The Faith of a Teenage Mom

There are two things I know for sure about God:

• He never works in the ways we expect Him to.
• He always works for our good.

The confusing part is how these fit together. If it weren’t for the former, the latter would be a lot easier to believe. If God did what I expected (and wanted) all the time, it would be a lot easier for me to believe that He is working for my good. As it is, I’m left befuddled and bewildered by His ways most of the time.

As a general rule, most of us try to avoid unpredictable people. Sometimes we even lock them up. And yet many of us have surrendered our very lives to one who never works the way we expect. What’s gotten into us?

Faith, I guess.

Think of the faith it took for Mary and Joseph and the wise men and the shepherds and Simeon and Anna to believe that a tiny baby could be the Son of God, their King and their Redeemer. He was so helpless, so fragile, so . . . human. Not at all what anyone expected. And yet still they believed. Before she even saw her baby, Mary said, “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit has rejoiced in God my Savior.” Sounds like she was too busy rejoicing to doubt.

Can I get to that place? Too busy rejoicing to stew about why God isn’t doing what I think He should do? Too busy magnifying to question whether He’s really working for my good?

If a teenage peasant could believe that the baby she just delivered in a stable in the middle of the night would one day be her Savior, then, OK, I can believe that God loves me, that He has a plan for me and for all humanity, and that He spends every second of every day of every century working it out for our good.

Transition Generation, Part II

“We look back on slave-owning churchgoers of 150 years ago and ask, ‘How could they have treated their fellow human beings that way?’ I wonder if followers of Christ 150 years from now will look back at Christians in America today and ask, ‘How could they live in such big houses? How could they drive such nice cars and wear such nice clothes? How could they live in such affluence while thousands of children were dying because they didn’t have food and water? How could they go on with their lives as though the billions of poor didn’t even exist?’” —David Platt, Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream

The transition generation. I think we’re it. My generation has learned to function and benefit from life in a global society; my children’s generation will learn to care about it.

Disney theme parks offered a free one-day pass through its “Give a Day, Get a Disney Day” volunteering program this year. Glee, the trendiest show on television, invites its mostly young viewers to be part of Members Project, which raises awareness about the environment and promotes volunteerism and donating to charity. One lucky winner will even get to spend the day serving beside the Glee cast members in Los Angeles!

Our kids are being mobilized by the secular media. So what will we do? Encourage them to jump on board the “recycle/plant-a-tree/serve-Christmas-dinner-to-the-homeless-so you-feel-less guilty” bandwagon? Yes. These are good things. But I think Jesus calls us to even more.

It seems like a watershed moment for Christians, especially those of us who came out of the self-centered, indulgent 80s and 90s and are raising children who will lead us through this century. Will we continue to be a people identified by what we don’t do (drinking/smoking/swearing/dancing)? Or, as David Platt suggests, will we become a people known for what we do? Like reduce global poverty. Take in orphans. Care for the sick and the elderly. Serve radically. Give sacrificially. You know, change the world. Will the people of God be leaders in this? Am I pouring juice and folding socks for those very leaders right now? Wow, how cool would that be!

Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could raise teenagers who care more about providing fresh water in rural India than which Nickelodeon pop stars are dating each other? How incredible would it be if our college students happily spent their spring breaks in Guatemala instead of Daytona? Do you think it’s possible that we could raise a generation who defines success not by how many degrees they earn or how many toys they own, but by how many lives they can save by putting others ahead of themselves?

Parenting is a monumental job. For the transition generation, it’s a world-changing job. It excites me. It also scares the bejeebers out of me. Who will I have to become for them to be all I hope they will be?

Transition Generation, Part I

My great-grandma was born in 1902 and died in 1999. By the time I was born in 1970, she had seen the whole world change around her. She was a little girl who used an outhouse and rode in a horse and buggy. By the time she died, people were sending messages over the Internet. When she was about 90, I interviewed her about all the changes she had seen in her lifetime—driving a Model T for the first time, getting a washing machine, watching the moon landing. I remember thinking how unremarkable it all seemed to her. She was just living her life in Akron, Colorado, raising kids, then grandkids, then great-grandkids, playing paper dolls with us, cleaning up our messes, making jello.

I believe that the changes I will see in my lifetime will be just as profound as what my grandma witnessed. And maybe it’s just my innate need to feel special, but I have the sense that my generation, in particular—Generation X or whatever you want to call it—is the transitional generation.

Here’s what I mean by that. The first two decades of my life looked pretty similar to that of my mother’s and grandmother’s. Of course there were new inventions (TV comes to mind) and social changes (civil rights, women entering the workforce), but our day-to-day lives and thought processes were not vastly different.

Then came the 90s and everything changed. I graduated from college in 1993, and I can count on one hand the number of students I knew who had personal computers. I knew one person who had a phone in his car, and it rarely worked. A decade later, people would communicate differently, learn differently, shop differently, date differently, and, most significant of all, think differently.

People just ten years younger than me have minds not only influenced but actually wired by the technology that now permeates our culture. It seems that my generation stands uniquely with one foot in the “old world”—the way we learned to think and function when we were young—and the “new world,” in which our three-year-olds use a mouse with as much proficiency as a spoon.

My children’s world is much different than the one I grew up in, and I’m responsible to prepare them for the grown-up version of this new world, whether I like it and understand it or not. Even more important, I have to teach them to function beyond technology, to be comfortable and thrive in the real, flesh-and-blood world.

Yet my days, like my grandma’s, are still filled with paper dolls, messes, and jello. I just hope I don’t miss out on the bigger picture, that I don’t let the minutia of parenting overshadow the serious task of preparing the next generation to not only function in the world, but to make it better.

More on this next week . . .

The Importance of Being Known

I spend a lot of time in my car. I spend a lot of time looking at other people in their cars. Vehicles have always been used to make a statement about their owners, but I’ve noticed over the past several years that they’re no longer just status symbols. No matter how nice or how junky, they’ve become ways in which we identify ourselves.

It seems that nearly half of the cars in our school carpool line have stick-figure characters lining the back window. Two fuzzy-haired little girls and a baby. Or three little baseball-capped boys and a dog. Others are more specific: a gymnast figure accompanied by the name Britney, or the numbers 22 with Jason’s name underneath. Some people must feel this is too personal, so they use fish to represent themselves—two big ones and several little ones following behind them. One car displays two large pairs of Hawaiian sandals surrounded by six little ones.

Parental pride, right? Maybe, but I think there may be more to it. What about the older woman I see driving her Mercedes with a female golfer on the back? She’s not promoting her kids, she’s trying to tell the world something about herself. “I am a golfer. This is what I do.” She’s joined by the myriad “26.2” symbol bearers on the road who want the world to know that they run marathons.

I do this myself. Not the running marathons part, but I do have pioneer plates on my car, and I’m quite proud of them. Because I live in a transplant state, and I want people to know that I’m a native, that my family have been Coloradans for five generations. My family heritage is important to me, and I want people to know it. (The scratch and dent marks covering my car? Not trying to send any statement with those, but I suppose they represent my life as well.)

Perhaps I’m reading too much into this, but I think it may be coming from our deep longing to be known. It’s as if we’re saying, “I’m dashing through my life at the speed of sound, and I just want someone to know who I am and what’s important to me. Even if it’s just a stranger at a stoplight. Will someone please just know me?”

And this makes me sad. Is this how God designed us to live? Of course not. As hard as it is—as tempted as we are to keep our relationships safe, convenient, manageable—I hope that we’ll all let at least a few people into our lives who will really know us. Not because of the car we drive or the statements we make through our symbols, but because we have let down our guard and trusted people with our story.

Shedding My Skin

During my adolescent years, while I was holed up in my room reading twisted V.C. Andrews books, my Christian contemporaries were reading C.S. Lewis. I hadn’t even heard of Lewis until I got to college, and even then I didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. At that time, and perhaps still, Westmont College was home to C.S. Lewis’s own personal wardrobe, the one of lion-and-witch fame. By the skin of my teeth, I had slipped into the freshman honors English class, which meant I was surrounded by 14 smarty-pants kids who had been reading the Narnia books since infancy.

Our small class met for three hours on Tuesday nights. We sat on couches huddled around the old wardrobe drinking hot chocolate and waxing eloquent about Lewis and other great Christian writers. (I didn’t know any of them either.) I faked my way through it with a lot of smiling and nodding, but I had no idea who Lucy or Caspian were or why their stories mattered.

Now, twenty years later, I get it. I’ve still not read all the Narnia books, but I’ve read most of them to the kids, and some of them two or three times. The Magician’s Nephew—where it all starts—has become one of my all-time favorites. In the way The Great Gatsby, years ago, made me want to be a better writer, Nephew makes me want to be a better storyteller.

And then there’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, God’s most recent instrument with which to make His point to me. I’ve been reading it to the kids, while simultaneously reading Forgotten God. Francis Chan writes, “The Spirit will lead you to the way of the cross, as He led Jesus to the cross, and that is definitely not a safe or pretty or comfortable place to be. The Holy Spirit of God will mold you into the person you were made to be. This often incredibly painful process strips you of selfishness, pride, and fear.” As an example of this, Chan references Eustace’s transformation from dragon back to boy in Lewis’s Dawn Treader book.

OK, so he spoiled the plot for me. But I got over it a few days later when I read the description of this transformation. After three times trying to rid himself of his irritating, burdensome, scaly skin—but finding that there were too many layers to ever shake off completely—Eustace was told by Aslan, “You will have to let me undress you.”

Eustace explains: “I was afraid of his claws . . . but I was pretty nearly desperate now. So I just lay flat down on my back to let him do it. The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt. The only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off. . . . Then he caught hold of me—I didn’t like that much for I was very tender underneath now that I’d no skin on—and threw me into the water. It smarted like anything but only for a moment. After that it became perfectly delicious and as soon as I started swimming and splashing . . . I saw I’d turned into a boy again.”

Back to Chan: “Sometimes the sin we take on becomes such a part of us that it requires this same kind of ripping and tearing to free us. The Holy Spirit does not seek to hurt us, but He does seek to make us Christlike, and this can be painful.”

I sense I’m in a scale-shedding sort of place. Layers of selfishness and pride have become my second skin, and, man, does it hurt when it gets ripped off. But, like Eustace, when the skin gets irritating enough, when you realize it’s keeping you from becoming all you were made to be, you find the faith to lie flat down on your back and let Him do it. Thank you, C.S. Lewis, for such a beautiful picture of submission. I now understand what all the fuss is about.

Just a Thought

Something to think about from Francis Chan's book Forgotten God:

"What would your church (and the worldwide Church) look like if everyone was as committed as you are? If everyone gave and served and prayed exactly like you, would the church be healthy and empowered? Or would it be weak and listless?"

More than a Bone

I recently found myself asking God if He could just please throw me a bone. Could something please be easy instead of hard, could something please work out the way I hoped, could I please just see His favor in ways that I could recognize as Him?

See, my pants had gotten streaked with grease while I was trying to serve someone else. Someone the Bible tells me I will be blessed when I serve. They weren’t just any pants, either. They were my favorite pants in the whole world, a pair that make me feel skinny and chic. I’ve had them eight years, and they’ve seen me through a lot of living. They’re something I would grab if there was a fire and I could only take ten items with me.

I asked, “Seriously, God, did you have to let my pants get ruined while I was trying to do your will?”

My pity party lasted a few hours. Then Paul came into my mind and turned off the lights ’cause the party was over. I can’t think of a single time when the apostle Paul complained. He expressed concern over people’s actions and attitudes, but he never whined about his own physical state. On the contrary, he writes that he delights in weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecution, and difficulties because those things bring out Christ’s power in him. I wonder how Paul felt about dirty pants?

Paul learned the secret of being content in every situation. And though he had ample opportunity, what with all those letters he was always writing, he never complained. Not about the shipwrecks or the public floggings or the false imprisonments. He didn’t complain about the morons at the synagogue who wouldn’t give him the time of day or the crowds that kept chasing him out of town. Instead, he kept plugging away, content and delighted.

I doubt that Paul ever once asked God to “throw him a bone.” Why would he need a bone when he felt like every day he served the Lord was like a feast?

Yes, that’s conviction I feel. Got it, Spirit, thanks. I’ll wipe away my tears, go find my Shout stain remover, and give thanks for the feast that is my life.