free from the penalty of sin and purchasing every benefit of salvation.

My dad was asking me if I knew about this. About the cross. He might have wondered if this could possibly be true, or why I hadn’t shared this with him. Maybe he just wanted my verification that such a thing could be true.

If you don’t know about Appalachian mountain religion, then you may not understand that it’s possible to go to church and be around Christians for years hearing about the devil, heaven, mama, the end of the world, sin, morals, family, miracles, prayer and twenty other things…and almost never hear about the cross.

But it’s not just mountain churches; it’s evangelicals and Christians of all kinds. You can be in church, around Christians and neck deep in a Christian culture and not understand the heart of the Gospel.

My dad, in his mid 70’s, after years of fearing God, praying to God and hoping that God would take him to heaven, finally learned about the cross and all that it means to the very heart of our faith.

How does that happen? Dad wasn’t in church much, so it’s no surprise, but that still doesn’t soften the blow. Dad didn’t know what I knew as a 16 year old boy. He didn’t know about the cross until Charles Stanley told him. When he did, it was good news. Good news for a man with many sins, many failures and many, many fears. Now he knew that the cross wasn’t just a bad event done to a good man. Now he knew the cross was for him.

This is why I tell my preachers that I want them to preach the Gospel. I don’t want their stories and anecdotes if they aren’t leading us to the cross. I don’t want to hear lessons from the Bible to help my students be better people. I want them to hear about, be moved by, be compelled to consider the God who was crucified for them.

My dad listened to those tapes a lot. They are now very close to me as I type. They are the good news he heard as an old man. I want the men who preach with me and to our students to take up the cross, and lift high the one on the cross. May the Gospel be preached so that in the light of the cross we can see who we are, who God is, and be in awe of all he’s done for us in his gracious Gospel.

It was in my advanced placement English IV class. Our brightest seniors. I’m fortunate to be able to work with them.

A few days before we’d taken our final exam, and with two days left in the quarter, I decided to show the 1989 Peter Weir movie, Dead Poet’s Society, featuring Robin Williams in one of his finest performances, and then write an essay.

It’s the late 1950’s, and conformity is in the air at little Welton Academy, a college prepatory boarding school where Mr. Keating has been hired to teach senior English. Keating tosses the boys some high-grade existentialism and budding beat philosophy along with an adolescent love of romantic literature. The effect of Keating’s mentoring on his young charges is explosive, with results varying from the revelatory to the tragic.

If you haven’t seen the film in the last twenty years, then prepare for a spoiler. One of the boys, Neil Perry, has been ordered by his compulsively authoritarian father to become a doctor. Neil has little reason to resist until the acting bug bites and, against his father’s express wishes, he plays the part of Puck in a community production of A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream. His father is furious and pulls Neil out of Welton with the intention of sending him to military school.

His first night home, Neil commits suicide.

I asked my students to write Neil a letter, assuming that he would read it before killing himself. I’ve done this assignment before, but this time I asked the students to read their letters before the class, with one student designated as a responder.

Predictably, all of the students advised Neil, among other things, to wait till he was 18, then do whatever he wanted to do, no matter what his father wanted for him. The point was getting out from under the authoritarian father and doing whatever you most wanted to do in life.

It was a good assignment and we had a good discussion. Then I asked Kim Kwan, one of my Korean students, to read his letter.

We have a lot of Korean students. They are, in the main, some of our hard-working and most successful students. I’m fascinated by the process they are part of as they bridge two cultures. This is particularly obvious on the subject of the value of education, as we were about to learn.

Kim very matter of factly told the class that Neil should obey his parents and become a doctor. Kim said that Neil’s parents had sacrificed for him and they loved him. His greatest happiness should be in doing what they wanted him to do in life.

My American students were stunned, to say the least.

Further, Kim said he related to Neil because he had wanted to be in the hotel industry, but his family wanted him to be a dentist. Without any of the expected bribery, his parents simply told him that he should be a dentist, and he changed his mind and vocational direction. His parents, he said, were willing to work hard and sacrifice so he could become a dentist, and he beleived their wisdom was best for him. He could make many persons’ lives better as a dentist, and he might even make enough money to buy a hotel. It might be difficult sometimes to make this choice, but it was the right decision and the way to the most happiness.

He trusted his parents, and he wanted to honor them.

The reaction of our students- and my own- was fairly predictable. We simply would never go this far. In fact, I have doubts, as a Christian, that anyone should go this far, though I have no problem with using as much influence as possible to keep a student in school and in a position to make a choice of careers based on a degree and an education.

But deciding for them? Like an arranged marriage? Believing that I know what my son or daughter should do with the rest of their lives? I’m not that competent. My own feelings about freedom are mixed in with my desire to be a good parent. In the end, I support my children’s decisions about vocation.

But I’m also an American. I’ve never believed that self-sacrifice was all that great an idea. My students and I are hard-wired to avoid difficult choices that might be less than what we wanted at the time. Why can’t we all do what we want as much of the time as possible? Why trust anyone when you can follow your own dreams and desires?

Kim was telling us that, in his worldview, doing what he wanted was not the way to happiness. Trusting his parents was the way to happiness, even if it meant sacrifice, suffering, an uphill struggle in a career that wasn’t his first choice.

Honoring his parents was more important to him than doing what he wanted to do.

We wanted his parents to make their happiness dependent on letting Kim do whatever he wanted to do.

Sound familiar?

Yes, that’s where I’m going.
‘
I thought about it all day.

I should trust and honor God. I should trust his choices that are not my first choices. I should trust the sacrifice he has made for me. What further proof do I need that he is for me and wants what is best for me?

Why do I assume that the Gospel is all about a God who makes my happiness and a guarantee of my
choices his greatest concern? Why do I assume that discipleship is a process where I will always get what I want, the way I want it, when I want it?

Why do I think that the way chosen for me by a loving Father can’t possibly be that path of sacrifice; that path of difficulty?

Why does what Kim Kwan is saying sound so strange to me? Why does it sound so unlike the way I want God to be?

Why does it irritate me that he trusts his parents so much?

Today, I was the student and my Korean friend was the teacher. I’m not signing up for the superiority of this way of being family, but I see the beauty of it as well as the weaknesses. What I see most clearly of all is what Ravi Zacharias called “the imprint of the Father” on the human soul; the deeply imprinted fingerprints of a time when we trusted God more than we trusted ourselves. The deep imprint of what it means to be made in such a way that you know your happiness and your own choices are not the ultimate path to joy.

The shadow of the cross that lies at the heart of the Father’s love; the cross that made Paul say “I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live. Yet not I, but Christ lives in me.”

Friday night high school football with several other men is a highlight of fall for me, and last night was the first game we’d seen. The who, what and where aren’t important, but one aspect of the game was memorable.

The officiating crew was terrible. I know that’s a frequent complaint, but I didn’t really have a dog in the fight and the team I was modestly pulling for won, so I’m not whining. The terrible officiating simply ruined the game. I felt bad for everyone: fans, coaches and, of course, the boys.

In short, the officials threw over 30 flags, most of them frivolous, and mostly in the second half when one team had some hope of gaining momentum enough to make up a three touchdown deficit. There were four reversed calls. Four! Four times the announcer read the signal, the teams reacted, and then a couple of minutes later- without benefit of instant replay- the call was reversed, usually taking away a fumble recovery or a first down.

The coaches repeatedly received sideline warnings for being out on the playing field pleading their case. I usually find coach complaints unprofessional, but these coaches were in the middle of complete chaos and they couldn’t be blamed for speaking up.

It appeared to me and my friends that one referee was making most of these calls, and the others were gently trying to correct him and restrain his excessive penalty calling impulses. But to no avail. By the fourth quarter, both teams looked completely drained. The game had gone on much longer than a normal game. For the entire third and fourth quarters, it seemed that no more than two plays in a row occurred without a penalty.

Tempers briefly flared between the teams, which gave us some hope that the game would get interesting, but the referees quelled that as well. With the last 12 minutes left, everyone on the field was out of it, and even the crowd was silent with disgust.

Really, it was one of the worst displays of officiating I’ve ever seen.

It reminded me a lot of lessons for those of us who minister to and with the body of Christ. So Christian leaders, ministry leaders, pastors, youth ministers, denominational types, preachers, evangelists, district superintendents, bishops, cardinals and popes……consider a few lessons from a very badly officiated football game. If you can’t see how it applies to what we do, throw a flag in the comments.

1. Let the team play the game. It’s about the Gospel first, then it’s about people, then the church. It’s not about you until we get well down the list of what’s important.

2. You’re there to serve, and if you truly serve you will rarely need to be the person everyone thinks about or talks about all the time. Other people will look good. Everyone will have a stake in a good experience. You will look competent.

3. Find that balance between you doing your job and the regular Christian doing his/hers. When good leaders are finished, it looks like they were working with a great team.

4. You don’t have to call every infraction you see. Question your sensitivity to pointing out what is wrong. Barney Fife was probably right most of the time when he arrested jaywalkers. The compulsion to make the game about your ability to see infractions is a disqualifier from being an official, in my opinion. There’s a difference between looking the other way all the time and seeing where leadership is needed judiciously.

5. If you have to be escorted to your car by law enforcement, you probably didn’t do a very good job that day. (I know that’s not universally true, and sometimes you have to make the tough call and make lots of people unhappy. But that should be rare, not regular.) If you have to change your phone number and are constantly talking about those who are out to get you, consider a reality check. That angry mob may be the only way to get your attention.

6. If we go home talking about how many times you told everyone that something was wrong, I doubt that we heard the Gospel. An abundance of corrections isn’t Good News, in case you didn’t know that.

7. Yes, some coaches and players are upset with the officials who are “just doing their job.” And yes, you can probably quote the rulebook better than they can. But remember that the striped shirt and the rulebook don’t insure that you are anyone’s superior or that you have seen everything and understand everything. Sometimes the other guy really did see the play better than you did.

God called you to demonstrate his gifts and to use yours. In that order, about 98% to 2%.

8. When your fellow referees tell you it’s time to back off a bit for the sake of the game and your own integrity as an official, listen to them. They may see something you need to see, but that you can’t see while you are practicing your two handed double flag toss act.

9. That despondent look on the players’ faces after your 20th flag of the night…..pay close attention to it. It’s telling you something nothing else will; something sad that’s hard to put into words. Remember that if that player quits tomorrow, he can be blamed, of course. But you are a large part of why. You took away his joy and convinced him that his best efforts were pointless. He knows he’s imperfect. Do you know that about yourself?

10. One of the good things about being an official in this game is we don’t have to reinvent our identity or our role with every game. Those striped shirts are about continuity with what’s best, not about originality in officiating. In other words, stay old school. Hide behind the masters. There have been great officials before us that showed us what to do and how to do it in a way that made te game better. Learn from those examples. Imitate them. Doubt yourself and your instant reactions a bit more. Search for wisdom even more diligently than you share yours.

I.

On Thursday, almost everyone I work with was at a waterpark about an hour away, including my family. I opted to stay home and get work done, as school is about to start and I am way behind on several projects that have to be completed soon.

While the entire staff is gone, a volunteer group from one of our supporting churches comes and does whatever needs to be done in order to keep everything safe and running in the absence of all the support staff. These are people who come a very long way just to do a servant ministry on this one day.

So I was on campus and had to go to the main office for a moment, and outside that building was one man from this group, enjoying the beauty of the day on our nearly deserted campus. I passed him going in and spoke briefly, and on my way out I did the same. He was friendly, but it was all small talk.

So as I approached my car across the street from the bench where he was sitting in the yard, he says, “I like that Internet Monk web site.”

Now, a bit of a detour. I’m not the internet monk around here. In fact, while I know a lot of my co-workers read the site, not all do so in a supportive way. So not only do I never mention it, I really make an effort to completely keep it under the radar as much as possible.

But it’s important to know that a good bit of what I do hear is from those few who are offended by something I say. And that has caused me endless hours of stress and confusion over whether I should stop writing or not. My choice, obviously, is to keep writing, because God has given me hundreds of thousands of readers and what happens at this site is, if my mail is accurate, overwhelmingly positive.

I’ve decided that God made me who I am: a communicator and a writer. I can be a better one in my context, but I won’t ever cease to be one.

But I just never know what someone who is a supporter of our ministry thinks, because it’s the nature of things that it’s the criticism that is brought to my attention.

So here sits this Baptist man, a middle aged deacon, and I didn’t even know he knew my name. And he wants to say to me that he, for one, likes this web site and likes what I write.

I turned around and was silent for a moment, then I said “Well, thank you very much. It’s good to hear that.”

He walked toward me and said, “I’ve had some Bible questions I wanted to ask you….” and away we went on the witch at Endor.

I needed that.

II.

My wife was at work, and the pastor of the local Baptist church came by to talk print shop business.

Being a pastor, the conversation turned to church, and he said “I know you’re going through a transition right now, and I wanted to give you something.”

Background: My wife has been an important part of our local Baptist church. Played the piano for services when asked. Played piano for choir rehearsals a lot. Sang in the choir. She’s loved and liked by the staff and people.

Knowing that they now know she’s going to the Roman Catholic Church, and knowing that I’m deeply struggling with it as a husband and a minister, it’s been difficult for her to know how people feel about her. Especially the pastor. (These are Southern Baptists, who aren’t exactly famous for ecumenical fervor.)

So she was expecting an anti-Catholic tract or some sort of Protestant apologetic book. She’s had some minor brushes with unfriendly comments already from some who attend the church.

He held out to her a crucifix. An older one from its look. A gift for her.

“My step-father was a Catholic, and this belonged to him. I thought you would appreciate it.”

And then he offered to come by and pray with us anytime, and to be pastor to our family in this unusual situation.

My list of people who have responded to all of this with any measure of simple Christian compassion had five names on it. Now I’ll be adding a sixth.

III.

There is discouragement in my world, but if I am honest, most of it is smaller than I make it. I am the one who amplifies it most of the time.

As I’ve learned to listen more and more to the promptings of the Holy Spirit, I’m learning that Jesus was very dependable when he taught us that the Kingdom of God is upon is. Right here, right now, close by.

I choose to not see it because I am lobbying for that most destructive of emotions: self-pity. Jesus is reminding me that there is sufficiency in the love he extends, and the love he places around us. That love comes in thousands of different ways in a day.

The problem is that I don’t expect it, don’t listen or look for it, don’t live in expectation that his gracious love will meet me throughout the day.

Lamentations 3:22-24 “Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. I say to myself, “The Lord is my portion; therefore I will wait for him.”