“Ignorance is bliss.” English poet Thomas Gray

Yesterday I tweeted an old thought that came to mind a couple of years ago.  It said, “Which is better, to be happily deceived or disillusioned, yet aware?” So much of my life over the last 10 years has been about wrestling with my own disillusions, yet aware that they exist.

And as I was driving this morning I was thinking there are essentially three approaches to dealing with pain and suffering.  We can simply ignore the pain and suffering, moving through life as happily deceived, yet still suffering under the weight of circumstance.  We can acknowledge it’s existence as though we have no capacity or power to deal with it.  Or we choose to move in through and beyond it by addressing it.

The first option I think is the most common.  It’s just easier to ignore reality, even when it our ignorance is the very thing that fuels that reality’s existence.  The second option is depressive.  To see the problem and resolve the self to the idea that nothing can change is despairing, if not nihilistic.  The third option is to confront the problem causing the pain and suffering.  Yet to do that we have to assume we have the capacity to overcome it.  And unless we see who we really are, as beloved children of God, we likely won’t.

When Jesus said, “Come follow me,” I can’t ignore that it led him to the cross.  But the cross was a waystation.  It wasn’t the final destination.  What if Jesus knew that to get to the other side of pain and suffering we had to go through it.

I’m learning that my ignorance is not bliss.  It’s destructive and painful in all the wrong ways.  It compels me to infinitely poor choices that usually lead to regret.  But when I confront my ignorance and set down my pride, I can usually find my way through.

I was also thinking, “So much of pain and suffering feels like hell.  It feels like walking through the fire.  It feels like separation from God.  Because in the midst of pain and suffering, when I’m ridiculously honest with myself, my heart is crying out, “Where are you God!”  Is it really possible that God could actually forget me.

“When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned; the flames will not set you ablaze.” Isa 43:2

The only way I can discover the other side of the cross is to keep walking towards it.

I had a thought the other day.  If God’s judgment leaves someone out of the Kingdom of Heaven, which can be rationally described as hell, then I’m going to hell.

Did I get your attention?

Here’s why I’m going to hell.  The broad assumption in evangelical Christianity is that in order to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, one must speak a specific belief of Jesus.  This was called the sinner’s prayer when I was growing up.

So let’s say that is true.  It is then arguable that most of the Eastern world, Australia, Asia, and much of the Arab and Jewish world would be excluded. The primary assumption in that model is that grace is only true once it is accepted.  It becomes true in the cosmos, when we accept it.  As Rob Bell asked, “Will billions and billions of people burn forever in hell?”

I’ve said that prayer. I learned to recite it daily in college because I constantly wondered if I had said it right.  When someone speaks this prayer, they are considered in…mostly. ;-P  So I’m assuming that I’m in.  In fact, as Paul would often suggest, I must be in.  I’ve committed my entire life, my entire way of being to following this Jesus guy.  I gave up my career in business to pursue ministry.  I spent most of my life savings so I could spend time developing community based discipleship programs. I wrote a book on the Gospel.  None of that get me in heaven. It simply is.

But if I’ve learned anything from following Jesus, if I’ve learned anything from the Gospel, it is that it is relentless in its pursuit of the lost.  Jesus spoke parable after parable of the lost sheep, coin, and son. If there are people on the outside of the gates of heaven, then I’m rallying the troops inside to go find them.  I’m going to hell to remind them of who they are: children of the living God who are called very good.

Love doesn’t end.  The mission isn’t over if someone is on the outside of the gates.  There is still someone who doesn’t know the message.  Call me a dreamer, but I just can’t see Jesus going all the way to the cross and then saying, “Yep, they just didn’t get it while they were alive.  Let’s leave ‘em to rot and burn.”

Care to come with me?

About six years ago I made the choice to commit my life to the practice of love.  Lately I’ve been having some of the deepest conversations with people about what it means to step into love, especially people we consider our enemy.  Some of it came from this post, which asked what it would feel like to see our darkest enemy standing next to us in heaven.  Loving the other, especially when they don’t reciprocate is hard.  It feels pointless to a certain extent.  In some ways it feels like I’m trying to change the other into someone who loves back.  In my desire to love I also want to be understood.  I want the other to get that I am not an enemy.

But as I write that I am confronted by my own impressions.  In some sense, and probably most of it, what I am really wrestling with is that I can’t seem to change my own perspective.  Is my frustration that I can’t see the other as anything other than an enemy?  My frustration is then not in the lack of change in the other, but that I can’t seem to change my own perspective, to live as though they are my friend.  Because I can’t ignore that my desire for them to change is a condition of our relationship.

I’m really exploring what it means to sit in the midst of the tension and suffering without the prerequisite of change, to just be.  So much of my life (and I know this is partly a guy thing) is to fix stuff.  But right now I can’t fix some stuff.  I just have to let it be.  And letting it be means allowing the other the space to just be.  I’m exploring what it means to just sit in a space and understand someone else’s suffering, without the need to change or fix it.

And let me say, IT’S HARD.  I recognize that sitting in the space of suffering and just being, without answers, and seeking just to understand means I have to put my own agenda away for a while.

Why is there such a tension with grace?

This past week Jay Bakker, son of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, was profiled in The New Yorker.  The article surprised me in some respects because it was a profile on an emergent perspective.  It’s a fair feature piece on a guy who has been to hell and back, and then chose to go live in the midst of suffering for the sake of the Gospel.  I’ve met Jay and he is truly as genuine as they come.

But on the third page of the article the author draws out the tension some have with Jay’s approach.  It states:

None of this thinking has endeared Bakker to the conservative-Christian behemoth. “I think a movement founded on rebellion is going to collapse under the weight of its own moralism,” says the Evangelical writer Ted Kluck, who accuses Revolution of substituting the arrogance of the traditional church with its own. To others, Bakker is not moral enough: He is engaging in “cafeteria Christianity,” picking only the parts of the faith that suit him. By focusing on grace, he is absolving sinners. He’s been threatened physically at speaking engagements and been told he’s leading people to hell. But Bakker speaks like a true believer. “Another type of reformation is happening,” he says. “And when a reformation is happening, the reformers aren’t recognized as reformers. They’re seen as heretics.”

The central tension is that Jay is focusing too much on grace. And when the author draws out the tension by saying, “he is absolving sinners,” I couldn’t help but think of this verse.

5 When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralyzed man, “Son, your sins are forgiven.”

6 Now some teachers of the law were sitting there, thinking to themselves, 7 “Why does this fellow talk like that? He’s blaspheming! Who can forgive sins but God alone?”

8 Immediately Jesus knew in his spirit that this was what they were thinking in their hearts, and he said to them, “Why are you thinking these things? 9 Which is easier: to say to this paralyzed man, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Get up, take your mat and walk’? 10 But I want you to know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins.” So he said to the man, 11 “I tell you, get up, take your mat and go home.” 12 He got up, took his mat and walked out in full view of them all. This amazed everyone and they praised God, saying, “We have never seen anything like this!” (Mark 2:5-12)

The Gospel begins with this radical notion of grace and forgiveness.  Isn’t one of the central responsibilities of the priesthood to dispense grace? And if Jesus gets to dispense forgiveness in the name of the Father, then I get to.  Jay Bakker gets to.  We all get to.  That is the truth.

Where is the safest place to put our anger?

Some of you may have heard that Adam Walker Cleveland lost his twin sons in the middle of the pregnancy.  It’s one of those things that has no real point of ground.  There’s just no words or thoughts that can bring a sense of peace to these kind of moments. As Adam painfully states, it just sucks.

So I appreciate Adam’s honesty in his post “Yelling At God.” Adam chose to share his heart in the moment of deepest pain.

Yesterday I took a ride on my scooter out to Morgan Territory – an area that has a lot of hikes just outside of Livermore. It was a beautiful day out and I thought that while Sarah got a massage, I would take a ride. As I got out into the country, I found myself praying to God in my head and letting God know about my frustrations with what has happened in the past few days. However, as I got further out of town, I found myself beginning to audibly start talking to God and eventually found myself yelling at God.

I don’t feel the need to write out everything I said – primarily because I know some of the people who read this blog would not want to see those words. But they were things that I needed to say out loud. Certainly nothing God didn’t already know, but it was important for me to yell these things at God. Essentially – this was my “giving God the middle finger moment.”

A younger version of me would have been pretty scared to hear the things I was saying to God…but I’m not worried. There is a biblical precedent for being pissed at God. And I’m pissed. This is unfair. It’s wrong. It sucks. It’s not what was supposed to happen. It’s not what Sarah and I should have to be going through.

When we got home from the hospital on Monday night, I was just so mad. And I still am. And I know that probably won’t go away for awhile. And God knows that I’m mad. And God can take it. God can take my profanity, my anger, my tears and anything else that I might bring to God.

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Why are you so far from saving me,
so far from the words of my groaning?
My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer, 
by night, but I find no rest.

I am grateful for Adam’s words today.  For he chose to share his gift of pain. I needed that reminder of what it means to be human in the moments when life seems to conspire against us.  Yet Adam chose to bring it to God.

It’s so easy to miss that one of the deepest purposes of the cross is the place where we pour out our anger.  The cross is God recognizing we need a place to put it.  So God says, “Give it to me.”  And in this space it becomes our redemption.

A Gospel Of Suffering from The Work Of The People on Vimeo.

Why does God allow suffering?

A week ago I had the pleasure of meeting with Missiongathering community and presenting Discovering The God Imagination. And while this was the statement I heard the most, it was a late night gathering on the deck that produced the best question for me.

As people were asking me questions and processing a very different way of seeing the Gospel, a woman asked me, “Why do you think God allowed suffering?” The question caught me for a second, but then she responded to her own question with a unique response.  She said, “Maybe because God thought we could get through it.”

I honestly couldn’t get that idea out of my mind after she said it.  Part of the message of the cross is the idea that we can make it through the suffering.  God actually took the risk because we were capable of overcoming it.

What do you think?  How do you feel about the idea that God believes you can overcome?

BTW, one of my favorite songs of all time is Ashley Cleveland’s I See You.

One of the central conflicts in the human story is how we deal with the reality of unspeakable evil.  I make the argument in Discovering The God Imagination: Reconstructing A Whole New Christianity that the cross is God’s response to how far we as humans think we can go.  It invites us into the reality that there is nothing we can do to lose the love of God.  But we can lose site of it.  And because of this possibility we still encounter evil.  It still exists.  To engage the God imagination means going through the cross.  And that’s not easy to do.

I received the following letter from a friend who is working through Discovering The God Imagination.  His letter is brutal but at the same time deeply hopeful.  I look forward to your response to it.

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I enjoyed the youtube promo clips – well done! It was my wife’s birthday yesterday and your book was part of our dinner conversation at the steak house last night. I’m glad I finally had a chance to let her know why I feel so passionate about the whole matter and why I spent quite a bit of time thinking and blogging about it.

Less than an hour ago, I received a phone call from the daughter-in-law of one our elderly church members. Her dad had been in a wheelchair for the last 20 years of their marriage and just died a few months ago. Being widowed hasn’t been easy but somewhat manageable for the mother-in-law but she also has a younger brother who is a bit slow (not quite mentally retarded) – a very gentle soul who couldn’t hurt a fly. He’s come to church with her many times. Earlier this week he became victim of a home invasion during the night. He woke up from the commotion and the invaders beat him into a pulp. They broke his neck and back, threw him down the stairs and then tried to set the house on fire on top of him.

I don’t know any details how he survived but he’s in ICU right now and the doctors are predicting that he will be in a wheelchair for the rest of his life as well.

The daughter-in-law told me that her mom was pretty mad at God after receiving the news. It’s more than understandable. It’s one thing to intellectualize the problem of evil and quite another to have it hit so close to home. It really puts the God imagination to the test like nothing else. It’s hard to see unchanged dignity in people capable of such unspeakable evil and unprovoked violence. It’s difficult to maintain faith in humanity and an unshaken belief in the continuing perspective of ferocious love in God for the enemies when love itself has been so utterly perverted into senseless satanic brutality against the innocent and when you have to experience and endure it yourself or see it happen to a loved one. That particular aspect of the cross is being repeated over and over in our world, not always to such an extreme but brutal enough to leave all of us scarred in the end.

I guess what I’m trying to say is: as simple and compelling the God imagination may be to an open mind and in the attempt to grasp the meaning of God’s story, the very reality of evil and our personal encounters with it can easily shout louder in their presentation of evidence to the contrary. It’s in situations like this where one feels much more compelled to embrace a concept of utter depravity and evil identity of human beings who are all bound for judgment and hell unless they miraculously change by God’s intervention. We judge the tree by its fruit. If the fruit is so evil, obviously the tree must be evil as well. It is the question who we really are when the evil evidence presents itself.

How do you talk to a victim of horrible violence about God and about those who inflicted the suffering? I know that what we want to hear is that God hates these criminals just as much if not more than we do. What we want to hear is that even though they got off the hook now, God is going to get them later. Justice will be served. They’ll burn in hell and deservedly so. And we hear it as an echo of all the martyrs whose blood still cries out for justice.

Problem is: where does that leave US? Are we incapable of the same evil? I know that deep down we really believe that we could never do what these guys did, or those who ran concentration camps, gulags and alike – who seemingly without any remorse abuse, torture and kill. We really do divide humanity into the good guys and the bad guys. And we’re convinced that in heaven we finally don’t have to deal with the bad guys anymore. But there’s always that nagging question too that just won’t go away: am I really good enough? Will God possibly judge me as evil too? We may not carry with us the same degree and depth of evil but still enough to know that there’s lots in our own lives that cannot pass as holy and pure.

For me personally, it still all comes down to the meaning of the cross. The cross reveals the evil inside of me just as it does reveal the evil in those who were complicit in Jesus’ arrest and execution or who actually carried it out. But it reveals at the same time how far God’s love and grace is willing to go – not to give evil a free pass and encourage it to continue but to give everyone a chance to see evil clearly and embrace love instead – a love that sees value in people apart from their evil deeds and is undeterred by hate and senseless brutality, a love that has the power to free us from hate and transform us into lovers ourselves.

So my conclusion is this: Suffering and our broken understanding of it may speak louder than the truth but it cannot drown it out. If our evil acts determine our identity and those of others, we’re all doomed, not just those who are beyond the line of acceptability in our own thinking. Thoughts of revenge and deserved wrath may be a true reflection of our understanding of evil but they don’t solve anything. It doesn’t really lessen our pain nor will it change the perpetrators. The only way to heal is by seeing and embracing God’s way of redeeming through consciously and willingly taking up the cross as an act of love towards all. We can only overcome the sting of suffering and death by embracing suffering and death ourselves. I’m not able to love this way apart from being profoundly impacted by God’s same love for me.

Those are some intitial thoughts after feeling quite numb having heard what happened. Maybe you have some comments of your own. I’d be happy to hear them.

Much love,

(Friend)

Note: Please feel free to share your thoughts on the letter and what it means to love in the midst of unspeakable violence.

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Discovering The God Imagination: Reconstructing A Whole New Christianity offers a sweeping new interpretation of the narrative of Christianity, Jonathan Brink explores the remarkable dissonance between our historical understanding of Gospel and what the story in Scripture actually reveals.  It offers a compelling possibility for those looking to reconstruct their faith in a whole new way. Available today from CreateSpace and Amazon. Order from CreateSpace and use code 5GFARGT9 to receive a 15% discount.

Contrary to public opinion, I think the Bachelor and the Bachelorette are important shows. Seriously? You ask.

This post started because my friend Kate Murray shared her thoughts on the show. She said:

Last night I watched the Bachelorette.  I never watch the Bachelorette.  I don’t know what got into me, but I sat on the couch, for two hours, listening to the guys “tell all” and recount their stories from the season.  Mostly I watched as they and this season’s Bachelorette, Ali, spoke of finding love and her quest to find the man of her dreams.

But as I watched, I thought about how different their experiences have been from my own – and if any relationship that begins in such a setting (not only in exotic locations, but on national TV) can survive the reality of life (most don’t – I think only two or three couples have actually made it down the aisle and are still together).

Her observations made me thing of another show I watch with my kids.  It’s called Wipeout. Contestants navigate an obstacle course and get pummeled a long the way. What I’ve noticed is that the course is designed to produce moments of hilarious pummeling. In other words, its designed for the laugh, not the contestants.  There are points in the course that the contestants simply can’t get by without experiencing a dramatic wipeout, hence the name.

The producers of Wipeout are smart because they pick really interesting, and rather kooky people who are willing to look silly on tv.  Those willing to make fun of themselves have the chance to win 50 thousand dollars. They highlight those willing to make fun of themselves. Its no unusual for contestants to dance in costumes, shout native calls, talk about their desire for breast reduction surgery (a male), and show their ninja skills.

I’ve watched the Bachelor and the Bachelorette in the past and I can help but wonder the same thing. The show is not really designed to produce relationship. It’s designed to produce a moment where we cringe, guffaw, and laugh AT the contestants. Both shows are like a pressure cookers designed to produce cringe worthy moments where someone melts down on television.  Those are the moments everyone talks about on Twitter and Facebook.  “Did you see that guy last night get the tattoo for the girl.  LOSER.”  We’re in on the gag because we now know from the history of the show that no matter how much they think its real, it is not.  No matter how much they try, there is a high degree of probability that they will not make it.  In other words, the show is for our experience, not the contestants.

I think we watch because the show gives us our dream scenario.  Contestants are given dream situations for their dates, romantic possibilities that only a few could experience, and are then expected to make a choice that is largely undignifying no matter how much they rationalize it.  But if the dream does anything it shows that it more likely a nightmare.

This is a very powerful video on people’s experiences of being judged, specifically within the church space.  I have felt some of these statements myself and have seen them in other people’s lives.  Not trying to be funny but I really loved the story of the guy who stole the Jesus statue for his grandmother.  Its sad that a little boy did something for such good reasons but it became one of the defining negative events of his lives.

Judgment is so destructive.  When we exclude someone from love, when we see someone as outside of the possibility of being loved, it ruins people.  I would suggest the people who are doing the judging are the one’s suffering more because they are likely unaware of what they are doing.  But in the end I think everyone falls into that category to an extent.

Love wins out in the end.

[Note: The above video contains graphic violence.]

Sometimes I wonder if our fear of hell in the afterlife is keeping us from seeing the reality of hell in this life.

Some of you may know that I spent some time working in Hollywood.  I wanted to be a screenwriter after growing up watching movies.  I was captivated by the storytelling process in a visual medium.  Two of my favorite directors were Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorcese. To this day A Clockwork Orange remains one of the most haunting movies I have ever seen. If Kubrick and Scorcese have done anything it is display the brutal reality of the human situation.  We like to kill each other, sometimes in horrific ways.  We don’t like the idea that we are capable of such madness, yet we watch it.

Well some guy decided to mash these two directors together using 34 of their films to produce three short segments.  What is brilliant about it is that it in a very simple way captures the madness that both directors seemed to present but in a very simple narrative.  By isolating the emotion, it magnifies the emotion.  The first section explores violence.  The second section explores madness.  And the third section explores the anger of loss.  In all three sections  I couldn’t help but see the reality of hell.

The second section is particularly interesting to me because it seems to explore the reality of our own brokenness.  I think the central question in the entire human story is, “Are we good or evil?”  And at certain times in our lives we are struck with consequences that actually suggest we are evil.  The expression on the characters faces provides an amazing glimpse into that moment.  This is the moment when we’re contemplating the need and want for redemption yet it seems beyond our grasp.  That is hell to me.  It’s that moment when we see ourselves as beyond the love of God, with no hope.  If we extend that thought to eternity, we are trapped.

What do you think of the video?  And if you’re so inclined, what do you think of hell?