Believers in the Hands of a Loving God

I know you’ve heard it ad nauseum. But let me quote it once again. John 3:16 states, “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have everlasting life.” Anyone who has grown up in the church has been able to spew it out mindlessly since he was old enough to string a sentence that long together. Its popularity is understandable, of course; it is perhaps the most succinct statement of the gospel in the entire Bible.

This verse, however, made me feel disconnected from faith when I was young. I couldn’t understand how God loved me personally. Yeah, I believed that I was lumped into the “whosoever,” but only by the default nature of the word. I believed in theory that God loved me, but only because He had proclaimed His love for everyone. It’s like hearing about a party with an open invite. Sure, in theory you’re invited, but that doesn’t mean that the one throwing the party actually wants or expects you to be there.

I’ve spent most of my life believing that God loved me only in theory, that He loved me only because He’d so rashly proclaimed “whosoever” long before I’d ever been born. It’s just been very recently that I’ve started to accept that maybe He loves me specifically, and intentionally.

But how do I know this? I recently had a conversation with a friend who has been feeling the same way I had been for so long. The worship band had been playing “How He Loves,” with that epic refrain of “He loves us, oh how He loves us,” and he felt completely disconnected from the emotions expressed by the people around him. I tried to encourage him, to tell him I had felt much the same in the past but things had changed. But I couldn’t explain the process. I couldn’t look back and give tangible and useful evidence of the change. There is no twelve-step program for accepting and recognizing God’s intimate love for us. It was just a miracle that God had worked in my life, and I felt helpless in knowing all I could do was to recommend hanging on and waiting for God. I know from my own experience how hollow that sounds to someone in that place.

What changed in me? How is it that I’ve dared to believe that maybe God really does love me in a personal way? The truth is, I had always been hoping for some kind of transcendent moment where God might float down on a big cloud and proclaim in a Morgan Freeman voice that He really does love me, and that all my dreams will come true; I would feel all tingly and ecstatic and want to start dancing in the aisles during church. But I’m sure that even the most surefooted Christians, the ones most secure in their relationship with God, would say that those moments where they feel the direct contact of the Creator are few and far between. There are few who can genuinely say that God has spoken to them audibly, or who can claim to have seen angels, or who have felt the physical touch of invisible hands and arms. And these occurrences are rare even for them.

In my own life I cannot claim any experiences of this nature. The closest I’ve come is a dream I had maybe a month ago, and it’s the only dream I’ve ever had that I can even remember. It started out as a standard dream, where various unrelated points of my past and present life intersected in typically bizarre ways; what details I can recall of this part were related to memories that have contributed to my sense of low self-worth. Then I remember distinctly being surrounded by friends (their faces were not visible, but I knew deep in my heart that they were genuine friends), and they presented me with a jacket. And just looking at it I knew that it would fit me perfectly, and be warm and comfortable and cozy. And all over the lining inside the jacket were scrawled messages of Truth. Like the people around me, the messages were indistinguishable, but I just knew in the most profound way that they were words of Truth about who I was, and how much they cared about me, and how valuable I was. I turned out the inner pockets in the coat, and even there I found Truth written in the shimmery, silken lining. I began to weep, and at that point I woke up to find myself weeping in reality as well.

I can also remember an occasion or two in which I was heavily overcome with a sense of the Spirit while reading Scripture. One such event happened at Bonnaroo, of all places, as I read through Isaiah one morning after the sun had risen too high for me to sleep in the tent, and it’s a moment that I referenced in the lyrics of a song I’ve written and recorded called “First Light.”

But these things are very subjective and personal to me, and of little value recounted to another. So how can I relay to someone that God really does love them personally and intimately? The words “God loves you” ring empty in a scientific and technological society that relies so heavily on the question “Why?”

Let me try approaching this from a different angle.

Evangelism is a major part of the Christian faith. We are called to spread the gospel to unbelievers, and the afore-mentioned John 3:16 is a popular quote in this endeavor. If it were possible to simplify evangelism into two styles, or categories, I would say that there are those that evangelize through the use of words and those that do so through the use of actions. Certainly there is a place for both approaches, but most Christians would tend to lean one way or the other.

Mere words are not enough in this society, though. In 1741, Jonathan Edwards preached the infamous “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” and masses of people were converted. In more recent times, Billy Graham packed out stadiums with his preaching. But modern society has seen an overload of opinions, thanks to the internet and the constant exposure to mass media. Anyone can spout any kind of opinion anywhere, and this makes people jaded to words alone. Maybe passing out tracts in a train station was a viable means of evangelism in the past, but not anymore.

Our society increasingly needs the evangelism of actions. Kids who are growing up in shattered homes, and surrounded by constant stimulus and chatter, are likely only to listen to those who show them genuine love in tangible ways. Words require actions to gain anyone’s attention, and love—genuine, unforced love—is certainly the sort of action that can see positive results.

All that to say, we know that God has called us to be His hands and feet. It’s a cliché already, and Audio Adrenaline copped it for a cheesy youth group anthem. But that doesn’t mean it’s not true and viable. And so that is the more common form of effectual evangelism in our society. We feed the poor, we donate to charities, and we pitch in to help a neighbor who has fallen upon disaster.

Unfortunately, the idea of us being God’s hands and feet has generally been typecast as evangelism, as only being a means of saving souls. But God has called us to be His hands and feet to our fellow believers as well. I’ve heard the words “God loves you” all my life, but in the absence of tangible signs directly from God Himself, it only began to sink into me that God loved me when His followers became His hands and feet to me. And it obviously wasn’t intended as proselytizing; I was already “in the fold,” so why bother? No, they loved me and cared for me genuinely, and this was God’s love becoming tangible in my life.

I think about when Ryan Rado took time out of his day to pick me up where I was stranded by the side of the road and help me pump up the flat tire after I’d succeeded in accidentally letting all the air out. I think about another flat tire, when Aaron Holden picked me up at nearly midnight to give me a ride home, and then Ryan Stubbs came to my house early the next morning and drove me around town while I got the tire situation worked out. I think about all the times Brady Lane has worked his magic underneath the hood of my car. Wow. God has shown His love to me so many times through my piece-of-crap car. It kind of makes the headaches and the wasted money worth it, in a skewed sort of way.

I think about the year my birthday fell on poker night at the Stumps’, and Jamie and the others took the time to bake a cake as a surprise for me. I think about the times I’ve been completely broke, and friends gave me food or had me over for dinner. I think about all the conversations I had with friends like Chris Hayzlett and Kevin Bender, who were gracious enough to put up with my constant complaining and confusion and generally exasperating ramblings in self-loathing. I think about all the friends who have taken time out of their extremely busy schedules to indulge my desire to play music live, or to record it better.

I could go on and on with occasions where God showed His tangible love to me through His hands and feet on earth. I had just failed to recognize it all as such until now. I had only understood the concept of God’s love personified in His followers as a form of evangelism. I had never extended it to the way we Christians interact with each other. I know God loves me personally and intimately because He has placed these wonderful people in my life who love me personally and intimately even though they really don’t have to. They’ve never proclaimed any sort of “whosoever.” They’ve gone far above and beyond what would be considered basic human goodwill.

Yes, on occasion God will choose to interact with His people directly. But it is a rare thing. His day-to-day expression of His intimate, personal love for us is through the amazing people He puts in our lives. Of course, people are flawed conduits of God’s love, and often we fail. A person who is intensely lonely and who has been hurt and abandoned by those around them is not unloved of God. He is only surrounded by broken hands and broken feet. Fortunately, God is also the Great Physician, but that’s another thought for another time….

An Overactive Imagination

Children aren’t surprised by miracles. Their capacity for imagination amazes me, and oddly puts my intellect to shame. As an adult, I’m fairly certain that next time I’m at the mall a unicorn will not materialize and saunter through the crowds. But if one does, you can bet every child in the place will approach it with matter-of-fact curiosity, while every adult in the mall will emit a collective “WTF?!” In the same way, a mother with cancer can suddenly be found to be tumor-free; the doctors will be entirely mystified, while the child is just happy that Mommy is back home and her hair is growing out again. It is as though children understand things that are far beyond the comprehension of adults.

It’s the complete opposite with things that we adults understand. We don’t have to be knowledgeable in the field of aerodynamics to grasp the fact that the wings of an airplane are structured and angled in such a way as to create lift with enough speed. We take for granted that an airplane takes off and lands because we as adults understand it. But a child can stay nose-glued to the terminal window, watching in awe as plane after plane takes off and lands, and it’s amazing to them. We as adults can walk through a garden without noticing one thing around us, yet the child is caught up with the brilliance of the flowers and the caterpillar on the sidewalk and the puddles just begging to be jumped in. Children find such joy in the things we adults take for granted.

What happened to us? Why do we discount the things we can’t comprehend, and find no amazement in those things we do understand?

In our world, the moment we stop believing in Santa Claus is a rite of passage. Setting aside tales of fairies and dragons and aliens is considered part of growing up. Dreams are reduced to being nothing more than the result of late-night pizza. Angels become naked babies with wings, and the monsters under the bed are the products of an overactive imagination.

In Walking on Water, Madeleine L’Engle theorizes that we’ve been taught the story of Peter walking on the water all wrong. We’re told that he just had so much faith for that moment that he was able to perform the miracle of walking on the tops of the waves. Her idea, though, is that Peter was remembering how to walk on water, that for that brief second he had returned to what he had originally been created to be.

L’Engle also emphasizes that Jesus was fully human as well as being fully divine. And Scripture makes it clear that his miracle power was not coming from within him, but rather from God the Father working through him. He was fully human, but because he was also fully divine and knew the Father so intimately, he was perfectly willing to go along with everything the Father commanded him to do. He knew the Father so well that he trusted Him without question. And God was able to use him to the greatest extent. He could perform miracles, and heal, and walk on water, because he trusted the Father implicitly and was the man he had always been created to be.

(I’ve heard the question put forth as to why the Western world doesn’t see miraculous healings like the Third world still sees on a regular basis. The answer posited was that God’s gotten so fed up with our self-reliance that He just gave up on the West almost entirely and left us with our health care. This was only partly a joke.)

We all know that story of Jesus with the little children, how the adults didn’t want them to bother Jesus, but he put the adults to shame by declaring that the kingdom of heaven was of such as those children. We’ve also all been taught that story incorrectly, or at least incompletely. I know I was. I was always told that that story was proof that children were important like adults were. It wouldn’t be overly flippant of me to say that it was meant to be a self-esteem boost for kids. But that’s not what Jesus meant.

What Jesus meant was that “childish” qualities such as creativity, imagination, wonder, trust, and acceptance were qualities that one needed to see the kingdom of heaven come to fruition. These kids ignored all the “important” adults who wanted to debate theology and real life with Jesus, and who wanted to observe the proper protocols of interaction with a teacher. They just walked right up to him and sat in his lap, and allowed him to love them without prerequisite or condition.

It is implied in this story that the kingdom of heaven is one of those things that children inherently grasp but adults have discredited at worst or taken for granted at best.

Holy crap, what if the “overactive imagination” of a child was a part of God’s original design for humanity?! What if creativity, imagination, wonder, trust, and acceptance are qualities God intended for each of us to have, and it’s just been the proper adults who have squashed those nascent gifts within us as a requirement for “growing up”? What means to knowledge can be found in the ninety percent of our brains that we do not use? What if we truly take hold of the idea that there are more ways of knowing than just logic and the scientific method? And what if we were to go beyond just recognizing that observable fact is truth to acknowledging that not all truth is observable fact—that observable fact is actually merely a subcategory of truth?

I wish I knew how to regain the wonder and the curiosity of a child. The innocent inquisitiveness. The easy trust. The vibrant creativity. (I can’t ignore that creativity is the very first aspect of God’s character that we see in action in Scripture. Not faithfulness. Not love. Not wisdom, or judgment, or power. Creativity. Should it be a surprise then that children take to it so naturally and so early in life?)

I just know that I used to be terrified of God, and now I dare to approach Him like a dear friend, and often tactlessly. I know that I used to tell people what to think, and now I’m made fully aware I know nothing and all I can do is encourage them to seek God more intimately. I know that I could never find any interest or joy in my physics classes, but now I long to know about black holes and string theory and general relativity and the Creator of this universe and all its mysteries. I know I used to feel like the stories in Scripture were tired and cobwebby, and now I’m insatiably curious to know what else happened—I want to know about the Nephilim and the Watchers, about Enoch and Jared, about the “hot springs” Anah discovered in the wilderness, about the further exploits of the sons of Jacob.

I want to remember who I was created to be. I want to walk on water. I want to see miracles, and healings. I want to create uninhibitedly. I want God to come down and walk with me in the cool of the day. I want to approach Jesus without reserve and just allow him to love me without cause. I want to be filled with all the wonderment of a child gazing out the window of the airport terminal, as the airplanes take off and land over and over again.

The Palm Tree Thanks the Hurricane

I don’t watch a huge amount of television on a regular basis. Sure, I can get caught up in “Ace of Cakes” marathons, or “18 Kids and Counting” on demand, or cheesy Playlistisms, or “Will and Grace” reruns, or “Family Guy” episodes I personally own on DVD…. Okay, so maybe moving into a house that only has basic cable was the best thing I ever did. There is little of interest on basic cable outside of Conan O’Brien. And “American Idol.” And “So You Think You Can Dance.” And….

All that said, it’s probably a bit strange that I’ve not seen a whole lot of the show “30 Rock.” Tina Fey’s appearances on “Saturday Night Live” portraying Sarah Palin were the highlights of the 2008 election season for me, yet I’ve seen little of the show that has really launched her to national prominence. The sitcom also features Jack McBrayer as Kenneth the Page, an actor with whom I’m familiar because of hilarious appearances on Conan, “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” “Walk Hard,” and “Talladega Nights.” Kenneth is an endlessly naïve and optimistic country rube who is a member of an unspecified conservative charismatic religious denomination. And thanks to the miracle of Facebook stalking, I discovered through a friend’s post that this character was a graduate of an institution called Kentucky Mountain Bible College.

Probably nobody is aware that KMBC is an actual college in the tiny town of Vancleve, nestled in the Appalachian hills of eastern Kentucky. The 2000 census lists Vancleve’s population at about 364, with only 6 individuals being of a minority race. The average household income at the time was just over $16,000. It would seem that a Bible college located in such a place would be the perfect school to have produced such a character as Kenneth the Page.

The funniest part of all of this is the fact that most of my mother’s family attended this school, or at least attended Mt. Carmel High School, which is essentially the little sister to the college. My mother and I believe all three of her siblings, as well as a few cousins, attended Mt. Carmel. I’m not sure just which relatives attended KMBC itself, but I do know that my aunt and uncle currently live and work at the college, and all three of their sons (my cousins) attended. One can also go to the Mt. Carmel website and see a picture of my cousin Brian listed as an RA of the men’s dorm there.

So there is one portion of my heritage—Kentucky hillbilly. The community in Florida in which I was raised was really no different; it was just located a mile from the Atlantic Ocean rather than in the toothless maw of Appalachia. Both places are a part of what they call the “conservative holiness movement” (feel free to search the term on Wikipedia). One might consider it loosely a blend of the Wesleyan-Arminian theology of the Nazarene denomination with the lifestyle standards of the most conservative Pentecostals, mixed with a healthy dose of what is basically asceticism. One must actively work to free himself of all “worldliness.” Therefore women may not cut their hair or wear jewelry and makeup, and may only wear long, loose skirts; men and women may not so much as kiss or hold hands until marriage; rock music in all its forms is worldly, derived from the satanic tribal music of Africa; television is forbidden, as are nearly all movies; alcohol and cigarettes are signs of pure, unadulterated evil in a person’s soul. I actually grew up in a household much like that on “18 Kids and Counting,” just minus 15 kids and a father.

Okay, maybe I’m starting to be a bit facetious. But they do go to unusual lengths to keep themselves “unspotted from the world.” It’s an environment that creates paranoia that one might become “worldly” by accident, and therefore contact with anything outside this community is kept to a minimum. Children grow up, marry right out of high school or Bible college, and start families just around the corner from their own parents (unless they are called to be missionaries or pastors elsewhere). People work and hire within the church community as much as possible, and—much like with the Amish—pressure is (usually) implicitly but strongly levied on everyone to remain a part of the group. And funnily enough, the church I grew up in was considered to be more “liberal” within the conservative holiness movement; shirt sleeves were only required to reach the elbow, and single parent status was not considered enough of a moral failure to justify someone being fired from a school or church job.

Clearly I still have issues with my upbringing. But how can I not? Because of this environment, I had to wrestle with the minute question of the acceptability of Christian rock music with the same spiritual exertion someone else might use to understand the concept of a loving God that allows evil to reign on earth. Others might debate the idea of predestination with the same gusto with which we would debate the acceptable length of shirt sleeves.

So when I see NBC mocking this mindset via the lovably innocent character of Kenneth the Page (gulp…I even have two relatives named Kenneth), I can’t help but join in on the laughter.

I suppose there are benefits to this sort of childhood. I was never given the chance to screw my life up before I was old enough to know better—heck, I’d never been in a movie theater until I went to college, much less been allowed the opportunity to knock up a girl or careen drunkenly through a red light or overdose on anything stronger than caffeine. And I definitely have (somewhat) interesting stories to tell. And I think in some skewed way this upbringing has allowed me to be more accepting of the differences of others than I might otherwise have been. After all, my own family is out in left field compared to most of the world.

The subject of my first blog posting here was that of my aversion to risk-taking, and it’s true that I don’t like taking risks without knowing all the variables involved and making conscious recognition of what is the necessary course of action. But I think the battles I had to fight in freeing myself of this upbringing have built in me the willingness to make bold and fearless decisions once I know what is the right and necessary thing to do. It was drilled into me that rock music was the evil tool of the devil, and it was not an easy task to shed the spectre of hell every time I listened to my favorite music. It was so heavily ingrained in me. But I made the conscious decision to accept the risk that they might be right and that I might be condemning myself for wanting to write and record rock music of my own.

And so the most precious gift my upbringing has given me, I think, is the courage to abandon tradition and the resulting guilt whenever I come to understand that it is wrong. I’ve learned to weigh everything carefully, knowing that conviction is a dangerous companion that must be kept at arm’s length and readily exchanged or dismissed if truly need be. I’ve come to acknowledge the humility that is necessary when making decisions or assertions, the humility that allows me to acquiesce to fuller understanding in the future. And I’ve become good friends with Doubt, rather than enemies.

I now line up to the standards of my upbringing very little. I love and even create “evil” rock music. I work and shop and watch movies on Sundays. I wear shorts in public. I love a good beer and the occasional cigar or cigarette. I sometimes use profanity. I oppose the banning of abortion (for practical reasons, not moral reasons), and I oppose any sort of marriage amendment and favor most gay rights. I haven’t voted Republican in years. I live half-way across the country from my family for no “approved” reason, and I’m still nowhere close to getting married. And there is therefore now no condemnation on me for any of it.

So while I have accumulated a great deal of baggage from my childhood, I also have developed the ability to doubt and to question without fear of damnation. I’ve learned that my faith is about my relationship with my Father Creator, not about what lifestyle standards I adhere to aside from anything that would actually grieve Him, my dearest friend. I recently wrote a song about this very idea; the chorus includes the lines “Your purpose in life is not what you do/It’s who you love and who loves you.”

I don’t find my faith easily swayed; at the same time I don’t have it tied too tightly. I have the guts to stand firm in the face of doubt, and the guts to give in when more truth comes to light. For that I can thank the “conservative holiness movement,” in the same way the palm tree can thank the hurricane for making it need to grow strong and flexible.

Tracing Letters

If I wake up one morning sneezing, I can load up on drugs and chicken noodle soup and see the runny nose and coughing subside in time. That doesn’t mean I’ve found a cure for the common cold. In the same way, if I have an addiction to alcohol, I can set up boundaries and never have another drink again, but that doesn’t mean I’ve resolved any of the issues that drove me to drink in the first place. Bad physical habits are hard enough to break; even more difficult is correcting destructive ways of thinking and feeling.

Anyone who has known me for more than about ten minutes knows that I function in a mindset of self-deprecation. My natural impulse is to tear myself down. If someone hurts me or criticizes me, I automatically accept the blame for the situation. If I find myself in a place of conflict, I pile all the responsibility on myself so that I might not have reason to dislike or resent the other person. I am an expert at accepting the greatest harms that have been done to me and then twisting them so that they are all my fault. Of course this has built into me a very heavily ingrained sense of worthlessness—I have nothing to offer the world, and my existence just doesn’t matter. This mindset shows up in the way I talk (I don’t), in the way I carry myself, and in my sense of humor.

I know full well that Scripture contradicts this point of view. Psalm 139 is one of my favorite passages in the Bible, and Jeremiah 29:11 remains the single verse that has most impacted my life. My favorite character in the Bible is Gideon, the man God used to lead Israel despite his constant protests that he wasn’t good enough. Yet I have always struggled with recognizing the value that is inherent in me as a son of God.

It has taken me many years just to reach a point where I am aware of this problem in me, and to grow into a functional understanding of God’s character. Only now am I beginning to accept that maybe God loves me without condition and without qualifiers. Only now am I grasping in my head the liberating truth of God’s grace, that it is His hand placed upon our lives to help us do the things we are called to do but are thoroughly incapable of doing (like recognizing our own value). Only now am I starting to realize that I don’t need to be ashamed of myself, and that I can be a little bit more assertive and it won’t matter what people think.

Essentially, I’ve recognized the problem and I’ve begun to see the solution. But how do I transfer this new knowledge from my head to my heart? How to I plant this seed of truth in my soul and have it take root? How do I make this way of thinking a good habit to replace the bad habits that still reign quite solidly in my head and my heart?

I know a girl who taught herself Korean. It’s a difficult language to learn, for sure, but especially in a place like Nashville, where absolutely no one else speaks it. But she worked at it every day. She immersed herself in every bit of Korean culture she could find, seeking out a Korean church community in the area and watching Korean television online. She dedicated herself to grasping the grammar and composition of the Korean language, which is designed completely differently from English. She memorized characters and vocabulary and expressions, and she worked to develop her accent. Then one day, after living and breathing Korean for well over a year at the very least, something clicked in her mind. She just realized suddenly one morning in Korean church that she no longer had to translate to herself. No longer did she have to ponder the Korean words and figure out what the English translation was; now she was actually truly listening and thinking in Korean. Now she could just enjoy the sermon without having to utilize a good chunk of her brainpower just translating. She could watch Korean television without having to actively translate to English before comprehending the dialogue. She just understood Korean without English coming into play.

I’m starting to think that it’s the same with developing healthy thought patterns. I’m a native speaker of Deception, and I’m trying to learn the language of Truth. And right now I’m just learning the vocabulary of Truth. I’m just learning how sentences are formed. I’m tracing out the new letters on lined paper, the same letter over and over a thousand times. And I’m constantly translating in my mind. When I find myself thinking, ‘Dan, you pretty much suck at life’, I have to “translate” that very intentionally to what I now know to be true. I have to catch myself in the act, and actively say, ‘Dan, it’s okay if you suck at life, because it’s no longer in your hands. You’ve given it over to God, and He’s promised that He has a plan and purpose for your life. He doesn’t suck at life…’.

I’m just waiting for that day when, like that friend who learned Korean, it just clicks in my mind. That day when no longer must I expend the energy to translate everything, and instead just know. That day when I can think and feel and speak the language of Truth naturally and with confidence, and when I just know who I truly am in Christ and can live it out honestly.

That day is coming.