Serendipity

I've debated about whether or not to post this. It's way premature. Anything could happen. The whole thing could fall through. I might discover that it's not for me. Others might decide I'm not for them. Maybe nobody else will want to play. Maybe I can't do this. Maybe I'm just kidding myself.

You see, one of the things that has kept me going through the past several years of indecision, confusion, pain, and angst about my experiences in student ministry and subsequent exit has been this half-baked dream in the back of my head about something improbable. I've thought, on and off for probably eight years or more, that I wanted to be a part of planting a church. I've held that thought through two less than stellar staff experiences, and then through a time when I thought the dream was dead for good. I held those dreams in one hand on more than one occasion, spade in the other, prepared to bury them and move on. I've clung to them when it seemed the only thing keeping me going was an irrational, intuitive belief that they were not dead, only asleep. I've argued with God about them on more than one occasion, yelled and ranted and raved and sobbed and simply sat in sullen silence. I've hauled them out of bed every morning as I headed off to a job that I never expected to take. I've drug them to bed with me at night after staying up far too late reading tales from others who have pursued their dreams as I sit and watch and wait.

I have other dreams also - dreams of further study, of more letters to follow my name, of books and papers and lectures and classes and teaching. I've carried that set of dreams alongside the first, as both of them have seemed about equally probable. Lately, though, I've been thinking that my path would carry me out of vocational ministry entirely, taking me into the world of academics and further study, pursuing one set of dreams while abandoning the other for good. But that path has also remained closed - the money is all wrong, I'm not ready academically without additional coursework in languages, and foremost, my kids have watched me do homework for long enough. In other words, what seemed the most likely path is also the most costly, and it's coin that I can ill afford to pay. I don't want my kids growing up as academic orphans.

However, this week I had a meeting, a not-quite-random encounter that has changed many things. I heard words of encouragement, of welcome, of shared purpose and vision, and of possibility. Tentative words, words that mean more conversation must follow. But a nearly abandoned dream has started to awaken, and I feel alive. It's a good feeling. It means that, perhaps, I've done the right thing in guarding this nearly-expired hope against extinction.

I may be getting way ahead of myself. This might not happen, and I might be all wrong.

But maybe not.

The Question of Suffering

I started class again tonight; it's a promising course called Spirit and Church. We're hitting a number of topics based on the epistles. Tonight, we started off with the topic of suffering. It is, of course, a weighty subject; I still feel somewhat subdued as I think over the various threads of conversation. One thing in particular, though, struck me as significant, particularly in light of my previous post. We were reading and discussing an article by Chuck Colson in which he was reflecting on the lack of resources that the evangelical tradition offers when dealing with issues of suffering. (He turned, interestingly enough, to the mystics such as Theresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross. I was somewhat surprised - I never thought of him as having a mystical bent.) What struck me forcefully, though, was the realization of the nature of suffering as opposed to the typical approach to scripture-as-answer-book I discussed previously.

It's sort of obvious, isn't it? The reason that the evangelical tradition offers virtually nothing in terms of a meaningful theology of suffering is that suffering, by its very nature, resists answers. Our prof read an excerpt from Nicholas Wolterstorff's Lament for a Son that is stunningly beautiful yet simultaneously tragic. Wolterstorff writes:

What is suffering? When something prized or loved is ripped away or never granted - work, someone loved, recognition of one's dignity, life without physical pain - that is suffering.

Or rather, that's when suffering happens. What it is, I do not know...I understand nothing of it. Of pain, yes: cut fingers, broken bones. Of suffering, nothing at all. Suffering is a mystery as deep as any in our existence.

I've written previously about some of my marker stones, so to speak, on my spiritual journey. Most of them are captured under this thread about hope. I think that all of us have defining moments, experiences in our lives that form us and shape us so deeply that, once experienced, change us forever. Some of these are joyful experiences; often, they are not.

What do we do when we are confronted with the wildness of God? I don't pretend to understand it. I have questions but no answers. I find myself in the position of Wolterstorff, confronted and confounded by mystery that I cannot grasp, and holding nothing but a theology that claims to have "all the answers," nicely packaged and bound in new leather and red letters. But when I turn the pages, I am not confronted by answers. I am faced with questions, pages upon pages of questions that remain unanswered. "Why do the wicked prosper?" "Why, O Lord, do you reject me and hide your face from me?" "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

But it's in the questions that I find comfort. Particularly the last, one uttered by Christ himself as he faced greater suffering than any of us have ever known. Christ who suffered, Christ who questioned, the Word himself unanswered, pouring himself out in lament.

I read these words and know that I find myself in the best of company.

Technorati Tags: hope, suffering, Wolterstorff, questions

Little Resistances

I had thought to write a bit more on my definition of hope, but upon further reflection I think I'll let the discussion continue in the comments. (If you're interested in weighing in, head to this post.) Instead, I want to post some final thoughts on why this topic has gripped me so, why I think it's vital that we recover the language of hope and what it might do for us as the children of God wandering in a land sometimes far from home.

There are really a lot of things that I could say here. Paul writes of faith and love springing from out of the hope that we carry, so perhaps anemic displays of faith and love are symptoms of a hopeless people. Peter says, in that most-often mangled passage that has little to do with apologetics, that we should always be able to tell those who ask of the reasons that we hope - and if we cannot articulate and inhabit our hope, what would ever inspire anyone to ask?

I think, though, that the striking thing about hope for me is its capacity for meaning-making. One thing that I've already mentioned is that hope, by definition, is future-oriented. Hope speaks of the telos of the creation-story, of the end towards which all of existence is rushing. It speaks of the accomplishment of God's purposes and the fulfillment of His Kingdom. Christian hope that cannot speak of the realization of the Kingdom is weak and pitiful at best. Again, I must appeal to the prophets in scripture as the agents of hope, announcing the fall of the powers and the triumph of God's purposes. Like Morpheus in the Matrix, they shake our comfort and stability, undermine our complacency, and recruit us into a venture that looks crazy at the best of times. Theirs is not a candy-coated, artificially sweetened message - but it is one of hope, one that looks reality unflinchingly in the face and states that reality has not the final word.

Hope crafts meaning out of existence. If there is, in fact, an end towards which we are headed, then perhaps redemption has not yet passed us by. This is not some naive cliche about things happening for reasons, but rather a bold statement about the actions of a Redeemer within history - both in its entirety and on a personal level. This is our resource to combat fear and dare great things for the One we love. We hold to the hope that a Word has been spoken that reaches beyond any word of fear or exclusion or trouble or death. These are not the final words.

This is why we must find our hope, inhabit it and speak it and share it. This is our little resistance, our practice of shared meaning, and our family bond as a transient people making our way towards home.

An Unscripted Lesson in Hope (part 4)

It feels sort of odd, all clinical and detached, to try to talk about how I now think about hope. For the longest time, I resisted trying to define it, until I conceded that hope is only sometimes described and never really defined in scripture, so to construct a biblical theology of hope without clarifying my understanding of terms was somewhat less than useful. Still, I think it worth noting that I'm sort of backing into my understanding from a combination of what is said and not said on the topic in scripture, and that in truth I don't think there's a way to begin to wrestle with this topic outside of the realm of experience. Let's be honest - we could construct an academic, sterile discussion of faith or of love, and although we could pull all of our concepts from scripture and align them perfectly and cleanly, we still wouldn't know what it is to actually have faith or love.

As I said earlier, I think that hope is something that happens when we reach the end of ourselves. I think it's notable that the two books in the Old Testament that seem to speak most of hope are Job and Psalms - two books where suffering is worn on the sleeve, where desperation is articulated most fiercely and brazenly. I had mentioned earlier that, when we reach one of these crossroads in our lives, we are confronted with a choice. In one sense, this sounds rather detached, as though we weigh our options and throw our lot in with what looks like the best deal, where we weigh our risk tolerance and potential for reward and decide accordingly. Personally, I think it's nothing like this at all. It's rather the sort of choice where we reach an understanding with the voices of despair - we either give them power, or refuse to bend our ear to their siren song. And I'd wager that until we've faced down those voices, we'll never truly know what it is that hope requires of us.

This is why I call hope "arational". In many cases, hope defies all rationality and requires us to instead cast our trust on an unseen, often silent God who is never late but, as someone once said, misses many wonderful opportunities to be early. But I think it would be unfair to call it irrational, as Jared accurately noted in my earlier post - it is no more irrational than faith or love. Hope simply refuses to play by the rules of reason. It sits outside reason's boundaries and categories and is bothered by this not in the least. Hope is the language of the prophets - it is the reason that Jeremiah can buy property in a land that has been conquered and left for dead, that David can continue to sing as he is surrounded by enemies, that Jesus can hang on a Roman cross and speak words of comfort and paradise to the one hanging next to him. Hope is the only language in which we find the words to proclaim that death has not the final word, that a Word more powerful than death has been spoken.

I had hoped to wrap this up tonight, but it seems that a few more posts remain. Tomorrow I'll attempt to round out our working definition, and then I think it only fair to conclude by asking why this matters enough for me to sink this many posts into the topic. For those of you still reading, thanks for coming along for the ride.

Away, and A Thought

I'm heading out of town for a retreat this weekend with the LEAD program at Biblical. I can't think of a better way to wrap up my sabbath week. I won't have any internet access until Sunday, so I'll respond to comments or emails when I get back.

I did want to leave a thought to ponder until I get my concluding post on hope completed. I think we need a workable definition in order to get the discussion off the ground. Here's my proposal:

Christian hope is the arational, unshakeable belief that redemption always triumphs in the end.

An Unscripted Lesson in Hope (part 3)

One thing that strikes me about the thought given to hope (or lack thereof) in contemporary western Christianity is that we are so rarely faced with a situation in which we are actually required to hope. We're incredibly self-sufficient, self-reliant, and self-serving. Hope in my context, I think, more accurately resembles market analysis or risk assessment than it does the biblical, spiritual virtue that it truly is. We "hope", for example, that we will be able to have enough income for a comfortable retirement or that we can afford a bigger house someday, and then we set about crafting our lives around strategies designed to bring our desires to pass. I'm not convinced that hope works that way. Hope, I think, is what happens when we reach the end of ourselves, when our self-sufficiency has been reduced to rubble and we sit on the ruins of our plans and designs and try to figure out how we're ever going to clean up the mess. At that point, we are confronted with a choice - and how we respond to that choice is what can begin to germinate a tiny seed of something that can grow into something much larger and more amazing.

I had nearly reached the end of my rope prior to losing my ministry position last year. Spiritually, I was a wreck. God and I still weren't really on speaking terms; I hadn't begun to deal with the issues that I still carried from my first ministry experience. Physically, I was working myself into a coma. I was stressed and exhausted. Emotionally, I wasn't much better - I took an assessment as part of a course for my MDiv and was shocked that I was showing significantly more symptoms of depression than I ever would have identified consciously. (Interestingly, it shows up in my writing from that time, but I wasn't listening to what my heart and spirit were trying to tell me either.) My wife and I were in agreement that, as soon as her massage clientele stabilized, I would resign.

The termination fell into this mess like a match into a container of gasoline. To be honest, I almost walked away. I could have given God the finger and turned my back. I say this not in pride or boasting, but so that you may understand what happened next.

I can't articulate exactly how it happened. In some sense, I think it's more accurate to say that hope happened to me, rather than that I decided to keep believing. Something in me refused to let go. I felt like Jacob wrestling with the Deity, demanding that He respond before I let go. And respond He did, in a surprising way. I had enrolled in an Etrek course at Biblical Seminary. In December, we wrapped up our time together with a two-day gathering at the school. On the afternoon of the second day, we took time to walk a labyrinth at a local church. I wrote about what happened here. Things haven't been the same since.

I can't write any more today. I am still full of emotion as I think back to that cold December day and how I met God between the worn lines of a faded labyrinth. One more stop to go.

An Unscripted Lesson in Hope (part 2)

It's interesting, I think, the way that God works. One thing I must say at the outset so that you will understand why ordinary things have significance in my life in ways that might not to others: I have never been hired at a job for which I have applied on my own initiative, with the exception of part-time mall jobs in college. The significant positions, the ones that have shaped me as a person and form what I consider to be my "work history", have always sought me out, and any that I have tried to initiate have never been offered to me. Keeping that in mind, I pay close attention when an offer comes my way - I immediately begin inspecting it for God's fingerprints.

A few days after my initial conversation with the senior pastor in which I was informed of my pending termination, I received a call from a local church that had been meeting for only a few months. They were looking for someone to work with their middle school group and had gotten my number from my friend that I mentioned in my previous post (an odd series of events in and of itself). After a series of interviews, I was asked if I would lead the group on a volunteer basis while the elders made the arrangements to hire me, not a simple process as the church was still operating under the mother church's 501c3 (meaning that the church didn't yet exist as a separate, legal entity). In the meantime, I signed on with a temp agency to pay the bills and took an assignment at the company where I now work. Going to work in the corporate world was a little death every morning - a small piece of my soul withered away every morning as I walked out my front door. I couldn't wait to get back to working with students on a full-time basis. As the months passed, I began to suspect that this would take longer than I (or the elders) had thought, and when I was offered a permanent position at my company (one that I had not applied for), I reluctantly accepted, suspecting that perhaps God was up to something.

Proverbs says that postponed hope makes one's heart sick, but a fulfilled desire is like a tree of life.

It took nearly a year and a half from the time I submitted my resume until I was finally hired. When all was said and done, I was offered a part-time position of ten hours a week. I was happy at the church and excited about what was happening in the student ministry, so I didn't really mind - I thought that eventually things would open up and I'd be offered a full-time position. In the meantime I was doing well in my job and was offered a promotion within the first year. It was somewhat ironic - I prospered at a job I never wanted, but the work that I truly desired was out of my reach. I thought more than once about sending out resumes to look for a full-time position, but something always held me back - I just knew that I was where I was supposed to be.

After nearly four years, in June of 2004 I was told that the church had finally decided to hire a full-time student ministry leader. However, they had also decided that it was not going to be me. I was informed that my employment would be terminated within two weeks of our discussion, but that I was more than welcome to continue to volunteer with the ministry. Needless to say, I was underwhelmed by the prospect - in truth, the church had been undergoing a number of changes that I wasn't comfortable with, and I was preparing to submit my resignation, not out of anger but rather because my stress had reached toxic levels. It's interesting for me to go back now and read what I wrote about the situation - somewhere along the way I had begun to think again about hope, and once again with the subject fresh in my mind I found myself trying to reconstruct pieces of broken dreams.

Along the way, I think God was trying to tell me something, but I hadn't yet learned how to hear it...

An Unscripted Lesson in Hope (part 1)

A brief note at the outset - as a writer, sometimes it seems that there are those stories that take on a life of their own, that write themselves without asking your permission or guidance. This was one of those tales. I didn't intend to write any of this when I sat down tonight, and yet perhaps it is good to have been written. I choose to let it stand, and hope that in some small way you might find something of Jesus hiding between the letters and words.

I was reading back through some of what I've written lately and came to something of a surprising discovery. Six of the last ten entries that I've made have commented on hope in some form or another, not to mention the earlier stuff that I've written on the subject. (If you've noticed this trend, it wasn't conscious.) I want to explore this a bit further, because apparently it's something that's on my brain. But in order for you to understand how I approach this topic, I need to tell you a bit of a story about how I arrived at where I am today.

I first started really thinking about biblical hope in the fall of 1999. At the time, I was serving as the youth pastor for a church in the western Philadelphia suburbs, not far from where I currently live. I had developed a great friendship with another local youth pastor, and together we'd spend a fair amount of time meeting to pray for the schools in our area, both by ourselves and with students who attended the schools. We started talking about our dreams for the students that we knew who wanted so badly to live as Christians in ways that made sense and that caused others to want to do the same. In the process, our dreams caused us to turn to the biblical reflections on hope, what it was and how one could grow in it and develop it.

Hope in scripture is surprising - it's not at all what you might expect. Even though it's identified by Paul as one of the "Big Three" virtues, it's rarely preached or taught in western Christianity. (I believe there are reasons for that, which if you read my take on Brand Name Jesus™, you can probably deduce.) Hope is future-oriented, but it has its roots in the past. I believe it to be the counter to doubt, rather than faith as is more commonly understood (faith, I believe, more properly opposes fear). Hope is arational and imaginative. Paul also says that there is a connection between suffering and hope. This is an odd, jarring sort of statement that I'm not going to begin to unpack here - it deserves a full essay of its own. Suffice to say that this particular connection was one that I wrestled with for some time, not really reaching conclusions but struggling nevertheless with its implications. I wanted to understand hope, what it means to be hopeful, and how hope could transform my faith. This was my journey through the winter and into the spring of 2000.

In May of 2000 I was fired without warning from my ministry position. The process took about six weeks, and on July 9, 2000, I walked out of my church, my dreams of serving God vocationally shattered like so much broken glass.

What had been theory transformed in a matter of weeks into cold, hard reality. I tried to pick up the pieces of my dreams but it seemed that I kept getting cut on the sharp edges. Some of this tale I've told before, and most of it I do not desire to relive, so I will spare the details. Suffice to say that I've spent the last five years trying to reconstruct some way of thinking about my story in which I can find hope. I wanted what Paul said to be true, that suffering produces, in the end, hope, but I couldn't see how that was anything more than rhetorical fluff. And yet, through it all, I think there was a part of me that refused to capitulate - and thus was born a tiny seed of what may yet grow into something greater, something hopeful.

But I am getting ahead of myself...

The Oppression of the Ordinary

Jordon Cooper posted this recently highlighting the struggles of pastors and the negative impact that ministry has had on their personal lives. To be honest, I have several reactions to the statistics he's citing, all of which fit the context of my recent thoughts on imagination and hope. For now, I'm going with my initial reaction to the post, which was that this illustrates exactly our collective inability in western Christianity to imagine an alternative way of being. (However, I reserve the right to return to this from the perspective of how suffering informs and, in some sense, enables hope to grow.)

Here is the context for my thoughts on this: for the past week, I have never felt more the cog in the wheel. Perhaps it's the realization that my recent promotion at work could cost more of me than I was prepared to give, or recent conversations that have reinforced that businesses by and large are concerned with the welfare of their employees in the same sense that they want the network to remain up or that they want the grounds to be properly maintained. Think about the irony inherent in the term "human resources" (where, by the way, I am currently employed): these are the assets of the company that are in the form of humans. "Human" is merely the adjective that describes the noun "resources" - there is no doubt which is subordinate to the other. The likelihood that we are all familiar with the term and think of it mostly without blinking serves to reinforce the oppression that society places on us with ordinary, everyday, unspoken assumptions, in this case namely that persons are commodities whose worth is determined by a combination of buying and producing power.

These thoughts connect squarely with the sense that, even in churches, there is a sense of minister as professional that dehumanizes the minister, turning him or her into a commodity that has worth in connection with output. In fairness, I have no doubt that a portion of those surveyed bring their own baggage that contributes to workaholism or other similar issues. However, doesn't the fact that the system as a whole is structured in such a way to permit, enable, and even baptize such behavior point only to its brokenness? We find ourselves unable to imagine greater than the economy of people, and so are mute in the face of the relentless assault that such an economy wages on personhood.

This is the crisis that we now face, one that largely goes unnoticed as the everyday tyranny of the-way-things-are does its destructive work on our collective imagination. And where is the hope that we offer? What meaning do we have to present that can stand in the face of such oppression? Without hope, we are mute. Without imagination, we have no hope.

Fortunately, we do have hope, although we may not easily recognize it as such. More to come...

Of Myth and Meaning

Is something going on in the blogosphere and I missed the memo? Lots of talk about story out there - Jimmy over at liquidthinking posted some good thoughts here and here on the topic of myth. Jimmy writes,

We all live by myths...both cultural and personal. Unfortunately, in Christian culture we have all but forsaken the idea of myth. As a matter of fact, it has become synonymous with nothing more than a fictional story. In a large section of American Christianity, one had better not dare to call the Christian story a mythical story for fear of being a herectic who says the whole thing is bunk. But a myth isn't just a true story, it's a truth story...it goes deeper than events to the meaning that we crave.

I need to dig a bit deeper on the topic of hope. It's something that I've played around with over the years, a forgotten theme I think in western Christianity that has left us impoverished. But I'm suspecting that our emphasis on reason and systematics has prohibited our development of a healthy, vibrant, truly Christian hope. Meaning and hope are inextricably connected - another topic perhaps that needs further exploration. For now, I'll simply add to what Jimmy has said that perhaps one of the reasons for the inability of western Christianity to excite and inspire even its own members is that we are unable to articulate a hope-filled story that goes beyond simply Get-Out-of-Jail-Free and instead redeems the stuff of life...

Labyrinth

I've walked the labyrinth three times now. Last week, as a part of our closing Etrek session, we walked a labyrinth at a local church. It was outside, and the weather was freezing. It didn't help that I've been having difficulty with silence for a while now. Silence has always been a refuge to me, a place where I meet God - I gravitate towards the contemplative disciplines, and silence and solitude usually wrap around me like a blanket, offering comfort and safety. Not so in recent months, however. My recent experiences have left some scars, one of which seems to be a question of trust. How far can I trust this God that I serve?

For anyone who's never had to walk a path where your trust is put on the line, the typical academic responses do not work here. It's one thing to recite scripture and possess the cerebral knowledge that "all things work together" and whatnot. It's quite another to hold the broken pieces of dreams in your hands, knowing they can never be fixed, also knowing that, on some level, the God that you serve led you down the very path that ended in the mess in which you find yourself. After all, He's not a tame lion.

So it was that with these thoughts, consciously and unconsciously, floating through my brain that I began the labyrinth. Now, what you must know about this particular labyrinth in order to understand what I am about to share is that it is incomplete. By incomplete, I mean that the years have not been kind to parts of the outline, and there are places in the walk where the path disappears completely. Sort of odd for a labyrinth, I know, but on this occasion the metaphor was rather powerful. I found myself walking through extended sections of the path where I had no sense of direction, no way of knowing if my feet were being placed correctly, at several places confident that I had missed an important turn. All the while, I meditated on my journey in a larger sense and found some irony in the fact that even on the labyrinth I couldn't find my way. But as I reached the center, God began to speak.

What took place I will, for the most part, leave between myself and Him. It felt like when you meet an old friend with whom you've had a disagreement. Initially it's awkward, then perhaps you yell a bit, and then you realize that you've really wanted to patch things up but haven't quite been sure of how to go about it. At any rate, the one thing that I will share is that I had a rather certain sense that I was being told that just because I can't see the path, I shouldn't assume that there is no path. I had a very strong sense that I was in this place by design, that I must continue to walk and that eventually the destination will make itself clear.

Eventually I began the journey back out of the labyrinth, following as is customary the same path in reverse. However, something had changed. The path that was previously invisible had become visible. I could see every line clearly and stepped surely and confidently where not twenty minutes before the path was simply not visible. No doubt the setting sun illuminated the outline differently and the changing light revealed what had simply been obscured before. But I know that there was more to it than that for me, that a very vivid picture had been painted for me by One who never misses a brush stroke.

Hope

Hope is a funny thing. It's a misunderstood thing, I think, a neglected virtue that Paul set alongside faith and love as one of three that most typified Christian spirituality. It doesn't get much press these days; I can count on one hand the number of times I've seen it emphasized in a sermon or other teaching (not counting my own). I think there are reasons for this, one being western Christianity's failure to develop a significant, meaningful theology of suffering, but regardless of the whys we are still left with an impoverished spirituality that handles disappointment poorly. I would be tempted to write of this simply on a personal level if I did not know so many people who have been faced with the tragedy of broken dreams and have had no way to speak of them from a theological standpoint.

Hope is difficult to define. For my purposes, I am choosing to forego definition in favor of description, to begin at least to put some framework around something that I am trying to think through in light of recent events in my life. Hope is anticipatory, concerned with what will be rather than with what is. It is this particular orientation that, it seems, causes us to struggle with understanding and embodying it, because it grates against our perceptions and causes us to live in tension between the present and the future.

Often, hope is portrayed as naive or innocent. It is a warm, soft virtue, like fuzzy bunny slippers or hot chocolate. It is cute and sweet, but not terribly realistic. It is found most often in romantic movies and children's songs and bumper stickers, or so we've been taught to believe. It is fine to hope, so long as we understand the realities of the present.

I don't think hope is like that. I think that hope is a hard, angry virtue. It is defiant and rebellious and stubborn. It stands in the face of the storm and screams defiance into the wind. It is irrational; it cares little for the realities of the present, stubbornly clinging to the tatters of belief that something better must exist out there, biding its time. It is painful and difficult. It gives the last of its sustenance to wandering prophets; it refuses to bow to idolatrous statues; it sees heaven through the bloody haze of pain as rocks come crashing down on its head. It refuses to release its adversary until it is blessed. It stands silently and courageously, refusing to answer its accusers. It is the source of all great deeds of biblical heroism and courage, shouting with its final breath, "Though He kills me, I will never relinquish my trust in Him."

I think that's what hope is like.

Change

I have never understood Abraham. I think that, if God showed up and asked me to kill my son, I would give Him the finger and walk away. I do not say that proudly - I simply have no frame of reference to discuss a man who can hear such a command of God and follow it as an act of faith. To Abraham, however, Isaac was more than his son, his only son, whom he loved - Isaac was the embodiment of all that God had ever promised him. His acquiescence is cryptic at best. Where is the shrewd bargainer, who attempted to talk God out of destroying Sodom and Gomorrah? Where is the hardened fighter, who bested the armies of four kings? The Abraham of Genesis 22 sounds like a broken, defeated man who has run out of responses to the strange commands of God. To me, his silence throughout the narrative speaks volumes. And yet, the only words that he finds to speak are full of some relentless, irrational hope that refuses to release God from the promises He has made - and that hope is proved right in the end.

theopraxis has always been a mix of theological and personal reflection, stemming in part from my desire to live an integrated life. My theology informs my experience informs my theology, so to speak. Last week I wrote about my desire to begin to reflect more constructively, to write about what I find wonderful and mysterious and hopeful instead of writing cynically and critically. Ironically, one week later I find myself in a position where I have nothing constructive to write. I have come to a point in my experience where I, at least for the moment, am unable to think constructively and creatively. I have come to the end of all of my answers and canned theology, and I am not certain where to turn next.

This weekend I had a conversation that brings to a conclusion one chapter of my life, possibly for good. Certain hopes and dreams that I have held for many years have now reached their conclusion, and it is empty. The road has led to nowhere; I am uncertain of where to turn next. I am not able to think constructively, because at the moment I have nothing left but to grieve for things that will, in all likelihood, never come to pass. I do not have a theology for that. Perhaps I should.

I plan to write more specifically about this soon. Certain protocols must be followed, so I am not yet free to say more than I have. My family is well and I have not sinned any more than usual, that much at least I may say. Please, if you would be so kind, remember us in your prayers as we walk through this time of change.