Yesterday I had a free day and had the chance to explore OnDemand television. And its funny what a little downtime and curiosity will do. OnDemand allows the viewer to pick the television show and watch it. For some reason I chose to watch Celebrity Rehab and Basketball Wives.  It’s reality television at its finest and ugliest.  I like to call it train wreck television because the joke seems to be on the people willing to spew out their tragedies on television.  They gain the media exposure and in the process reveal the real tragedy of being famous.  Inevitably it gets ugly.

Why do you think people do this?

So the post I wrote on Friday somehow posted with the comments closed. So I wanted to ask.  What are you favorite holiday memories, past or present? Do share.

I was in conversation recently with a group of people creating a network.  The focus was on radical inclusivity and the practice of love in hard places.  And someone said, “We don’t have a creed.”  My first thought was that I liked that idea.  Creeds have a ways of becoming much more than they were originally intended for, largely because they are based on someone’s constructed ideas or thoughts.  But my second thought was that I didn’t want to participate in something where anything goes. I believe the kingdom of God has some structure.

My second thought ran to the command to love.

He answered: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”

Could we create a network not around beliefs, which are fluid and subject to interpretation, but on the practice of love?  Because from what I gather, to love is the fulfillment of all that Jesus was trying to get me to believe. In other words, the simplicity automatically took care of the complexity.  Love is simple.  Beliefs are complex.  And so our beliefs are born out of the practice of love, not the other way around.

What do you think?  Do you think it’s possible, advisable, or just plain wrong to build a network on a creed to love?

This is a post about friendship.

Some of you may know that a couple of weeks I ago I began looking for work.  The long term funding for Thrive ended this summer and I’ve been wrestling with what that means.  I’ve loved every second of ministry and the freedom that it has afforded me to work directly with people.  Yet sometimes really good things come to an end. The hardest part is letting go of what I thought would be a much longer project.

Some of you might wonder if Civitas Press, my boutique publishing agency is the next step.  Surprisingly it has taken off in ways that I could never imagine.  We’ve already got two projects in the works and two more in development.  My hope is to have 12 by summer. I’m working with some of the best people and the interest has astounded me.  But it will likely not provide me with a sustaining income for the next 2 years.  I plan on developing it slowly and putting most of the revenues back into it for some time, because I value it so much. I love the idea of working with writers, thought leaders, and people willing to take the risk to publish their inspiration.

So that leaves me with the present reality of finding work. Meaningful work.

Two weeks ago when I really started this process, the only thing I was hearing was, “Apply.”  I took that to mean begin looking.  So I have.  And as many of you know this process is not easy in this economy.  On average, for every open position, there are 200-300 submissions for that position.  Networking is the critical aspect of the process.  So I called a friend who used to be a recruiter for Cisco.  I used to work in technology and know that I can go back to that space.

This morning we talked extensively about my next steps.  And what struck me about the call is that my friend was willing to give me some really hard advice.  You know that kind of advice that I didn’t want to hear, but needed to hear.  Some of it was just practical reality, and some of it was very inspirational.  I needed to hear it.  And as I got off the call I was very conscious that I have friends.  In the midst of this painful transition, I could see that my biggest blessing is not money, but people.  I am not rich by any stretch of the imagination, but I am wealthy.  I have a community of people around me that are willing to speak into my life in ways that I need.  They’re not blowing smoke.  Their willing to tell me what I need to hear.

And I know that many of you who read this blog have been incredibly valuable in my life. So I say thank you for taking the time in your day to spend a little of it with me here.

Much love my friends

Jonathan

Some of you might think this is a rant.

I just don’t get why men are so afraid of women in ministry.  I grew up in a fairly traditional evangelical church.  Women were never allowed to preach, although they were allowed to give testimonies or share stories, which now seems like a strange dichotomy.  But just below the surface women secretly ran the show.  They were the organizers, servants, and administrators making everything happen.  I know because my mom was the Director of Women’s ministries on several occasions.  If you wanted something done, you called a woman.  And my mom was one of the those women.

Even though this was the prevailing culture in my church, it was never the culture in my home.  My mom (see image above of Lydia McCullough, probably 1976) always began with the idea that a woman could essentially do anything a man could do, and often better.  I grew up being told that a woman is just as empowered as any man. My mom kicked butt and took names with the best of them.  She was the best friend anyone had.  And she loved God.  But God never became a stumbling block to preaching the Gospel.

The traditional response is Paul’s admonition in 1 Cor 1 Corinthians 14:34 – “…women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the Law says.”  The key thing that I’m noticing is Paul’s response of “As the law says.”  I’ve never noticed that before, that he actually clarifies himself by appealing to the law.  In other words, is Paul suggesting that there is a cultural law in place.  Because we treat it as the our law.

But I’ll be honest in saying that although I think it’s a cultural issue, I don’t think it’s the best reason for allowing women to speak in church.  I think in keeping women quiet, we miss half of God’s voice in our midst.  I got to see the lives of the people my mom touched, men included, and I can only imagine what it would have been like had women been allowed to participate in the larger theological dialog on a more proactive basis.  I was reminded of this when I read this from Melody Hanson.

“It frightens me that so much of (most or all) biblical interpretation throughout history was done by men. “

Could it be that so many of our denominational problems, doctrinal issues, and theological debates actually feed the ego of men.  I’ve worked with so many men over the last fifteen years in spiritual formation and we’re just bent toward the logical.  We like thinking.  We like debating and arguing.  We like to be right.  Women are different.  They predominantly feel first.  They get to the heart of the matter because their bent towards relationship. And isn’t that what the Gospel is ultimately trying to get to, a restoration of relationship?

What would it look like if us men actually took the risk to include the other, perhaps stronger, side into that conversation.  I think it would be epic.

If you read this blog, contribute to the dialog or just lurk in the background, I just wanted to take a moment and say thank you for being part of my life.

Poverty is often not what we think it is.  It’s not just about money.

Over the course of my life I have had the remarkable opportunity to meet a range of people across a spectrum of wealth.  This is an observation about those experiences.

I have a friend who has been homeless for fourteen years.  She chooses to be homeless for a myriad of reasons.  She lives on the streets by choice among a group of people who have also been homeless for many years. She has very little money, very little resources, and very little hope.  I would describe her life as an existence at best. When I see her, she holds her hand over her mouth because she has lost most of her upper teeth for various reasons associated with her choices in life. But when I look into her eyes, my heart breaks for her because her poverty is deeper than her possessions or place.

I contrast my friend with two “billionaires” that I have worked with in my life.  Both were exceptionally successful men who had built small empires.  Both happen to drive the same Lexus brand of car, wear incredible business suits, and were always looking for the next big score.  But both were also incredibly arrogant, driven, and lonely. Much of our business endeavors seemed to be about “getting”, which made me really wonder if “enough” is ever enough. Their appetites were insatiable.  Both were friendly…as long as we were making money or dreaming about making money. But when things didn’t work out they way we dreamed, they were ruthless.  Working with them became very hard because we were always the problem when something wrong happened.

Money didn’t change the sense of hopelessness to satisfying what was happening inside.  In both my homeless friends and the two billionaires, I could see a deep sense of wanting that would not go away with or without money. It made me sad but aware that my striving for money could not produce what I wanted it to produce, which was a sense of being comfortable in my own skin.  My heart longed for something more.

I contrast these relationships with a moment in my life that I was profoundly taken aback by the concept of money.  About twenty years ago, I went with my dorm room in college to the “Dumps” in Tiajuana.  The Dump was essentially a hill just inside the border that would be described as a homeless camp.  Most of the houses were half finished brick walls, some with roofs, and mostly without running water.  If it did, it was from a spicket.

We were there with an aid group providing medical services, food supplies, and to put on an arts day camp with the kids.  I remember connecting to this little boy about five who kept grabbing my leg.  What surprised me about him was that he was always smiling.  He was arguably in the same condition as my homeless friend, but he still had relationships.  He lived with his father and mother and two sisters in a one room shack with a broken door.  But he always smiled.  He had hope.

What is interesting about my experience in the Dump was not the it was unique, but that I’ve heard the same story over and over again.  So many of my friends who step into what we think of poverty, often find hope in the darkest of places.  It’s not the money but the perception we hold about our life in the midst of circumstance that defines us.  The little boy had virtually nothing, but he had hope.  When I looked into his eyes I could see it.  But when I looked into the faces of both billionaires, I didn’t see that hope. I saw loneliness.  I saw pain and suffering.  I saw fear that drove them on and on and on.

I’m also not doubting that the little boy had his moments of pain and suffering.  But sometimes I really wonder if poverty is a perception of the self that is empty. The void grows in a way that becomes insatiable.

Have you every had experiences like these?

Scot McKnight shares a story on his blog that I have seen countless times in ministry.  He says,

One time a student came to my office and rather doggedly and aggressively said, “I don’t believe in God.” I knew the student a bit and I knew the student’s family, and I knew enough about the situation to say something that can only be taken as a “prompting.” I said to him, “What I think is that you don’t like your dad.” He stared at me so I suggested more: “You don’t really not believe in God. You don’t like your dad, and your dad is a pastor and therefore you reject not only your dad but everything he stands for.”

Odd thing is that the student agreed with me. Over his college career he gained back most of his faith.

Lately I’ve had so many conversations with people who are just leaving God behind.  I get that.  The conversation about God has shifted into a sort of complacency and disinterest.  But the problem of God doesn’t go away when we leave God behind.  Agnostics, atheists and doubters still talk about God incessantly.  We’re hard wired for God.

Sometimes I wonder if our shift to a postmodern mindset, and a shift away from organized religion has something to do with the loss of the father in the home.  The industrial age took the Father out of the home and it took 100 years to show that it had profound implications for the family.  This is just the first generation to speak up about it in a provocative way.

I hold onto the idea that we search for God because we are on a quest to understand ourselves.  If we are created in the image of God, to reject God is to reject the very thing that informs the self.

What if philosophers got it wrong? What if the basic notion that we are hard-wired for narcissism and self-interest is not as true our our forefathers adamantly ascribed?

I’m deep into The Empathic Civilization, a profound work of human understanding. Jeremy Rifkin suggests that science is now calling into question just about all of our pre-existing notions of human enlightenment and philosophies, many are built on the notion that humans are selfish brutes.  Science is now revealing a little thing called mirror-neurons, which reveal that we are hired wired for connection.  It doesn’t mean we don’t have selfish interests.  It suggests that our bodies are hired wired to transcend those selfish interests automatically.

Mirror neurons work very simply.  In order to understand the world, we internally reconstruct what we see happening outside of our bodies.  In other words, our bodies create meaning by reliving what we see in others.  This ability reveals that we are hard-wired to connect, to feel what others are feelings, to engage other’s pain and suffering, and to help transcend those maladies.

“The essential point is that mirror neurons underwrite the ability to recognize what helps or distresses others, what they suffer and enjoy, what they need and what harms them.” – A.C. Grayling

Rifkin begins his great work by suggesting that there is a strange relationship happening inside the body.

“At the very core of the human story is the paradoxical relationship between empathy and entropy.”  Rifkin,  (p 2)

Empathy is the fullest realization of our design as human beings created in the image of God.  Entropy is the fullest negation of it. So the question is then what keeps us locked into a state of entropy?  What keeps us from realizing what our bodies are already designed to experience?

I wonder if we’re afraid of empathy because if we experience what the other person is experiencing it may just captivate us.  This is the tension of the human story.  Does the experience of evil make us evil? Can we change reality?  I would suggest that this is the underlying tension of the human experience.  Can God transcend what we’ve done and love us then? I would also suggest that the basic human journey is to participate with Jesus in overcoming this death.

This is the brilliance of grace. Grace is the original framework that allows us to live in the midst of chaos and not be defined by it. Actions, or what we’ve done was never the basis for human dignity, or value.  God’s declarations were.

So my question is this.  What keeps you from experiencing what you are already designed to do, which is connection and relationship?

In the simplest of terms. We’re trying to make sense of what it means to be human.

I have a friend who continually hurts himself.  He’s entirely self-destructive in his attempts to make relationships work.  And no matter how much those around him try and love him it just doesn’t seem to make a difference. When he’s sober he’s a really interesting person to hang with.  But when he’s not he’s often found sleeping in a car for months on end.

Eminem’s new video, Love the way you lie, caught my attention this week after thinking about my friend. (Adult version embedded) The song is infectious and explores the dark side of relationships and what it means to be human.  In some ways it explains the world my friend lives in.  It is arguably one of Eminem’s best songs. I don’t think I could have written a better song exploring the tension of the root problem in Discovering The God Imagination: Reconstructing A Whole New Christianity.

The song opens with a provocative line, with Rihanna singing:

Just gonna stand there and watch me burn
But that’s alright
Because I like the way it hurts

Eminem shares the tension by singing:

And I love it the more that I suffer
I suffocate
And right before im about to drown
She resuscitates me
She fucking hates me
And I love it

Their lines made me wonder how often we create conflict because we need to feel.  We actually like pain because its the only way we can feel alive.  We closed our hearts down so much that the only way to engage the human experience is to feel something sharp.  We blunted our capacity to feel in a way that our defense mechanisms won’t let anything in.  What’s interesting is the title, which recognizes our subtle alliance with the lie.  We know its not good for us but we like it because it allows us to feel.

The conflict we create then produces the opposite effect of what we intended. In living in the polar extremes of passion and hate we lose touch with who we really are.

Cause when it’s going good
It’s going great
I’m Superman
With the wind in his bag
She’s Lois Lane
But when it’s bad
It’s awful
I feel so ashamed
I snap
Who’s that dude
I don’t even know his name
I laid hands on her
I’ll never stoop so low again
I guess I don’t know my own strength

The capacity to lose control reveals the moment we’re afraid of.  Maybe we aren’t so good.  Maybe we really are children of a lesser god.  Eminem’s line, “Who’s that dude” resonates on so many levels.  You can hear it in the anger of his voice.  Death has arrived in a way that he did not expect.  We’re longing to be human in a way that produces life. But when we lose site of who we are, we inevitably lose what it means to be human.

The video ends with what I think is a rather intriguing view of hell.  It’s as much a present reality that exists within. We don’t need it to be in the future because we’re already living it now.  Both Eminem and Rihanna are literally consumed by fire, their lives, their stories, their homes and burning.  This is their reality.  Their trapped under the weight of their own judgments, consumed by the evidence that renders them guilt of things they would never want to commit in a million years, but their actions betray them.

One of the central elements that I explore is the idea that we need a substitute.  The evidence produces guilt and the guilt drives us straight to hell.  Bu the problem is not solved when we commit suicide.  So we take out our pain on those we think love us, or as in the video’s bar fight, on those that represent the loved.  We need release from our own imagination in a way that reconciles.  So the cross is God saying, “Release your anger onto me.  I am the only place you can put it.”

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Discovering The God Imagination: Reconstructing A Whole New Christianity explores a profound possibility. What if we’ve misunderstood the Gospel? What if our historical approaches to Christianity have been distorted by the very same problem they are attempting to solve?  Available today from CreateSpace and Amazon. Order from CreateSpace and use code 5GFARGT9 to receive a 15% discount.