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.

Cadillacs and Church Planting Movements

The first mission trip I remember going on was with my parents when they went to Mexico when I was three.  The only things I remembered from that trip is that I let one of my new Mexican friends play with my six-shooter cap gun and that I really liked sitting on the backseat armrest to see of out my dad’s ’61 Sedan DeVille.

Some things have changed since then.  The ’61 Cadillac has been replaced by an Airbus A330 22, worn out buses, and bora boras.  Handwritten letters and land line phone calls have given way to email, texting, and surfing the Interwebs via BGAN.  Some things haven’t changed since I was taken on my first mission trip…like being involved in a church planting movement, medical clinic, construction, orphan care, pastor training and cultural tourism.  This trip, thirty people from six different churches in the United States and Germany spent six days on the ground getting an incredible amount of things accomplished.

Our church partners with Helping Hands in Uganda primarily to be involved with a church planting movement but also because they are doing some great work with orphans.  Grace Calvary Christian Ministries is an indigenous church planting movement that is aggressive and is looking to plant churches where there isn’t an evangelical presence. Plans are to plant at least six churches on the banks of Lake Victoria where there’s no churches. Our team helped support that this time with survey work in some of the newer churches and I met with 21 pastors to get information for some marriage enrichment material they’ve requested. I thought their request for marriage material in a culture that still embraces polygamy was interesting.

We attended a baptismal service for 61 people.  You may say, “baptism, schmab-tism” but it was really incredible.  The people getting baptized were from multiple churches, mostly adult and they had all started their relationship with Christ within the last 30 days.  There was even one guy that told us that God had spoke to him while the baptismal procession was going by and told him that he “needed what they have.”  Oh yeah, and there hadn’t been a big evangelistic push or crusade.  This was the Church doing what the Church was designed to do.  You don’t see that happening in the average American or European church.

Just had a thought.  Maybe Satan deceptively nurtures the inherent materialism in humans in order to get us to buy into the false belief that if we have stuff that faith is unnecessary.  Most Ugandans don’t have that problem. They’re poor as dirt.  They live without air conditioning, raise their own food, drink their beer from a common pot through reed straws and still have unsanitary water and sewage conditions.  When you don’t have much you tend to be more open to spiritual things.

The “mother” church of the church planting movement, Busia Calvary Church, is responsible for starting an influential orphan ministry in Busia.  Their philosophy is that they can help more kids by providing a free school for the orphans to attend.  They provide over 600 kids uniforms and shoes, a meal (usually porridge and the side of the day like beans, rice, or greens) and a government recognized education. When a team comes in, a medical clinic for the kids is led by Dr. Brenda Kowalske.  The cool part of partnering with a smaller organization is that you have access to the child you sponsor.  The picture on the right is of me and our family’s sponsored child Irene.  One of the most eye opening things was when Dr. Richard Kowalske was going to get construction supplies and brought 11 drug addicted street kids back with him.  His offer: If they get off drugs they’ll get two meals for 30 days, new clothes, and a place to sleep on the condition that they attend class every day.  I did the intake on all of the kids since the headmaster was in training with his teachers and I was the only one free to do it.  Four of the kids (average age of nine) were straight up stoned on inhalants when they got there.  Five of the other kids weren’t high but they used.  One 16 year old boy was just orphaned and homeless.  I cried the next morning when 9 of the 11 boys were back.  I don’t have a rep for crying about stuff like that.  Just sayin…

The construction part of the team got a lot done by prepping and pouring a floor for the wash room in the kitchen at the school. They also poured concrete pillars for the Busia Calvary Church building that had been destroyed by an unusually strong thunderstorm. I have to give credit where credit’s due…a group of 7th grade Ugandan boys made sure that we always had concrete ready. They mixed it by hand on the ground for two days straight.  They are strong and hard working young men.  It proved to me that a lot of American 7th grade boys (and men) are soft.

The lessons I learned on this trip:

• You should be able to get along with anyone at some level. Thirty people worked like a well oiled machine on this trip. “Accept each other just like you have been accepted in Christ Jesus” (Romans 15:7).
• Each church should do foreign missions in a way that matches the culture of their church. Not every church is wired to do 10/40 missions.  Not every church is designed to do construction. Every church should equip its members in how to share their faith story.
• Find a missions organization that’s smaller and more personal. It doesn’t sound as cool when someone asks “So who do you partner with in missions?” but the personal connection factor is huge.

Tell me some of your stories. How your church does mission work?

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’…

Sex to die for

Preface
I get asked to speak to college students/young adults once in a while. Last week I was invited to a college group to do a talk on pre-marital sex. Not how to have it, how to respond to the inevitable urges we have as human beings and how manage those urges from a Christian worldview. Like I told them last week, if you take nothing else away from the talk/article you need to take away the “one big question.”

If you’re a parent, use the info below to talk about sex with your child. It’s too bad that it’s something most parents leave to self-discovery. In the words of Crosby, Stills, and Nash…”teach your children well.”

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Sex to die for

If you grew up in the Southern religious culture that I grew up in, sex as a subject was treated more as a sin than as a gift from God that a husband and wife share. The word “sex” was never even mentioned by any pastor that I ever heard preach. Okay, my Dad (a pastor) did talk to me about sex but it was pretty much “don’t you ever get a girl pregnant.”

So I grew up thinking abstinence was the best way to handle pre-marital sex. Mainly because I thought my Dad would kill me if I did anything otherwise.

Southern religious culture, and I’m guessing most other Protestant and Catholic religious cultures, talk about sex from a sexual immorality point of view as their default setting. We pound out the virtue of abstinence with a sledge hammer of “don’ts” and “thus saith the Lord.” Okay, fine. It’s a sin to have pre-marital sex. The problem is, when you mix humans and religion, one tends to get a legalistic view of things when the subject is charged with social tension.

When God says something is a sin, I usually think that there’s got to be a good reason that he’s giving us a warning. He’s infinitely smarter than we are, right? So why not look at his command that tells us not to go there, to not have pre-marital sex? Let’s do…

If you’re not religious or a Christ-follower and you’re reading this, humor me for a bit and keep reading.

Humans were created in the image of God. There’s a lot to unpack there. Suffice it to say that we were created to be spiritual beings with a physical existence. Then God says to have sex. When God told us to “be fruitful and multiply” he didn’t mean eat healthy and score high on the math section of the SAT. To make more humans, there had to be sex. So God created human beings to have sex. In the perfect setting of the Garden of Eden, God saw that everything was good. (You can read the whole story in Genesis 1.)

Humans damaged our relationship with God by being prideful. That, in turn, damaged our spiritual connection (Gen. 3:1,7,23) with God and our emotional (Gen. 3:15) and physical existence (Gen. 3:16-17).

When God introduced himself in human form, we were given the opportunity to be healed spiritually, to enjoy more emotional health, and to understand and live with our physical maladies. (This is a long post so to find out how Jesus Christ came to make your life better by reading this book and this book for starters.)

Since human beings were created to be with both God and other humans, we crave being connected. When we’re missing a healthy spiritual and/or emotional connection we try to connect the only other way we know how…a physical connection. We often try to fill the spiritual/emotional need by connecting physically, often with sex. The results end up being an epic failure. It’s a crappy part of life in a world damaged by pride and selfishness.

When pre-marital sex happens, affairs happen, babies happen, abortions happen, divorces happen, STDs happen, and lack of trust between humans happens. Small wonder that God says that sex before marriage is unhealthy and dehumanizing.

By the way, there’s a screwed up belief among Christian teenagers and young adults: That you’re not having sex (and therefore not committing sin) if you don’t have intercourse. They would rationalize that anything leading up to intercourse is perfectly fine. Don’t be stupid. Read Jesus’ human ethics discourse in Matthew 5. Saying it’s okay to go past “third base” as long as you don’t go “all the way” is just a different twist on the legalism most young adults hate…making the Bible say what you want so you can manipulate people and get away with something. Read the previous paragraph again. Then read the next one.

Sex isn’t just a sensual, physical thing. It’s tied to the emotional and spiritual parts of us as well. From a Christian worldview, there’s no way to extricate sex from being a spiritual occurence. The unity of spirit, soul, and body are clear (1 Thess. 5:23). To live as redeemed humans we should guard our lives and others by refraining from engaging in less than human behavior (1 Peter:13-25). If anyone wonders why they still feel empty after pre-marital sex, that’s why.

Sex, in all of it’s pleasure and goodness, was designed to take place between a man and a woman that are married (Gen. 1:27; Mark 10:8). That’s why sex was intended to be shared as a physical, emotional and spiritual union with one’s husband or wife. Since the Scripture teaches we have spiritual/emotional/physical unity and a husband and wife become “one” (Mark 10:8) when they’re married, the clarity of sex only inside of marriage emerges.

The “one big question”
When I was reading that a husband should love his wife like Christ loved the church (like, he should be willing to die for her), I came up with the one big question that I think people should ask before they start having sex…especially pre-marital sex.

Christians need to honestly ask themselves if the person that they’re going to have sex with is the person that they’re willing to become “one” with for the rest of their life. Before they start getting all hot and bothered and taking off too many clothes, maybe they need to ask the “one big question”:

“Am I willing to die for the person I’m getting ready to have sex with?”

Question: Anyone have a better question/technique they use?

Two great books to read:

Sex God by Rob Bell

From Eternity To Here by Frank Viola

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.