I was talking with a friend recently, and she asked me about my convictions as a Christian. “If someone were to ask you what you think about the way they live,” she said, “what would you say?”
This is a question I’ve thought about a lot since moving to NYC, and I believe it is one of the areas in my life where there has been profound growth over the past several years. After growing up as a Christian, going to a Christian college, and then moving back home for a few years, living in NYC has been the first time in my life where most of my friends are not Christians. So naturally, for my first six months of living here, this question weighed on my heart. I think this is a question that people who grow up as Christians all struggle with, and, quite honestly, often come up with the wrong answers to. As a culture, Christianity in the US very often errs on the side of legalistically telling the greater population how they should be living, instead of telling them the reasons why. It’s almost impossible to avoid this, when growing up in a Christian home. For a large percentage of Christian kids, their faith doesn’t get truly thought through until high school or college, and until then the values their parents impress on them come across as things that are done just because that’s the way it should be. This is often not the fault of the parents (though sometimes it is, if they are more concerned with keeping their kids from doing bad things than encouraging them to make the faith their own.) My parents, and many parents I knew, constantly preached the gospel to their children. I remember my mother saying, once, “Someday, I hope you love Jesus more than you love me.” Yet until the Spirit works in a child’s heart, even those with the most proactive parents often see the faith through nothing but legalistic eyes. Even once the faith takes root and becomes knit deep into the bones, it’s hard to shake this sense of cultural morality. As a child, when friends asked me why I did or didn’t do the things I did, my understanding of my own depravity and the depths of the gospel was not extensive enough to truly explain the choices, so more often than not I would spout a platitude or cite a rule. Combined with the directive to be missionary-minded and bear witness for the gospel, I and Christian kids like me often began to see our role in the world as a kind of Christian rule-minders, beginning first with our Christian friends and inevitably crossing over into our interactions with non-Christians. Even into my young twenties there was an anxiety that followed me, as I was never quite sure how outspoken I should be about actions and words that were in direct opposition to Christianity. For children, this is hugely difficult to avoid, and something that has to be worked through individually. Yet the problem is not that Christian children have to work through this, but that it is something that continues into Christian adulthood, and has embedded itself into the fabric of many Christian cultures across the US. I am beginning to see how destructive this mindset is. The answer to my friend’s question, for me, is to first ascertain whether the person I’m speaking with is a Christian or not, because my answer will be different depending on that crucial distinction. I can imagine this statement being misunderstood, or plainly disagreed with, because one of the tenets of the Christian culture in the West seems to have become an expectation that everyone—whether their hearts are in it or not—should abide by the Christian laws (which are different from the civic laws. We're not talking about murder here.) And I want to be very careful, because I don’t want to be misunderstood to the extent that someone would think I am advocating a moral relativity, or saying that I don’t believe the way Christians live is the right path. What I am saying is this: You cannot ask someone to live in accordance with morals they do not profess. As a Christian, I believe I have chosen the path that is not only true, but also best. So it makes sense that I want to share my beliefs and the benefit of living the way I do. As my sister Hannah would say, “If I have the cure to a deadly illness, of course I want to share it with others.” But we cannot force others to take the cure, and we cannot put the cart before the horse. The way Christians are called to live is impossible without the work of the Spirit in their hearts. So how can we expect a society who does not know the Spirit to live in accordance with its radical work? It’s difficult enough for Christians to walk this road. The first step, therefore, is not to condemn a person for actions that are not in accordance with a doctrine she doesn’t believe. The first step is to extend an invitation of the love that knows, sees, and heals. The first step is to introduce a person to the grace of Jesus, and only once she has seen with new eyes can she be expected to make decisions about how her life should be changed and shaped by her new faith. It is within the Body of Christ that the hard work of living in accordance with God’s desires begins. The letters of the New Testament are riddled with commands, warnings, and examples of how we should live, but what Christians often overlook is that these letters are directed not to the unbeliever, but to the Church. Within the Church, by the grace of the Spirit, we begin the process of transformation, which means prayerfully making changes and struggling through complicated decisions. To the unbeliever, the message is simple: come as you are—exactly as you are—and bathe in love beyond all measure. We should tell others why we live as we do, lending advice to those who need it and encouraging them to choose the best path. But we must be careful, with both our children and our unbelieving friends, to point first to the good news that is the root of this change. The freedom of this new understanding overwhelmed me, when I first realized it. I am not the keeper of my friend’s morality. I do not have a required standard for the way my friends act. I can drink with and eat with and speak with my friends who are not Christians and not fear that their choices are somehow my responsibility. Within the church, we have a responsibility to hold one another accountable; outside of the church, our responsibility is only to be honest about our convictions and to extend the reckless love of Jesus. It is not that Christianity has nothing to say to the secular world—in fact it has very much to say, and we should be endlessly extending the gospel of grace to our friends, pleading with them to listen. But only once God’s love is made manifest in a Christian’s heart and the transformation begins can we start to discuss the deep changes that must be made, for it is only then that the lifestyle presented in the gospel will begin to make radical sense. ~Ruthie
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I am certainly a complainer when it comes to what I think I deserve. Because speaking to people I don’t know is difficult for me, it’s very easy for me to judge something like fellowship at church by what I would find comfortable. “No one comes up and talks to me,” I’ll say. “No one invites me to their parties.”
This is, first of all, simply not true. But more than that, it’s the wrong attitude, and I have to turn the question on myself. Do I go up to people? Do I make a point of befriending new faces? Why should I expect others to do it, if I myself won’t? It’s right to desire love from the body of Christ, but I am also the body. I have as much of a responsibility to love as any of the faces I see on Sunday. I’ve recently been thinking about what it means to open myself to being loved. I have this abstract idea of what it would be like to be loved completely, and yet it seldom involves being known. I seem to want people to know how to encourage me and meet my needs without actually being honest about the struggles in my heart. I want to be a sponge, soaking up encouragement and love from the body of Christ without opening myself to the give and take of messy honesty. Just as it’s difficult for me to acknowledge that I can’t expect to build relationships without extending my own words and invitations, it’s difficult for me to acknowledge that in order to open myself up to the love of the church, I have to open myself up to being known. Because the unfortunate truth is that the process of being known is kind of awkward. At least in my experience, revealing my needs tends to reveal some of the less awesome parts of my being. And more than anything, it makes me feel weak. My entire life has pretty much been one big quest to appear strong and whole and capable, so anything that counteracts this feels horrible. These thoughts were put into painful and beautiful clarity this past weekend, when I went on a women’s retreat with my church. If there’s one thing that terrifies me, it’s large groups of Christian women. Besides the fact that meeting new people is just difficult for this ISFJ, it’s hard not to find women who are older, or wealthier, or more successful intimidating. It’s hard not to compare or envy. It’s hard not to try on a coat of spirituality that masks the real issues hiding in my heart. Yet what I found, throughout the weekend, was an expression of God’s love being acted out through his church. In an awkward, messy, joyful way, my heart was first convicted, and then graciously shown the beauty of being known by God and by his women. The weekend began as I had cynically expected. I was confounded by the mechanics of making conversation with women I didn’t know and wasn’t sure I had anything in common with. I listened to women talk about their children and their careers and felt keenly the lack of stability in my life. Almost every woman I met was married or engaged, and I was reminded that for me, all these things are still far off. I spoke about my own passions haltingly. Some of the women from my congregation knew about my job search and asked me how it was going. I replied, “It’s okay!” trying to smooth over the complicated topic. But as the weekend progressed I began to realize, slowly, that there was life cradled in our conversations. These women are the hands and feet of Jesus, I thought to myself. There is no other secret, perfect church that I don’t have access to. These women, and women and men worldwide, and I myself, as disjointed and strange as we all are, are the out workings of Jesus’ love. It is through our conversations and relationships and actions that Jesus chooses to display much of his love for us. And he certainly displayed his love to me through the women on the retreat. When asked about my job search—persistently and often—my words of defense turned into words of honesty, and eventually into words of humble supplication. In admitting that I was worried about the future, and that I didn’t know what the next week or month would hold, I began to let go just a tiny bit of my pride and my constant urge to be in control. The response of love I felt from the women in our three-church network was amazing. It suddenly seemed like every mom wanted me to watch her children; these women may not have been able to offer me a job teaching theater, but while I search for that they offered me what they could. My guarded, shy heart was filled with gratitude. But the moment during the weekend that truly stopped me in my tracks was toward the end. I was speaking with another mother who was questioning me about my passions and the uncertainty of my future, and as we spoke I could see her face grow more and more thoughtful. Finally, she smiled. “I know this probably isn’t helpful,” she said, “but I’m sort of jealous of you.” “Yes,” another mom chimed in. “I know there’s something nice about having the stability, but someday you will look back on this time and remember how exciting it was.” And there it was—God’s hand smacking me upside the head, through the words of two moms. These women were illustrating to me the function of the body of Christ—not just to listen, and learn, and meet the needs of its members, but also to realign perspectives. It’s so very important that we are a diverse body, because it means we can remind each other that God has placed us exactly where each of us is right now, and that not only is it for a purpose, but it is often quite profoundly beautiful. This is my story, filled with bumps and terror and excitement and—beyond everything else—grace. Still, my own story doesn’t mean my individual story, off alone in my bubble of strength and competence. I have committed myself to the body of Christ, and it means peeling back the thick layers of my heart and asking for help when I need it. It means listening to women (and men) who are different from me, and accepting their advice. It means not complaining, but being the first to step forth in love. It means pushing through the veneer of awkwardness and bitterness and cynicism to see a taste of the joyful love Christ shares with us. A love that is so rich I am only ready for a bite, and so deep I can only dip my toe in, and so full I can only stand humbly in the wake of its power. ~Ruthie During the confession portion of the service at my church here in NYC the congregants are encouraged to kneel. I am grateful for this gentle reminder to my body—as is often the case, because my spirit and my body are not separate entities, the physical act of kneeling calls my mind into an attitude of humility and thankfulness.
Today, as the confession came to an end and I began to stand, it occurred to me that never in my life—not once—have I had the opportunity to doubt that God will hear my confession and choose to forgive me. I have never shouted prayers into a void, never expected anything except grace as a response to my confessions. I have known, from the time I was little, not only of my depravity, but also of the grace that always has been, and always will be there. It struck me then, quite fully, how beautiful it is to be able to say that. All of the times I have thought about whether it would be better to have known a world without Christ, so that I would know the difference between the two, were washed away for a moment in the joy of that realization. How I have been held, how I have been treated with gentleness. For all that I have had periods of doubting over the years, I have known deep within myself each time I went to confess not only that my prayers were heard, but also that they were received and atoned for. This is not a small grace. This is a huge one. Each of us has a path, and God’s hand is in each of them. But I think it’s important to recognize, from time to time, both the small graces and the large ones in one’s own life. Quite honestly, all of the fears and worries and unsureness of my present is swallowed up by this large grace, given to me—given to us all. The most beautiful thing about the grace that is true of my life is that it is true of all lives. The deepest, most troubling fear in my own life, and I think in everyone’s life, is the fear of being utterly alone. But regardless of whether man leaves or takes me, I am assured that God is constant. I heard from a friend, recently, that she was deeply troubled by conversations we’d had, long ago in college, about predestination—the idea that God predetermines our paths before we are born. Honestly, the conversations had not been red-letter ones for me. But it seems this issue has always been of utmost importance to her, and she had come to believe that my opinion on the issue is that we as humans are locked into one path or another, with no free will to choose. Now, it’s been quite some time since I last studied any texts on this doctrine, and I think my understanding of the issue was never more than a bit gray. But the fact that this topic has been bugging her has been bugging me, as well, and as I’ve thought about the ideas present in the doctrine of predestination, I think it actually begs us to admit a great degree of humility. As humans we are naturally inclined to know exactly what we think about something, to wrap it up and wipe our hands and move onto the next topic. But many of the arguments for something like predestination end up saying, essentially, This is what the Bible appears to suggest. These are the conclusions I have drawn, and I can draw none further. Now I am willing to live my life in the question mark, making what choices and decisions I can, based on what I have been given. I think it’s possible to say that I believe the doctrine of predestination is true, and also say that I don’t claim to know all the answers. I think it’s possible to make bold claims about what I believe the Bible says, and also to keep an open heart, humbly acknowledging that some things have not been revealed. So today, all of these thoughts—thoughts of grace, and doctrine, and questions—have led me to ponder how much hope there is in the knowledge that we have been given as much as we need. There are many, many things—theological and otherwise—for which we haven’t been given the full picture. But we have been given enough. I have been given enough, whether it is the fact that I will live my life with unanswered questions about doctrine, or whether it is the knowledge of the grace that bathes me through each moment, or whether it is the work and home I currently have. I am willing to live in the question mark, because I know that it is enough. It throws me off balance and brings me up short, but it also presses all around me when I find myself on my knees, my body quietly working to bring stillness to my spirit. There are truths that are solid, that I can dig my feet into, and there are truths that live in the question mark. I am grateful for both. ~Ruthie This afternoon I sat in a quiet house on Forest Avenue, sipping tea while the little girl I nanny slept. A few minutes later, I spoke on the phone with a woman who offered me a position as an assistant teacher for a few hours a week at her theater company. This is my life right now--moment by moment, moving from silence and quiet to decision.
I graduated from my MA program just before Christmas, and through the insanely busy months leading up to it, I was wrapped in the gift of peace. I ran from class to rehearsal to work to job application, and as the craziness coincided with the season of Advent, I found myself resting in peace, knowing that though I had no clear idea of what my life would be like after Christmas, I could trust that it would be good. Somehow it was all wrapped up into one--the season of recognition reminding me to remember that Christ was born into a world of chaos, and if his presence could heal the nations, it certainly also meant that my responsibility should simply be to trust. I am continuing to discover new sides of grace every day. The smallest steps of grace are the most difficult, and the most beautiful. It is patient work, not asking for more than I am given right now. A few weeks out of my program, my needs are met, and my future is piecing together. I am interviewing and applying, and the period of waiting is not over and done. I continue to rest in peace, but the struggle now is not that I have too much to do and too little time to accomplish it, but that I have so much time. I know everyone must deal with this differently, but time has always been difficult for me. The periods in my life that have been the most difficult are those in which I have an abundance of time, because I thrive on work. The more introspective I am, the more I begin to doubt myself. I like to have time for myself, but I also like to feel that things are expected of me, and people depend on me. I want to know that I am needed. Right now, I am full of time. Right now, the pace of my life has drastically shifted from the break-neck speed of pre-Christmas to a soft, gentle plod of cold winter days and shivering toes. I wake in the morning to a luxurious amount of time in which to drink my morning coffee, and I come home each night to long evenings of whatever my heart desires. Instead of telling my friends that I only have one or two nights on which I could possibly hang out, I tell them to pick a night--any night. My life is more open than maybe it has ever been. I know this will only be true for a short period of time. Already the difficult work of decision-making has started--if I say yes to one job, I am automatically saying no to a thousand others. So rather than panicking because I don't have the perfect job yet, or stressing over trying to figure out how to piece together a viable teaching artist schedule, or allowing myself to grow inward and downward, I have been learning to see this time as a great gift. It is a gift that allows me to spend hours writing, and allows me to get to know my roommates better. It allows me to bend to my friends' schedules, to clean my apartment, to read underneath a pile of blankets. It allows me to be quiet, all the way to my soul, and to let God's grace grow in my heart. Peace doesn't come naturally to me. I want to know the future, and control my plans. I want to finally be able to say "THIS is what I do, and THIS is where I will be." But that is not what is mine, right now. What is mine is this: slowness, and patience, and an open heart. These things are enough, now and always. These things are teaching me life. ~Ruthie Yesterday started off the wrong way. My 9am Saturday class is my biggest class, and also my most difficult. Because of a number of things—the earliness of the hour, the large size of the class, the personalities present in it, the fact that half the students don’t show up till the class is half over—the students rarely want to participate, and getting them on their feet and moving feels like pulling teeth. Our class is called “Creative Expressions,” but it’s often far from being either creative or expressive.
Mostly, this just makes me sad. The students in the class are all excellent listeners, highly intelligent, and eloquent writers. We’ve been exploring social issues of their choice, and last week, when I assigned them each to write a monologue and a poem expressing their views on their topics, they turned out incredibly thoughtful pieces on difficult topics such as police brutality, domestic violence, bullying, and homelessness. But when it comes to sharing their writing or standing in front of each other, it’s a flat no. I asked them why, this week. One girl looked at me and said, “I don’t like people’s eyes on me. It feels creepy.” “But life is all about being in front of others,” I said. “And in here, you’re all on the same plane. You’re all sharing your work, so you’re all equal.” But it didn’t make much difference. They’ll share because I tell them to, but they won’t like it. I suspect that in different circumstances, many of them would want to share. I can read the tells, as several of them give dirty looks to their classmates when they talk through their performances, or take just a little longer than a nanosecond on their still images. I opened it up for discussion at the end of our class yesterday, asking the students what could improve the class next semester. “Less people laughing at the people performing,” one of the girls said. I can’t force participation or trust, which is perhaps the most frustrating thing for a teacher to face. In contrast to my difficult 9am class, my 11am class is totally on board with performing their work. One of the most important differences is that the class has only 4 students, and even though they started the semester in the same place as my 9am-ers, we’ve built trust. Yesterday we ended our work on their chosen social issues by presenting short performances that used the words they’ve been writing over the course of the semester and ended with a call to action. Several of the students improv-ed an entire scene on the spot, and two of them shared very personal stories about racial profiling and domestic abuse out loud, standing in front of the class—not hiding behind their pens. When the class ended, one of the girls turned to me. “We didn’t write any of that down, Miss,” she said, speaking about the improv scene. “We just created that off the tops of our heads, right on the spot.” I praised their work, and then I mourned for my 9am class. People often don’t know how badly they want to be seen—seen in a positive way, and not the negative way we’re so used to—until they’ve experienced it. It’s certainly a risk to open yourself up to being seen, and it's one that my 9am class hasn’t tried yet. But my 11am class has, and once you get a taste of it, you never forget it. My goal, for the spring semester, is to find a way for my 9am-ers to build that same trust. ~Ruthie Maybe it's because for the past few months I've been in such an uncertain period of my life, but I've recently been thinking quite a bit about joy. Unlike happiness, which is something that cannot be called upon or chosen, joy is something that we can, in fact, choose to have.
That reality has always kind of confounded me. Because my understanding of joy is usually a false one (mixed up with the idea that it is the same thing as happiness) I've always viewed verses that discuss choosing to have joy, or being overcome with joy, as quite difficult. I want someone to just tell me exactly what it means to choose joy. Joy is slippery, because it must be sincere, but it is also a clear decision. In addition, the Bible not only encourages us to be joyful, it commands us. One passage that has been a stronghold for me for many years is this one from Romans 12:12: Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer. (NIV) I don't know exactly what it means to be "joyful in hope," but I know that I'm commanded to do it. And as with so many other things, that is a good place to start. CS Lewis wrote a whole book that told the story of his journey to joy, called, appropriately, Surprised by Joy. In it, he discusses the ambiguous nature of joy, and explains what he thinks joy is: Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with [happiness and pleasure]; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again... I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world. But then Joy is never in our power and Pleasure often is. And later on Lewis writes: All Joy reminds. It is never a possession, always a desire for something longer ago or further away or still "about to be." In Lewis's opinion, then, joy is something just out of our reach, something that we receive only when in communion with God. And yet we are clearly commanded, throughout the Bible, to rejoice, as in Philippians 4:4: Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice! (NIV) So what does it mean to choose joy? How do we separate joy from the health and wealth gospels and the wrongness of expecting Christianity to bring prosperity and happiness? I think it has to do with the first verse I quoted. Being joyful in hope points to the fact that this is not something we can pull from inside ourselves, or manufacture. It is a constant choice to call ourselves back to the truth of hope--a reminder to fix our eyes on the grace and promises of Jesus. On a super practical level, it probably means reciting the words of the gospel to myself, meditating on the work of Jesus, speaking with God. It means questioning my motivations and assumptions, and forcing myself to weigh my words and my thoughts before sliding to extremes. In this season of life, it means being grateful for the blessings poured out on me, and being patient in the uncertainty. It means trusting in God's provision, and not being cynical about my dreams. It means being faithful to wait, and pray, and cry maybe, and not giving in to the frustration of constantly being in a state of uncertainty. The times in my life when I have had the deepest awareness of both the fragility and the beauty of life are when I've had to wait, and be joyful in hope. Especially during this season of Advent, let us rejoice in the goodness of a God who commands us to pursue something so very good for us. ~Ruthie Last year my brother Daniel released an EP with five songs on it. It was called At Last - Far Off, and it has some of the most beautiful worship arrangements on it. One of my favorites is Psalm 77--it is such a simple refrain, but one that is refreshing and humbling.
Worth listening to, especially during this time of advent. Or check out his new single just released for Christmas, Puer Natus Est. Basically, just listen to his stuff. It's all good. Hello readers, we just created a new RSS feed due to technical problems with the old one. Please make sure you get the new feed here or click on any of the feed buttons!
~ Hannah and Ruthie I've recently been thinking about the Christmas season (for obvious reasons). It seems like it always sneaks up on me, despite the way I roll my eyes when I hear Christmas music playing in mid-October. Maybe it's because for most of my life, the Christmas season has corresponded with the busiest time of classes and finals, and when I come up for air at Thanksgiving, I'm always left saying, "Wait--Christmas? Already?"
Yesterday the pastor of my church back in Pittsburgh preached a really wonderful sermon about what it meant for the second person of the Trinity to come down to earth and become a human: God with us. That phrase has always made me feel a little spooked, in a good way. It should feel mysterious and unfathomable, for God to become human. But often, I don't think it does. Growing up in the church has some interesting side-effects, one of which is not truly realizing how outrageous the claims of Christianity are until much later in life. There are beliefs that I've held my entire life that I've finally stopped and actually thought about, and then found myself thinking, "You have to be crazy to be a Christian." And yet I often feel that the outlandishness of the tenets of Christianity provides some of the most compelling proof of the reality of the gospel. At its core, Christianity is not a nice religion--not a clean religion. It is not sanitized, though many perceive it that way, and many have tried to portray it so. The belief that God became a human and walked among us is high on the list of inconceivable, and quite messy truths. I've spent a lot of time thinking about it in a philosophical sense, and pondering what it meant for God to become human. How could it be? How could a God we claim to be so immense and immeasurable become so small and inconsequential? To take on the life of a human, a speck of nothing in comparison to the vastness of the universe? The implications of that truth are profound. Yet, as my pastor called my attention to yesterday, perhaps what is even more astounding and outlandish are the further implications of what it means to be human. Jesus not only humbled himself to become a human, he humbled himself to become a human. And all that entails. I've spent time reflecting on Jesus' human form, from time to time, when faced with temptation (because we are told that there is no temptation he did not also endure), but I'm not sure I've ever really let it land that he dealt with everything humans deal with. Things like diarrhea, and insomnia, and sweaty armpits. The Son of God had to get potty-trained. I'm not saying this to be flippant. I'm saying this because it matters. It matters a lot. We all have an intimate knowledge of the filth and the unrest in this world, and God did not enter the world as a human surrounded by a sterile bubble. He breathed in the breath of the woman at the well, and touched the puss coming out of the blind man's eyes. He walked through this world catching colds from those who clung to his clothing, and in the end he died a death where he lost control of his bodily functions, just as every human does when they die. He hung on the cross sweating and bleeding and crying, as his body betrayed him unto death. That is what we celebrate at Christmastime. Not the happy glow of an idyllic manger scene, but a woman bleeding on straw while she birthed a savior who knew the ins and outs of pain and struggle. We have hope because God was not above or around us, he was with us. He knows our suffering, because he suffered. Our hope, in this world that is so clearly wrong and sloppy and ugly, is that Jesus knows the world, and he knows us. He doesn't just love us on the days when we've eaten right and done everything on our checklist, he loves us when we're bloated and cynical and crying in our beds. And he has redeemed us. We have an entire month dedicated solely to reveling in this reality, and to celebrating this outlandish, absurd, crazy beautiful truth--so let us celebrate. For to us a child is born. ~Ruthie |
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