His Vigorous Heart

It’s that time of year again: the time I least like being a Christian. Because when it comes to Easter, I really think we’ve gotten the story wrong. (Which is bad, because if we get *this* story wrong, then we’re bound to get a lot of other things about our faith wrong, as well). I saw a quote the other day that went something like this: “What sort of predicament are we in that we should require the crucifixion of the son of God [to save us]?” (The quote then goes on to describe how horrible the suffering of crucifixion is, and how it was designed to make the victim subhuman, etc etc. The point being—I assume—that humans must be truly depraved and wicked if it required a sacrifice of that level to redeem us. The magnitude of a crucifixion sentence should make us somberly consider the ramifications of our depth of evil. We must be well and truly effed on an existential level if this is our only way out). But that assumes there’s a punishment mindset behind this whole story. That assume...

What's the difference between the statements: “Jesus is God,” and: “God is Jesus” ?  By order of the transitive property (thanks, #math) these sentences are saying the exact same thing. Except to many Christians, that might come across as a radical statement. Because to them, they view these two statements as more akin to: “A square is a rectangle,” and: “A rectangle is a square.” (Sorry for the geometry analogy. #math again.) Obviously, the second sentence in this scenario is false. A 'rectangle' is any shape that has two parallel sets of equilateral sides set at 90 degrees to each other. One subset of rectangles exists in which all of the sides are the same length: that is called a 'square.' So while you could say that all squares are rectangles, you can’t  say that all rectangles are squares. A square is a perfect description of a rectangle, but it is also inherently missing some aspect of what the broader possibilities of rectangles represent. (Does that make se...

I don’t know what the heck is wrong with me. I’m currently on my  [technically]  second job since deciding to step down from a ministry position at my dream organization. (The first lasted exactly 2 nightmarish graveyard shifts at 3am for a corporate dystopian warehouse where I had been hired to fulfill a completely different position.) The second is a perfectly fine position at a grocery store deli, working 8 hours a day and making the biggest paycheck of my life, cutting meats and cheeses and being friendly to customers. And I hate it. Because I don’t give a flying fuck about any of it. (Sorry about the language. Fair warning: there's more of it.) When I worked at OneLife (or any of the ministries and non-profits I've been involved with for that matter), I was frustrated by the financial situation I was in. I had food and housing provided, which was an incredible gift that's easy to overlook, but apart from that I was making pennies in a monthly stipend. And like, I get i...

It's been a minute since my last blog post, so how's this for a kick-off sentence: If the person you were five years ago doesn’t consider the person you are right now some sort of heretic, then you aren’t growing. Let me unpack that a bit. Your faith right now has boundaries. Borders. An edge. If that edge is in the same spot a year from now, you aren’t learning, you aren’t growing, you aren’t changing. You’re stagnating. Some say that God is an ocean and our brains are a soda can trying to scoop Him up. But if you’re sitting here with the same canful of ocean water that you started with, you’re missing out on a whole lot of God. (And as my friend Sam Van Eman likes to say: “You can’t afford to stay at your current maturity level.”) If your boundary is growing, then at some point you're going to include ideas and concepts about God that you didn't used to believe. If you had built a wall around your border, you're just going to have to knock it down .  That’s why I’...

Easter. When I was a kid, I was fascinated by the colorful candy, the whimsy of dyed eggs, the thrill of the hunt. As I grew older, I learned the story of the God who became man, who loved us so much that he died in our place. They call it the most beautiful story ever told. But as I got older still, I began to question that narrative. Because no matter how I tried to contort my brain, I couldn’t get that to align with the rest of the Bible story. When I read the teachings of Jesus, I saw him proclaiming a God who had been completely misunderstood by humans. “You have heard it said this...” he would say, and then he would flip the common understanding completely upside down. Jesus taught about forgiveness, non-violence, peace, love, mercy, and grace, and then said that “if you have seen me, you have seen the Father.” (And frankly, it was precisely this subversive teaching that made the religious people conspire to kill him.) And so when Christian churches tell the Easter story, I cring...

I should start a whole blog series called "Notes from my phone" because that's where most of these ideas have started. (Although a friend of a friend already beat me to the punch.) I've toyed around with the idea of posting some of my notes under a "Devil's Advocate" moniker, but that's not entirely what they're about. Mostly, I've been avoiding blogging recently because even outside of college I feel the pressure to write well/be perfectly articulate, and I just don't have the energy for that on this space that's supposed to be a refuge and release for me and for others who may be just like me. The joy of writing has been snuffed out by the need to perform.  So as a practice of overcoming fear--and also just because I am genuinely curious and fascinated about this topic and others that I've typed into my phone but haven't been brave enough to share with the world--I'm going to put it out there in the hope and beli...

It's a twisted view of forgiveness if we think it has to involve punishment.  Actions have consequences, sure. Reparations must be made.  But our imagination is weak if we can think of no restorative forms of justice. Our love is weak if it must rely on vengeance to make things right. Our forgiveness is weak if it only takes place in witnessing the destruction of others.  I wonder what our views about love and forgiveness teach us about how we think about God? I'm watching The Handmaid's Tale right now and I love it. It's brutal and dark and in many ways obviously unrealistic. But as a cautionary parable or metaphor, it shows us how easily religious doctrine can be distorted and misinterpreted in terrible ways that cause great pain to a lot of people. And if such errors can happen in this world, who's to say that we can't make similar mistakes in ours?  Just like Darren Aronofsky's controversial  Noah film, I'm fascinated by the ...

Recently, Nadia Bolz Weber shared an article written by my friend Connor about deconstruction. And today I came across a comment about deconstruction while I was stalking a Facebook post by a friend of a friend (as one does on the internet....no? Am I the only one? Alright.) 10 years ago--even 5 years ago--deconstruction meant something different than it does now. Back then (when cell phones still had hinges) it seemed like a perfect phrase for what I was going through. Like everyone, I had a boat , a house of cards, that I grew up within and was very familiar with. Not a "bubble", per se, but an entire personal framework and foundation for viewing and understanding the world around me. You could almost think of it as my identity; it was the way I interacted with the world, the container in which I held my conception of reality. It was comfortable in my little house, and I had a place to store every single thought or idea. But then slowly I started encountering things th...

Grace: (n) : The free and unmerited favor of God Can we talk about grace for a second? I feel like this has been the year that this concept has been thrown wide open for me, and it’s absolutely blowing me away. Grace isn’t conditional. That might seem obvious, because it’s in the very definition of the term, but somehow it’s sneaked into our doctrinal understandings that we somehow have to earn it. As if there was something we could do to make ourselves worthy of God’s goodness and love and compassion (and even more insidiously, as if we were UN worthy of it in the first place). (Yes, sin exists. Yes, we are capable of great evil. I’m not denying that. Anyone who looks at humans can tell that we are clearly broken in the ways we perpetuate pain and chaos in the world. But the story of creation doesn’t begin in chapter 3 of Genesis; it begins in chapters 1 and 2, where God creates women and men in His own image and calls them good. No matter how much mud and filth we roll around ...

That’s a provocative title, so maybe I’ll come up with something else to call it by the time I’m finished writing. (Here’s hoping) Here’s the deal. I work at a desk job where I do nothing but stuff envelopes all day (and don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful for it in so many ways; it’s teaching me a thing or three about grace , and I’ve already made more in 5 months than I’ve ever been paid in an entire year, so that's cool), but my point is, it’s not exactly what I want to be doing. I have a lot of time to listen to podcasts and reflect on my life and the deeper questions and issues therein, though. And in the process, I’ve discovered a few things about myself and my decisions and the shape my life has taken. So naturally I’m going to talk about it on the internet. First, (and these are in no particular order), I’ve noticed that it’s really, really hard to teach the way of Jesus inside a church. Here’s why: people who go to church already think they know everything. Most of them...

Hey! It’s been a while (yet again) since I’ve posted. So much for New Years’ Resolutions of staying on top of my blog game.  You might remember from last time that I had just moved into an exciting new community house in Roanoke, VA. I’m still here! Things are slowly shifting into place, and we’ve been hard at work making the house a functioning environment. We just welcomed our third member this weekend after he graduated from college, and we’re looking forward to a summer full of events to kick off the Aidan Community in style. (Come on out if you’re in town!) Some of you guys have asked me where I’m working, how life is going, etc. I’m fortunate enough to work right across the street from my house. (You might also remember that my car sort of...exploded...in November and so I was without a set of wheels for about 5 months.) It’s not a thrilling job -- I sit at a desk stuffing envelopes for most of the day -- but it provides my needs, it’s within walking distance, a...