It’s Still Good News

Bad news gets the headlines, sells papers and magazines, and gives ample opportunity to wring our hands and complain about everything.

But bad news doesn’t change lives.    Condemnation helps nobody change.   Criticism and complaining don’t make a dime’s worth of difference.

God’s good news changes lives.    Pardoning, grace-filled words, when we’re at the bottom of our lives, helps the most.   Life-giving, encouraging words and deeds make all the difference.

Our culture has largely eliminated the word “sin” from our vocabulary.    Eager to protect fragile egos, we use euphemisms like failure or lapses in judgement or weaknesses.   We even justify wrongs by redefining them as rights.

But we cannot eliminate the reality of sin–our inability to stop being selfish, to stop speaking or acting destructively, our pursuit of idols and the resulting addictions that enslave us.     We all have a monster within us, and it will kill us in the end.

Nor can we eliminate the tell-tale effects of sin–the fears and sorrows, a sense of dirtiness and liability to judgment, the alienation from God and others, the painful consequences that cannot be undone, the increasing bondage to more and more things the older we get, the aging and the dying.

That’s why I don’t expect the life to always go well, or the world to always be good, or governments and leaders to be perfect.    I expect bad news to be the norm for the human race.    I expect folly and even wickedness in high places.

And I don’t pressure myself or others to fix it all or make it magically all better.    The power is not in me and it’s not in you.     Never has been.   Never will be.

This is realism.    But it is not despair or pessimism.

No, outside the human system and beyond time and space there is a Someone who is supremely good and supremely active to bringing all history to the right outcome.     For unknown reasons, He allowed evil to exist and allow the human race to spurn Him for it.

But for even more unfathomable reasons, He didn’t wash His hands and leave us to our fate.    He intervened!

The good news is still good news.

We need someone far above and beyond us to come into our lives from the outside, and put things right.    We are spiritually dead and numb, and Life personified has come knocking on our doors.   We are trapped and unable to free ourselves, and the Liberator has come.

In our helplessness and wretchedness, there is a Hero who hears our cry and offers Himself in supreme self-sacrifice to come to our rescue.    There is a Good King who will bring in a new era, and provide the peace and joy we have longed for all of our lives.

The Good News is still good news.

We don’t have to have all the answers.   We don’t need to figure everything out.  We don’t need to manage everything and everyone.    We don’t need to hide and protect ourselves from all danger.

We no longer need to be our own father and mother, our own savior, our own lord, our own king, our own goodness, our own protection, our own anything.

We can resign from trying (and utterly failing) to be god and give up the throne and the crushing burden of control.    We can let go of all the props and addictive supports we use to maintain our illusions of control.

We can admit our vast need and become His and receive His self-sacrificing love and allow Him to bear the weight of all our sins and forever remove them.   We can, in simple trust, allow Him to occupy the throne of our lives and open us up under “new management”.

The Good News is we’re not stuck with the old regime of evil.     Regime change is possible and real and being offered to us right here, right now.

We need a new heart, and the Great Physician is willing to wheel us into the operating room and perform heart transplant surgery on us–if we’ll simply admit our need and submit to the surgery.

Yes, the Good News is still good and it’s far better than all the bad news put together throughout all human history!

A Bad Case of Voter Blahs

Count me among the already weary of the 2012 election.

I have little enthusiasm for any of the potential candidates running for president.  I don’t think there’s a whole lot that any president can do about our economy, our moral decline, or stalemated political system.

We are a troubled society, riddled with dysfuntionality, populated by very sick souls.   And that’s not going to get better anytime soon.   Nor is there much any government can do about it.

So what’s a voter with a bad case of the blahs to do?

I guess we can start with confession.

We elected a rookie in 2008 with a thin resume, and Obama’s team made some humdinger mistakes.   There really was a moment, at the summit of their power, when they could have been gracious and humble and forged a lasting, bipartisan coalition on many issues.   Instead….

Their stimulus bill was a misnomer.  It was actually a relief payments bill–not an investment in infrastructure with the prospect of long-term, national, economic benefits.   And once that money was spent on relief to the unemployed, to local governments–it was gone and gone for good.

Then these recipients came back the next year wanting more.    Which gives the nagging impression of having created dependency, and reinforces the magical belief  “we don’t have to make tough choices–the feds will bail us out again.”  Not smart.

Their decision to push for national health insurance “reform” squandered huge amounts of political capital and set off alarm bells among those concerned about deficits, expanding entitlement programs, etc.    Nothing like provoking a  reaction for producing gridlock.

So we’re broke, bitterly divided, and therefore crippled in our ability to really address long-term, deep issues confronting our nation.

Then there’s the congressional Republicans.     Under GWB, they lowered taxes and raised spending and failed to heed the warnings about the bubble economy.    Morally, many of them preached family values and practiced the opposite.    With friends like these…..

There’s almost a naive faith in the markets, in the goodness and “enlightened self-interest” of people.     So when all the regulations went by the wayside, they were dumbfounded by the rampant greed and tone-deafness to such basic morals as honesty and self-restraint in the money-making class.

True conservatism believes in sin, and therefore in checks and balances.   Unchecked government, and unchecked business interests, and unchecked unions, and even unchecked individuals can all do an incredible amount of damage.     None of us can be trusted with absolute power.

That is why, when a party or candidate dares to stand for morality, they will have to do an extra amount of soul-searching, accept a higher level of accountability, and begin with their own soul.  If you don’t want it, don’t preach it.

Deregulation was really a code-word for anarchy and “every man for himself” and “good ‘ole boys taking care of their own”.  (Note to Ron Paul:   this fact is why libertarianism is a fail).

Unchecked bureaucracy, on the other hand, is really a code-word for authoritarianism.  (Not to Obama:   this is why your regulatory fight with religious groups is never going to go away–please stop it).

Funny enough, confession is working.   I’m feeling less blah.   And light is beginning to dawn.

I want a presidential candidate that gets all the above.

I want Rick Santorum to say, “we social conservatives need to regain the right to lead our nation morally.  Too often we’ve been guilty of hypocrisy and trying to impose our views on unwilling people.  We’ve got a lot of work to do to regain their lost trust.”

I want Ron Paul to say, “we libertarians don’t really have an answer for unbridled greed and unchecked selfish impulses–and we need to find an answer before we ask voters to trust us.”

I want Mitt Romney to say, “we economic conservatives need to convince voters we’ve learned the lessons from the bubble economy, and we aren’t just offering more of the same and expecting different results.”

I want Newt Gingrich to say, “my moral failings and egotistical faults are real, and I’m working on them.    You have good reason to be skeptical, but I realize that I need accountability and people in my life who will tell me “no!” so my ego is deflated.”

I want President Obama to say, “I made some big mistakes and way over-reached and now my hands are tied by these large deficits and loss of trust and polarization.    So I’m going to call a moratorium on imposing liberal social policies, and work to undo my early mistakes if you elect me.”

Any candidate want to step into the confession box first?

Redeeming the White Underclass

There is a strong cultural bias against poor whites.

They are called “hillbillies”, “white trash” or “trailer trash”.

Many are uneducated, and proud of it.    School is seen as unnecessary, and parents blame teachers for their child’s defiance and/or failings in the classroom.

Many of their kids are over 2 grades behind, spending their school lives in “special ed”.  Then they drop out of high school, and/or seek a life in delinquency, promiscuity, and addictions–starting the cycle all over again.

Many come from single-parent, welfare dependent families.    Many are addicts–to prescription pain killers, to alcohol, to meth, or to enabling other family members to remain in addiction.

Many come from divorced homes, and many of their families are torn by unending feuding and family violence–often fueled by alcoholism.

Many are chronically unemployed, or on disability, or mentally ill, and/or sit around and watch television all day.    Many are fiercely independent, and extremely suspicious of government.    Many have never known their father, or had a drunk, wife-beating, or incestuous one.

This is not a pretty picture.    And it’s not hard to see why many look down their noses at this entire group–even though many, many of them are decent, responsible folks who have a lot to teach us about life.

So what can the church do to help redeem this white underclass?    What will help?

I can’t give a government-funded, scientific study kind of answer.    But I can tell about what I’ve seen and heard.

The first thing the church can do is to understand its mission–a mission to heal/redeem some very broken lives.    Which means it is a mission of escorting folks to the only One big enough to heal them, and helping them experience His grace first-hand.    We serve the Messiah, but we aren’t the Messiah.

To do that, however, we ourselves will need to become a healing, redeeming kind of family.    We ourselves will have to be freed of feuds, incestuous thinking, and religious addictions.     We will have to shed our hard-core, graceless religion and any hint of superiority or judgmentalism.

It will involve loving folks where they are, but helping them not remain where they are.   We will need to bring God’s truth to bear on issues of addiction/idolatry, sexual sin and brokenness, and resentment and proud independence.    Surrendering control to God is always the master goal.

We will have to learn how to be a new, healing kind of grace-giving family, and then invite these folks to “taste and see that the Lord is kind”.   In such a family, we have boundaries and say no to certain things.

In such a family, we are on each other’s side against the sin bedeviling all of us.    We’re honest, without being condemning or taking it personally and making a feud out of it.    We quit pretending we’re better or using church to compensate for private evils.    We come clean ourselves.

Trust, not formulas; grace not legalism; self-examination and personal responsibility, not blame–all received and practiced together as a healthy family.

The church is a thus hospital for the broken, not a museum of the already perfect.   It exists to share grace with others, not hoard it all for the benefit of insiders.

In other words, healing comes as the overflow of living within an imperfect, but growing group of people under Christ.    We experience His grace, and pass it back and forth in a life-giving environment.

Instead of the condemnation that only deepens us in sin and causes us to hide it, we bring it into the light and find we are deeply loved.    Amazingly, the power of sins melt, and the power of old patterns is broken, and we are freed!

As we get better together in this grace-giving, healing environment, we naturally want others to have what we have.    So the circle of grace expands to include others.

Marriages are healed; parents are reconciled with children; irresponsible, self-pitying people discover purpose and a network of folks help them find jobs.   Addicted folks are steered into 12-Step groups and co-dependents are held accountable to not rescue them but let them hit bottom.

Graced people then seed the businesses and institutions of our area with grace, and begin to speak good things into those places and sustain community advancement.

Local governing leaders are thrilled to discover a group of servants they didn’t know existed, and more and more lives come into contact with this grace-giving spirit.

This is what I have seen and heard.    I am an eye-witness to the power of church as a grace-giving family.   And this new family is where God re-parents lost souls and trains us to be holy and healthy.    A new pattern happens.

That’s why I am such a believer in Acts 2, grace-giving churches.   The kind of family we are is our greatest tool, our greatest way of redeeming lives.  We, together, are what the White Underclass so desperately needs to see, experience, and embrace.

If only we had eyes to see it!

The White Underclass

Today’s blog piggy-backs on Nicholas Kristof’s op-ed piece in the New York Times. To read it click on this link:  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/09/opinion/kristof-the-decline-of-white-workers.html

Essentially, Kristof argues that we are losing an entire generation of people in the rural, mostly White areas of our country.

Socially, their families and habits of life are precisely where the inner city ghettos were in the late 1960’s.   He highlights the loss of jobs, the explosion of Meth, the withdrawal of young men from the labor force, the huge illegitimacy rates and resulting family breakdown, and says, “We have a problem!”   My response is, “How many decades did it take you guys to figure this out?!”

Since I pastored in such an area for 13 years, and witnessed all this first-hand, I’d like to chime in and add my own thoughts.

First, these areas used to be places where you didn’t need much education to prosper.   But they don’t see it.

There were mills and trades where folks skilled using their hands could make a family-supporting income.    Therefore, education wasn’t valued as even seen as terribly useful.    So the values of the parents didn’t stress or expect their kids to go to college.   In fact, advanced education was de-valued and those pursuing it was seen as weirdos.

But when the mills closed, and when our economy changed to a knowledge-based one, the disdain for education values didn’t “work” anymore.

The young men still dropped out of high school or barely finished it, and yet could find few jobs except part-time, minimum wage work.    Many of them turned to drugs and recreational sex.     Which resulted in sky-rocketing addiction rates, illegitimacy rates, crime rates,  incarceration rates, and even greater family chaos.   A downward spiral was begun.

Sadly, disability rates and mental-illness rates in rural areas went up as well–as depression and stress took their tolls on bodies and minds and hearts.      Unemployment rates are chronically much higher in these areas–they are the last to prosper during good times and the first to suffer during recessions.    Need I point out that this cluster of issues costs our society a bundle?

Second, there is a spiritual crisis in these areas.

It used to be true that college-educated people were less religious than working class people–and less likely to marry and live a traditional, middle-class life.    But there has been a complete reversal since the 1960’s and now the opposite is true in 2012!

The same book Kristof is commenting upon highlights the fact that, in these distressed areas, people are far less likely to go to church, consider themselves religious, marry and stay married, and embrace the Protestant work ethic.  Ironically, it’s the college-educated whose families are living the more traditional, conventional, “by the book” lives–and who are reaping the benefits of wise, morally rooted financial stewardship and industriousness.

So we are heading towards two, parallel societies which have nothing to do with each other and which share little in common.

If I could emphasize what these secular writers don’t, the crisis in the rural areas is a crisis of faith and an abandonment of all ties to God, family, community, and society.

We are seeing male children raised to be lone wolves, with a predatory “taking” approach to life and a fierce resistance to limitations of any kind on their pain-and-chaos fueled approach to life.    These lone wolves are the ones who father a string of children with different women, who aren’t safe risks to marry, and who are the most likely to abuse or abandon their families if they stay in the picture.

Yes, we need as a society to answer the questions, “What can rural young men, who work best with their hands, do to support a family in today’s world?   And how are we going to help them find it?”      But we are going to also have to address the family chaos, the addiction-fueled damage to little souls and resulting hostility and resistance to bonding to anything higher or outside of their selves.

If what happened in the inner city in the late 1960’s is a guide, and if what we see there forty years later is a pattern, then we are one generation away from 70-80% illegitimacy rates and “someone being in jail” as the norm in rural areas.

Using my own experience in a rural church as a guide, I would like to discuss next time what the church can do to rouse itself and help heal the spiritual lone wolves among us and re-bond them to God, family, and community.

How to Lead Our Hearts Home

It’s not easy to lead our hearts home to God.

In 2000 years of Church history, many dear people have written down the insights they have learned from Christ.   Like us, they have struggled with many things that block their relationship with God, and have had to learn how to overcome these barriers.

We can piggy-back on their wisdom, thankfully, instead of reinventing the wheel.    And they have found three ways to lead our hearts home.

The first way home is the way of actions.  

Act like you love God most, and you will begin to feel more loving feelings towards God.   That’s why Jesus tells the Ephesian church, “remember from where you have fallen, repent, and do the deeds you did at first.

Instead of going through the motions, and giving perfunctory obedience from a  cold heart, act like your heart is warm towards Christ.    Ask, “When we first knew and loved Jesus, what did we do?  What did we say?   What were we willing to freely give Him?”

Then go and begin to do the same!

The second way home is the way of thoughts.

We stare and stare at God’s declarations of His love in Scripture.    We ponder them and mull them over in our minds all day.

We look at one passage after another, day after day after day, about God’s grace-giving, boundless, condition-satisfying love for us–even when we are at our worst and especially at our worst.

And as our mind is filled with His words of love, our heart begins to find itself engaged and waking up and experiencing His love.    Thinking and feeling go together, and one very often leads to the other.

We stop listening to the lies of our wounded, disbelieving ego–which says to our hearts, “If I don’t love myself, neither does God!  If I won’t forgive myself, neither will God.   If want to punish and reject myself for failing myself, so does God”.

We stop repeating these lies over and over and are no longer possessed by these self-hating feelings.    New, God-sent and God-spoken thoughts begin to fill us and our mood brightens and our hearts grow soft again.

We become, once again, what He says we are:   the beloved of God.

The third way home is the way of emotions.

We cultivate our affections for God, recounting all the ways He’s loved us in the past.    We stare at the cross with the eyes of our hearts, see Jesus suffering there out of love for us, and love Him all the more for it.

Interestingly, looking at mental images of His cross love helps displace other, damaging images from our hearts.

We all play these mental slide-shows–images of painful memories, images of abandonment or abuse, images of trauma and devastation where we felt powerless and were deeply hurt.

Nursing these emotional images keep our hearts bound up in old emotions, in past or present injustices, in past or present complaints, accusations, and judgments against others.

Our hearts are chained to our resentments and we cannot find self-release.

The way of the heart displaces these emotion-producing images with new images of Christ loving us as sinners.    Instead of feeling like we deserve better, we begin to feel undeservedly blessed with great grace.

We begin to feel privileged and deeply loved.    Our heart has come home.

Most of us will be attracted to one of these three paths.    And most of us will need to try the other two and perhaps walk all three paths at the same time to find our way home.

The important thing isn’t how we get there, the important thing is to get there!