Another Christian Scandal and Where It Leads My Thoughts

One of the songs providing fuel for my run a few days ago was DC Talk's "What If I Stumble?" It starts with this quote from Brennan Manning:

"The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians who acknowledge Jesus with their lips and then walk out the door and deny them by their lifestyle. That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable." 

In light of what's been happening at my son's college, Liberty University, the words hit me hard. I can't control the craziness in the world. I can't control what other people do and say. But I can listen and lean in when God says, "Let's work on you." 

Here are two things He has invited me this week to meditate on with Him. 

First, my own testimony. Do my behaviors match my doctrine? Do I practice what I preach? I am doing a thorough examination to be sure I'm not denying Christ by my lifestyle. I don't have any pool boys hiding in my closet, but what about the way I talk about other people? How do I respond when things don't go my way? Do I live like I trust Jesus?

I've also been thinking about why my testimony matters at all. Are there really people watching me to decide if they'll follow Christ or not? Hard to imagine who that might be. But when I think of the kind of testimony I want to have and why it's important, four sets of watching blue eyes immediately come to mind. My kids have received a lifetime of teaching and preaching from me, and there's nothing more horrifying than to think that I would give them reason to doubt the truthfulness of my message. 

If I were to fall into some hidden, unconfessed sin, I would be embarrassed and ashamed for my friends to find out. I would feel sick at the thought of dishonoring my husband and disappointing my mom. But my children? I would be torn to shreds, done in, for my children to see me as a phony and my testimony as a joke. Lord, give me grace, strength, and conviction every day to not betray my witness to my children. 

The second thing I'm thinking about this week is related to judgment. I can grab hold of Brennan Manning's words, hop up on my high horse, and scream down to the Christians caught in scandalous sin, "What on earth were you people thinking? Do you have no fear of the Lord?!" Righteous anger is legitimate, but for me, it's just a stone's throw away from violating Jesus's command, "Do not judge lest you be judged." 

I am not tempted by drugs or alcohol or elicit sex. I am tempted hourly by self-righteousness, which is just as much a slavemaster as the sins that get more coverage. 

I have recently returned to an article that I read this spring on the prophet Daniel's prayer for repentance in Daniel 9. Without any known moral lapses of his own, Daniel prayed, "We have been wicked." "We have sinned and done wrong." "We are covered with shame." "We have turned away." 

The author of the article, Jeff Peabody, says this:

"I find myself desperately wanting non-Christians to know what I am not. And that seems to be the trend. We decry the despicable brokenness of other believers and encourage the world to turn away from them and look at us instead for a more palatable, truer depiction of faith. But adopting a wholesale separatist approach feeds the lie that we are intrinsically different sheep from the rest of the flock. It deludes us into believing that our proper theology, superior morality, or enhanced sense of justice make us the keepers of God's full perspective. We lean further and further into our own self-righteousness. 

This is where Daniel's prayer is so jarring. Instead of recoiling from the wickedness he sees around him, he places himself squarely in the middle of other people's sin in addition to his own. There is no daylight between his personal failings and those of the larger community."  

This is sobering. It pulls me off my high horse into a place of repentance--for my "me sins" and my "we sins." I am not intrinsically different than the other sheep in the flock.

Another Miracle of Maturity

 I can count on two hands, maybe even a hand and a half, the number of times in my adult life that I've cried so hard I couldn't function. I tear up pretty easily, mostly when I am made aware of the presence of God in my life, but I am very rarely brought to the kind of gut-wrenching sobs that leave you temporarily incapable of participating in the world. The most inopportune incident of this kind came when I was in a movie theater by myself with six young children, including a toddler on my lap, watching the movie Up and crying so loudly that I scared everyone in the room, including myself. 

But the profound weeping incident I'm remembering this week was one from September 2015. I had just dropped my oldest daughter off at Mountain Lab, a somewhat mandatory "team-building" overnight camp for her eighth-grade class. She had been to camp once before, and it had not been a huge success. There are kids who love camp and kids who don't, and she definitely fell into the latter category. She had also been struggling with friendships the past three years. She didn't feel like she had any reliable, go-to friends at the time. She dreaded being with 200 classmates day and night for two days, trying to find a place to sit in a rowdy dining hall, and being forced to do trust-building activities with people she knew she didn't trust. The thought of Mountain Lab had haunted her all summer, and now it was time to drop her off to face her worst fears. 

As I pulled away from the campground, the tears started rolling. By the time I got to the highway entrance, I was in the full-blown emotional upheaval that's usually reserved for sudden deaths. I had to pull off the road. There I sat for several long minutes, weeping from the core of my being. I trusted that God was with her and would use this for her good, but I hurt for how I knew she must feel. I had always felt like this child in particular, out of all my kids, took my heart with her wherever she went. She was my sensitive kid. Her pain was my pain in a way I didn't experience with my others. I remember wondering, as I sat on the shoulder of the highway desperately trying to find something on which to blow my nose, how I would ever be able to send this girl to college. 

That question lingered in my mind the past five years, until it was answered on Monday. That's when we left her 800 miles from home for the next three months. As I hugged her goodbye, the tears, sweet and subdued, came for a couple of minutes. Honestly, they were tears of joy every bit as much as they were tears of sadness. This girl is going to be just fine. My hunch is that she's going to be great. 

My parenting mantra that I've said at least a hundred times: Maturity is a parent's best friend. Those problems you're having with your kid today? Those chronic irritations you notice again and again in your child? Maturity will take care of nearly all of them. Our job is to pray, be consistent, stay engaged and available, love and love some more, trust God, and let His gift of maturity do its good work. 

If you are the parent of younger kids, take heart! Have hope! Right under your nose, maturity is doing its work in those kids of yours. It won't always be pretty, but on the other side, it will be worth every sob session you've ever had. 

And if you have kids nearing high school graduation whose maturity is starting to cast a nice, warm glow in your house, and if you're starting to mourn their imminent departure, be encouraged by this: In my experience, the buildup to the goodbye is much worse than the actual goodbye. We spend their whole senior year dreading what turns out to be a pretty beautiful thing. The two times I've dropped kids off at far-away colleges, my sense of excitement for them has outweighed the sense of loss for myself. 

If I ever wonder about the goodness of God, all I have to do is think of the work He's done in my kids. A shy, scared 13-year-old somehow becomes an 18-year-old who is eager and equipped to live 800 miles from home with 20,000 strangers. That makes me cry. In the best possible way. 

Learning, Thinking, and Praying

Last time I wrote, I talked about how I've sensed God saying, "Let's work on you" in response to the conversation about race happening in our country. In the month since I wrote that, I have certainly seen Him work in me. And, wow, am I praying. I'm praying as I sit down to write this. God, please help me communicate what you want me to say, and let me write from a place of humility.

In the past month, I have read articles, watched movies, documentaries, and YouTube videos, listened to podcasts, and read White Fragility. Because God had still more to teach me, I ended up spontaneously housing a 17-year-old Black girl for the night and getting a peek into her world and then seeing my daughter's mostly Black basketball team called "dirty" by a group of white moms. My learning moved outside of just the academic/intellectual realm and into the practical. God is answering my prayers to open my eyes to new things.

So what have I learned so far?

For starters, a lot about Critical Race Theory, and its parent, Critical Theory. If these terms are unfamiliar to you, as they were to me, I encourage you to study up. CRT is the foundation of much of the response we're hearing today. It's the perspective from which White Fragility and many of today's "must-read" books come from. It provides a ready answer to the heartbreak we feel when we watch the George Floyd video and the yearning Christians have to seek after justice as the Bible commands. It's giving us terms like "whiteness" and "intersectionality" and "privilege" and "antiracism" and "fragility." It is the tidal wave sweeping over our country right now, and it's making us think.

Robin DiAngelo, author of White Fragility, is one of the key spokespersons of CRT. As a white woman, she does a very skillful job speaking to other white people. She knows what she's saying is hard. She doesn't hold back, but she presents her message in a way that shows she knows how hard it is to accept what she's saying. After all, that's what white fragility is--the discomfort whites feel when confronted about racial inequality and injustice. In a mostly tolerable way, she points out that whites are all racist, every single one of us, because we were born into and benefit from a racist system that keeps white people on top and pushes Black people down. She strategically separates morality from racism. In other words, you can be a good person and still be a racist. The CRT definition of racist is different from anything I've heard before. It's not a white person making mean jokes at a Black person's expense or using the "n" word or refusing to use the same bathroom as a Black person. It's everyone who's white, everyone who benefits from the structures that keep whites on the top and Blacks on the bottom, whether they know they're benefitting or not. A white person married to a Black spouse raising Black children is still a racist. The white people protesting as part of Black Lives Matter are racist. DiAngelo argues that it's not a moral term, but simply a reflection of reality.

Her book, filled with stories and examples, brought me new insight. It made me think. It, along with several of the other things I've read and watched, helped me see how my perspective of the world has been narrow. I've seen how I've made quick judgments about people my whole life, how I've believed stereotypes and responded accordingly. One of the most insightful things I heard came from Emmanual Acho in one of his Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man videos. In trying to explain white privilege to whites, he said it's not that we haven't had hardship in our lives; it's that our hardships have not come as a result of our skin color.

So what I'm reading and hearing has made a lot of sense. I have spent good time talking to God about my own biases and repenting of my partiality and prejudice, apathy and ignorance. But something in all this CRT messaging just feels off. It's uncomfortable, yes, but it's more than that. So I kept pressing in and asking God to give me discernment. That's when I discovered Monique Duson and Dr. Neil Shenvi, who brought clarity by holding up CRT to the light of Scripture. At its core, CRT is a worldview. Worldviews answer essential questions like these:

Why are we here and what is our purpose?
What does it mean to be human?
What is our Big Problem?
What is the solution?

My worldview is a biblical one. We are here because we were created by a loving God who wants relationship with us. Our purpose is to know Him, be in relationship with Him, and help others do the same. To be human is to be made in the image of God and deeply loved by Him, so much so that He sent His Son to die for us. To be human is to find our identity in Him. Our Big Problem is sin, and the only solution is Jesus.

I am definitely not an expert on CRT, but my understanding is that it would answer those essential questions this way: To be human is to be made up of several different identities, consisting of race, gender, sexual orientation, age, and physical ability, in addition to other things. What you identify with is what you are. Our Big Problem is oppression. We are all either oppressors or the oppressed. We can be both at the same time. For instance, a white man is an oppressor, but if he is gay or in a wheelchair, he is at the same time oppressed (this is what intersectionality means). At the core of this oppression is whiteness. All whites are oppressors; all people of color are oppressed. Racism equals prejudice plus power, so only whites can be racist. The solution is for whites to sanctify themselves by repenting, becoming woke by educating themselves of the problem, divesting themselves of their whiteness, and repenting of the sin of whiteness. That is our purpose.

CRT is a works-based solution. It has no consideration for grace or the power and necessity of the Holy Spirit. It brings us to repentance before human beings, not before God, when both are necessary and the latter is essential to the former. It does not recognize that partiality is a sin shared by everyone. It forces sides, saying, "There is one way for this to look, and if you're not doing it the right way, you will be silenced and disgraced." Critical Race Theory divides: oppressed against oppressor, us versus them. The Bible unites: "He himself [Jesus] is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility" (Ephesians 2:14).

I'm not ready to say CRT is evil or completely without merit, though I might get there with more study. But at the very least, a viewpoint that allows no room for white-initiated dialogue between races and forbids tears of repentance (there's actually a chapter in DiAngelo's book called "White Women's Tears") is missing the mark. But its proponents have brought a very important issue to the forefront of our national conscience.

It's bringing racial injustice to the forefront of the church, where it needs to be. Malachi Vincent (see resources below) says that before we can talk about unity in the church, and before we can talk about the world being transformed by the unity of the church, we have to talk about sins that the church needs to repent of. We in the church need to care about this as much as God does. And we need leaders who know they are accountable to God and to Scripture and who recognize that if they're not abiding in Christ, they are capable of nothing. More than anything else, we need leaders with deep humility who will call the rest of the church to humble ourselves and seek racial justice from the God who invented justice. Otherwise, as Monique Duson says, we're going to look to the culture and get swept up in its misguided attempts at reconciliation.

Do we in the church have learning to do? Yes. Repenting? Being agents of change? YES. But let's do it with a biblical worldview. "We are not fighting against flesh-and-blood enemies, but against evil rulers and authorities of the unseen world, against mighty powers in this dark world, and against evil spirits in heavenly places" (Ephesians 6:12, NLT). Help us, Jesus, the one who reconciled us to God the Father and gave us the ministry of reconciliation.

Resources

5 Ways Christians Are Getting Swept Into a Secular Worldview in This Cultural Moment

Alisa Childers interview with Monique Duson

What Do We Do with Critical Theory? from the Colson Center for Worldview

A Conversation About Race and Reconciliation with Francis Chan (three-part series, but I particularly learned from the first of the three videos and from Malachi Vincent, who starts at 7:00 in)

In light of the past 10 weeks

I don't presume to know what to say right now. My heart, heavy since March, just took on an extra ton of weighty sadness in the past few weeks. What a year 2020 has turned out to be.

I don't know what to say, but this blog has never been about giving advice or telling people what they should or shouldn't do. I write about the things God is teaching me, and if someone else gets something out of it, great.

I can't say I've been struck by major revelation in the past 10 weeks, but if I were to highlight one message I feel like God's been giving me between the pandemic and the protests, I think it's this: "Let's work on you."

The older I get, the more I realize that I have control over just about nothing. I can't control the world's leaders, my neighbors, my husband, or my kids. I can't even control my dog with a collar and a leash. Until recently, I thought I had some control over my schedule, but in the face of endless cancellations, I've realized that even that was a myth.

I can only control me. I've heard this for years, but I've never been so personally aware of it. So I sense God saying to me, "Let's work on the one thing you can control. You."

If I'm being honest, I do a pretty bad job of controlling me. The stay-at-home orders have shown me in new ways that I am quick to judge, I am impatient, and I find a lot of misplaced identity and joy in the things I do and the relationships I have with people. I get restless easily, and I'm looking for the next fun fix to get me through the monotony of life. God is showing me these things about myself, saying, "Let's work on you."

When I turn on the news at night, He is showing me that some of the realities I've known my whole life are matters of perspective and privilege. Through books and articles and documentaries, He is showing me what injustice looks like and how it's so ingrained in our world that I don't even recognize it. He is pointing out my own prejudices, biases, and partialities, and I am having good, hard, repentant conversations with Him about it. He is showing me how some of the quick judgments I've made in the past, the quick defenses and rationalizations I've made in order to uphold my own paradigm of what is good and what is bad, who is good and who is bad, grieve His heart. He wants something different for me. So He says, "Let's work on you."

He's changing the way I pray. I pray more for humility than direction these days. I want to be wise, but even more than that, I want to be teachable and correctable. I'm asking Him less to change the people and circumstances around me and focusing more on how He wants to change me.

Some would say there's a lot more I could and should be doing. I would have a hard time arguing with them. Despite what Michael Jackson said ("If you wanna make the world a better place take a look at yourself and then make the change"), working on me feels difficult, slow, and not terribly productive. But maybe in the long run, it's the most useful thing I could ever do?

Neighbor Loving in the Time of Corona

There was a time--it seems like ages ago, but I guess it's just been 7 or 8 weeks--when I thought the Coronavirus might be what brought this country back together. A profound, difficult, shared experience can have that effect on people, no matter how hard it is for them to get along. I remembered 9/11, when for a couple of weeks one September, people were kinder to each other. We waved to strangers. We united by flying our flags off our front porches. We were all in the throes of shock and grief, and we treated each other carefully, gently. I thought that might be the case this time, too. And I think it was for a couple of weeks. But 9/11 lasted a day. The Coronavirus has lasted two months in the US, with no sign of letting up. We seem to have grown weary of treating each other gently.

The two ruling philosophies of the day are no longer Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, but "open ups" and "stay locked downs." They both have a pile of evidence to defend their positions. I can be convinced by either side. But since no one philosophy is completely doable, we've landed in some sort of wishy-washy middle ground where everyone just does their own thing. It doesn't take long for someone's "own thing" to collide with someone else's, and the result is usually not pretty.

Early on in this strange new life we find ourselves in, I went to Sam's Club with my youngest daughter. About a quarter of the people there were wearing masks. At that time my "own thing" did not include masks, but in the cold produce area, we collided with someone who saw things differently. While I was some distance away, an old man wearing a mask approached my 12-year-old and shouted at her, "You're killing people right now!"

My kids spend a lot of time at school talking about rights and responsibilities. Part of their school's creed, memorized since elementary school, is putting responsibilities ahead of rights. The man at Sam's surely had the right to say whatever he wanted to whomever he wanted. But as an adult, he also had the responsibility to not frighten a child. Or accuse her of murder.

The second it happened, my mama-bear instinct roared to life in a way I hadn't seen in years. I wanted to punch him, or maybe just hit him between the eyes with an oversized strawberry. That response lasted for about a second. Then I saw him for who he was, a scared, fragile old man living in the most disorienting, terrifying time of his life. My mama bear went back to sleep, and I only felt sorry for him.

Today I have a different perspective than I had that day in Sam's. It's my right to breathe freely in public, unencumbered by a mask. It's my right to visit a restaurant that has decided to challenge the order to stay closed. It's my right to hang out with a large group of friends. It's my right to attend church in a building with other people. Rights are important. I do not want to live in China. But responsibility is important too, and my chief responsibility is to obey God, who calls me to love my neighbor as myself.

I was not loving my neighbor in the produce section. I didn't know it at the time, and he didn't respond correctly, but I can now see it from his perspective. People are scared, especially those who are most vulnerable. They're scared, and they need a head of lettuce. They need to get out of the house to keep some shred of sanity. By wearing a mask in public, I'm not saying I'm scared of the virus or other people. I'm not kowtowing to the government. I'm saying, "I care about you." (I'm also thinking, "I feel absolutely ridiculous wearing this thing," but I'm hoping that feeling will fade.)

Isn't it strange how the smallest decisions these days seem like major ethical dilemmas? Do I really wear a mask to run into the post office for 10 seconds? Do I let my kid go to the park with four friends? How close do I get to the person who crosses my path on a hiking trail? With no hard and fast answers, we're all left to use our best judgment and do our own best thing. Let's give each other a lot of grace. And let's ask ourselves, "What would it look like to love my neighbor right now?" That may be our best hope for coming out of this thing better, kinder, and gentler.

To my senior

My friend Christa recently said to me that her parenting arsenal has been reduced to two sentences during this pandemic: "I'm sorry" and "I love you." Yes, so true.

And so, in light of our school district's announcement yesterday that in-person school is cancelled for the rest of the year, I say this to my daughter Addison, a high school senior:

I'm sorry that your senior year ended on March 13 and you didn't even know it. I'm sorry you didn't get to say goodbye or have any of those "lasts" that all the rest of us took for granted. 

I'm sorry you didn't get to give your senior defense, the capstone project of your K-12 education at one school. I'm sorry you gave it eight months' worth of brain space and hard work, only to see it cancelled with so many other things. You would have done such a good job with it.

I'm sorry you're missing the senior lock-in, the senior scavenger hunt, the senior breakfast, and the senior assembly. I'm sorry that your graduation will be a drive-by diploma pick-up. I'm sorry that you have a brother who did all these things two years ago so that you know exactly what you're missing.

I'm sorry for the little things you'll never get to do again--drive your sisters to school, eat lunch in the band room, muster up your courage to share your thoughts in a Socratic seminar. I'm sorry I didn't get one last picture of you in your school uniform (or what you've been wearing the past couple years that we've called a school uniform).

I'm sorry that the hours, days, months, and years you've put into practicing music will not end with the senior recital we had planned.

I'm sorry for the senior girls in your class who have unworn prom dresses in their closets, for the senior baseball players and soccer players who got one game in before their season ended, for the track kids who were hours away from their first meet. I'm sorry for those hopeful athletes who needed one more season of highlight film to send to that college recruiter.

I'm sorry that you feel like life is too easy now for an introvert who loves to be alone, and that you feel like you're not stretching and growing like you used to every day when you went to school.

I'm sorry that you're trying to make a decision about college in the midst of the craziest days any of us has ever seen. I'm sorry that no one can guarantee you'll get to go to college in the fall.

I'm sorry that all of this feels so unreal that you can't even cry.

I'm sorry that for years we older people have doubted your generation's grit and resilience and that it took such a severe test for you to prove us wrong. You and every senior I know have blown me away with your resilience.

I'm sorry that I completely underestimated your ability to deal with the hard parts of life, when most days you're doing so much better with this than I am.

I'm sorry that you feel bad about feeling bad for your losses. I'm sorry that it feels selfish to mourn your graduation when people are dying and businesses are crumbling. Please know that loss is not a competition.

But here's what I'm not sorry for: that we are getting such sweet time with you, that instead of frantically running off to another senior event, you're playing dumb board games with us, watching 2012 episodes of Survivor with us, having a Tuesday-afternoon picnic in the park with us, playing basketball on rollerblades in the driveway with us. These are not the memories any of us expected to make in the last two months of your senior year. But they are good memories. We are not suffering here. God has been so good to us.

For what it's worth, sweet girl, I'm sorry for all you've lost. I'm sorry and I love you.

Ten Days Ago

I remember ten days ago...

• when the Coronavirus seemed like an Asian, Iranian, and Italian problem
• when the biggest concern at my kids' school was maxing out our snow days
• when we were wondering how to balance soccer, track, and club basketball without losing our minds
• when no one was home for dinner at the same time
• when my girls didn't see each other enough to argue
• when my daughter's looming college decision seemed like the most important thing in the world
• when only weird people wore masks
• when I assumed all these preparations we're making for the Class of 2020 would pay off in glorious memories
• when I was starting to plan parties for my April birthday girls
• when my college student went to college
• when I didn't spontaneously cry throughout the day
• when I had never in my life been on the CDC website
• when I didn't really talk on the phone
• when I didn't give much thought to people who live alone
• when I wondered why I had picked up TWO library books I was never going to be able to finish in three weeks
• when my husband's small business seemed fairly predictable and wasn't something I prayed about all day long  
• when going to church required a drive in the car and at least some degree of personal grooming
• when I wore makeup nearly every day
• when I got up at 5 and went to the gym
• when I was productive and got my work done and had my computer all to myself
• when I was a little disappointed about our lack of spring break plans
• when we couldn't wait for nine days of sleeping in
• when saying yes to sending my kid to a friend's house wasn't a monumental decision
• when partnering with the school to educate my children meant proofreading a paper now and then and taking in muffins for Teacher Appreciation Day
• when you couldn't get a one-way ticket to Nashville for $15
• when the Great Depression seemed completely irrelevant to our lives
• when the sniffles were just the sniffles
• when toilet paper didn't come up in every single conversation
• when my sister-in-law's family was having a great time at Disneyworld
• when I had no idea which restaurants delivered 
• when I had some idea of what tomorrow would be like
• when I prayed, "All to Jesus I surrender" and thought I meant it
• when I lived under the illusion of control
• when new mercies every morning were something I took for granted