Where Was God When…? Blog Tour

When’s the last time someone didn’t meet the expectations you had for them? Like 5 minutes ago, right? We expect to get our burger in the drive-thru without ketchup just like we ordered it. Three blocks later our expectation of burger goodness is shattered by no ketchup. We want our money back…or a chance to explain to the dude that made the mistake just how big a moron he is. And then there’s the really big expectation with big disappointments. Sometimes the blown expectations of others wreck our reality and our big expectations explode right along with theirs. It’s those kind of expectations that are loaded with emotional pain and trauma.

In a new book called Where Was God When…? Ric Garland tells his story of shattered expectations:

“When I was in college, I loved spending time with people, and especially dating girls. I never got serious with any of them—what guy does when he’s young? One day my mother wanted me to meet this girl. Right, I thought, I’m going to meet a girl that my mom wants to introduce me to. It was New Year’s Eve and I was home. We went to the church and she introduced me. Well, I hate to admit it but, uh…she was pretty. She was smart, witty, challenging, engaging, and we just hit it right off. I fell in love with Karen, and my life changed, with this amazing girl becoming a big part of it.

Our relationship went up and down. We got close and then she backed away. We got close and she backed away. I was still in college, and she was teaching at a Christian school. When she decided she was going to go to Japan and teach some missionary kids for a couple of years, I thought it was great, but once she was gone, my heart broke. I had to tell her the truth. So, I wrote her a letter and told her I loved her. Right at that time she came up with some physical problems that complicated some things emotionally and spiritually, and she had to come home.

At the same time, I was a missionary and was attending a missions conference an hour and half from home. After it was over, my dad and a friend met me in the back. My dad took me down to an office and told me that Karen had put a noose around her neck, kicked a chair out from underneath herself, and hung herself that morning.

Have you ever had that knot in your stomach that you couldn’t get rid of? Did you ever feel the pain so hard that you couldn’t explain it to anybody? I felt that. I felt that rejection.

I remember for weeks afterward driving down the road and literally seeing her hanging from a noose, calling out my name.

Where was God? I was supposed to marry her. I loved her. Why did God let that happen?”

Ric’s expectations of love and marriage were obliterated. He felt like God had let him down. From Ric’s perspective God had dropped the ball. God “allowed” someone to slip through a cosmic crack in our imperfect world. How could a perfect God allow that to happen? Where was God, exactly?

God was there the whole time. His love for Karen and Ric never wavered. It was rock solid. Still is. So why doesn’t God in all of His perfection make our life perfect, too? We want God to intervene and make our lives into what we think is a perfect reality. Our expectation is that we want God in all of His perfection and flawless character to adopt our flawed view of what perfect is. We want God to craft and control the circumstances of the world into our design of how we think things should be.

God isn’t going to make changes that aren’t in line with His character. The Perfect Being doesn’t need to exchange perfection for imperfection. And for us to think that He’s going to change the results of things to what we want would be asking Him to do something imperfect.

Okay, so God’s nature and character never change. But we humans, on the other hand, tend to react to the pain in life with inconsistent spiritual and emotional responses. We set our expectations of other people in a concrete mix of “must” and “should” and react with disbelief because the world we live in is made up of “maybe” and “I’m not sure.”  In other words, life isn’t neat and clean all the time. It’s pretty unpredictable and messy. When we demand things must go a certain way and they don’t, we set ourselves up for disappointment, anxiety and anger.

People are going to disappoint us because they’re imperfect. To expect perfect or near perfect responses from imperfect humans isn’t realistic. We tend to forget that, though. That means that disappointment, anxiety and anger aren’t going to go away soon. The good news is, we can have a lot less emotional pain by changing how we think (Romans 12:1-2; Philippians 4:1-8).

It’s really helped me to reflect on the true, right, lovely and pure things in situations that are less than perfect. How do you think you would deal with a death like Karen’s?

What to Do When You Don’t Know What to Do – book review

What to Do When You Don’t Know What to Do: 8 Principles for Finding God’s Way is a short-but not-so-short book designed to help people who are overwhelmed by life. It speaks to addiction and to life situations, especially relationship issues. The book has eight short chapters and some very good bonus material. Cloud and Townsend give solid, clear advice on how to cut through the emotional fog of addiction and relationship problems. That’s the short part.

The not-so-short-part is that the authors’ clear, solid advice comes in eight overarching principles, nine qualities and characteristics of good company to keep, six tips for leaving the past behind, seven areas to take charge of one’s life, nine facets of life that God should lead, and three principles to begin one’s journey (with a subset of “ten key reminders” in how to get it all done). I just got overwhelmed. Again.

To be fair, everything Cloud and Townsend say is good. Really good. Their real life illustrations are compelling. Their advice is theologically and psychologically sound. The layout and design of the book are inviting and bring clarity to the overall message. But the eight principles turn into, if I’ve counted correctly, fifty-four things a person needs to do to gain clarity in their dire situation.

I need a Xanax to finish the review.

Should you buy this book? If you’re a counselor and want a good overview of the counseling process in a 134 short pages, you should buy the book. If you’re a person who’s facing a personal crisis that’s overwhelmed by life, start with a good counselor.

Looking for contentment

If we’re searching for something we can find justification or even validation for it most anywhere.  I did that searching for contentment this week.  It’s always been one of those things that’s been elusive.  I wasn’t raised with much materially, so I’ve always thought I was trying to compensate somehow. I still don’t have much.  Sometimes I secretly wish a close friend or relative would win a PowerBall or MegaMillion and throw me a bone or two.  After all, it’s illegal for a Bapticostal to gamble, right?

So I’m preparing a talk for this weekend and the topic I was given was “the family as the primary disciple-maker.”  No problem.  Deuteronomy 6 was a good starting point.  Plenty of material there.  After a little study, I just seemed like I needed to go to the Ten Commandments.

I became transfixed and distracted from my subject matter.

I read the Decalogue and reread it.  I had already read it like a thousand times.  I even had most of them memorized.  (You may be able to quote them all without a lot of mental gymnastics, but I’m not you, OK?)

For the first time I saw the Ten Commandments as a statement of how to be content as a human being.  Adam and Eve weren’t content.  We haven’t been content since then.  In God’s infinite wisdom he knew we needed something to show us how to live as the human beings we were created to be.  The radical minimum standard of human behavior included, even if inferred, our need to have a character that includes contentment.

Be content with a Creator God alone.
Be content that I can’t successfully craft Him in my image or any other image.
Be content with a God that is indescribable instead of throwing His name around loosely.
Be content with completely unplugging and spending time with the Creator one day each week.
Be content with my parents and I’ll actually live longer.
Be content and I won’t get angry enough or careless enough to kill someone.
Be content with my wife.  Discontentment here just causes a lot of pain and misery for a lot of people.
Be content with your BlackBerry Pearl and PowerBook G4.  Contentment keeps me from getting arrested.
Be content to keep my mouth shut.  Let other people make themselves look stupid with gossip, lies, and slander.
Be content with my house that doesn’t have a media room.  I’ve got HDTV and a PS3. A servant or two might be nice…sorry.

It was a good study for me.  It wouldn’t get an “A” from my hermenutics professor but he’s probably already content.

I’m still working on it.  I’m content with being a created being, but I’m getting an iPhone 3Gs when my contract rolls over in November.  Just sayin’…

Spiritual disciplines

I’m not sure the current Christian sub-culture in America understands the spiritual disciplines. I’m not sure they want to know what the spiritual disciplines are or what they entail. My experience with Christian sub-culture in other parts of the world is that they don’t need as much to grow at a greater rate than we do. Experiencing their Christianity makes clear to me that how we Americans view spiritual growth is, at best, skewed.

A contributing factor is that, in an attempt to engage people in spiritual disciplines, the marketing arm of every American denomination (especially mine) has attempted to create a nauseating amount of studies for every imaginable demographic. I’m thinking about writing the study notes to a new Bible called “The Anorexic, Single, Chemically Dependent Parent of Hyperactive Children Study Bible.” Only in America.

Ubiquitous technology is also huge factor in our failure to engage in the spiritual disciplines. Technology is supposed to simplify our lives but it usually provides more clutter. I still love technology. I love iTunes. I love podcasts. I love the Internet, my cell phone, my bass guitar, my PowerBook G4, iPod, coffee pot with timer, WiFi, DSL, T1, satellite TV, TiVO, YouTube, and my garage door opener.

I heard a church leader in North Africa say that the cell phone was the 11th plague on Egypt. I think technology may be a plague to end all plagues, at least in America. Too much of a good thing is, well, too much of a good thing. Take frogs for instance. Frogs are okay. Frog legs are even tasty when they’re cooked properly. Frogs eat pesky insects. Frogs are useful and make great National Geographic pictures. Frogs are great except when there’s so many you have to pile them up and their decomposing carcasses stink to high heaven. Let me have frogs, but let me have them in moderation. Likewise with technology.

Getting your devotion on an RSS feed to your cell phone that you read during a boring meeting might qualify as engaging the spiritual disciplines. Maybe. It could happen. Or maybe you could open your Bible for 30 minutes instead of surfing the Internet, or checking email, or texting, or writing on somebody’s Facebook wall, or watching season three of The Office…again.

Me? I’m going to end this post and pick up my copy of “The BIBLE in 90 Days; Cover to Cover in 12 Pages a Day” that I was enticed to buy when an endcap caught my eye at my local Lifeway Christian Store. Hey, it works for me. Do whatever works for you. Just engage in a spiritual discipline.

So about the moniker thing…

Since it’s been SIX MONTHS since I posted the last time, do you think I’m gonna remember? I’ve got other theology crankin’ my brain right now.