Identity – The Word Worker

Stewards and Kings

In Tolkien’s famous trilogy, the kingdom of Gondor was ruled by kings who carried elven blood in their veins and lived by a sense of honor stemming from the Valar themselves. These kings ruled from a great throne while their most trusted advisors sat in stewardship below. When Isildur failed and left Gondor kingless, the stewards remained below the throne, vowing to keep their trust for the day the line of kings was restored. That is, until Denethor assumed stewardship and forgot about the throne above him. When the rightful king appeared, Denethor rejected him furiously, resentful of any threat to his own perceived authority. He chose angry despair and self-destruction over hope and redemption, all to preserve his own vanity.

By contrast, the rightful king returned without fanfare. He spent his time fighting in the ranks, walking with the fearful, and comforting the broken. Few even knew his true identity. As the final battle approached and his identity could no longer be hidden, he did not march into the city and seize the throne from the recalcitrant steward. He walked secretly in the camp, healing the injured and bolstering the courage of frightened soldiers. Only when victory was won did he claim his birthright, and then bowed to the smallest of his subjects in humility and service.

The first century Jewish religious elite had developed a reputation of scholarship. Their time spent poring over scrolls and arguing about application inflated their authority in their own eyes. When the King arrived and did not bow to them, His stewards, they flew into a self-destructive rage and went to war against Him. They even allied with those they considered most evil in order to preserve their own self-righteous vanity.

Jesus, the King Himself, came as the humblest of men. He walked the earth in homespun wool, went hungry and thirsty, healed and comforted and fed those with need. He walked the road to the cross, crushed under the weight of responsibility and love, every moment also carrying the unused authority to obliterate his tormentors. Only after resurrection proved Satan’s ultimate defeat was His Kingship proclaimed to the four corners of the earth.

The problem with Denethor and the Jewish elite was that they forgot that a steward is a servant. He or she has no authority, simply cares for another’s most precious assets. A steward carries responsibility to another, responsibility that effaces all other purpose for his or her life. However, all authority lies with the owner of those precious assets, and the steward must give account to the owner for every action taken. A steward who forgets the interests of the owner in favor of his or her own fails. A steward who inflates his own importance to preserve his position fails. A steward who focuses on unproductive actions to the detriment of the owner’s precious assets fails. A steward who takes advice from the owner’s enemy instead of listening to the owner fails.

There is only one King, and souls are His most precious asset. We, humans, are his stewards tasked with preserving souls, including our own. We have no authority over each other in His kingdom, only a responsibility we could never bear without His mercy. Souls are fragile things and require gentle tending to thrive. Each is different and must be carefully cultivated with love and compassion and understanding of what that soul needs in order to reveal the beauty for which it is loved by the King. We as stewards, as humans, as treasured souls, have no other purpose.

Keep the Feast

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As Jesus prepared to face the cross, He blessed the Passover meal one last time with His closest friends. As he snapped the crisp bread in pieces to share and raised His cup with theirs, He told them what those tokens had always symbolized. It wasn’t the first time He used bread and vintage as symbols for something greater; rather it was a final explanation of God’s grace.

In the book of John, He referred to Himself as the Bread of Life. The same book records a later conversation in which He named Himself the Vine and those faithful to Him branches of that Vine. Just as the liquid pressed from the grapes of a vine fulfilled the covenant, or promise, inherent in the vines nature, the blood that drained from the crucified body of the Christ fulfilled the covenant inherent in His nature as Creator and Savior. He gave Himself to restore life to our starving souls in the same way He provided bread to feed starving bodies in the wilderness.

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The apostle Paul wrote to the people of God in the city of Corinth about a terrifying problem they were facing. When these people interacted with each other, gathered together as a group, they began to squabble over differences and gravitate into physically similar subgroups. The rich ignored the poor, those with similar backgrounds ostracized those of other origins, God-given talents and callings were given hierarchy based on human perception and preference. In an effort to recenter their fractured unity, Paul explained that Christ Himself is the body, then explained that each of them with their different backgrounds, social situations, and gifts were parts of Him. Just as all the smaller parts of a human body are necessarily different and yet indispensable to its function, all of the parts of Christ are equally indispensable. In the same conversation, Paul told the confused Corinthians that, although they physically gathered together to feast, they had forgotten in whose body they belonged. They were attempting to feast without seeing the food, and were sickening from spiritual malnourishment.

The Israelites under the Sinai law had been blessed with symbols intended to guard their memories and focus their future. One of these symbols was the Ark of the Covenant bearing the Place of Mercy. It was the token of God’s presence with His people, but before long it had become the focal point of their attention. When war threatened, they carried the Ark itself into battle at the head of their armies as if it’s physical presence alone could win the day. They never thought to speak to the One it represented. When Jesus told His friends to eat the bread and drink from the vine in His memory, He signified an intimacy they would experience with Him that surpassed any experienced since God and man walked the Garden side by side. It was the illustration of an eternal, incomprehensible banquet, just as the Ark had been the illustration of unfathomable protection. For the Corinthians, that illustration had become the idol carried into battle as surely as the Ark had been centuries before.

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In the same letter, Paul told the Corinthians to keep the feast. They were bread, but had begun to bloat like yeast bread from their misplaced focus. He warned them that the only way to be part of the Bread was to remember Him, to recenter on Him alone. He was the sacrifice, He was the promise, He was the body. He, and they, were the feast.

The same is true 2000 years later, in a world with the same root distractions and misunderstandings. We, like them, can just as frighteningly become enamored of illustrations and forgetful of their Source. We bite and devour one another over concerns strictly bound to our physical forms and surroundings while feeding ourselves spiritual air. It’s time we learned again to recognize the Body and keep the life-giving Feast.

The Round Peg in a Square Hole: What is Normal?

Most of us played with shape sorters as children. As part of learning the different shapes and creating the proper connections, we tried fitting shapes into holes they didn’t match. Some of those mismatches didn’t fit at all; the shape simply would not pass through the hole. The corners of a square, for example, will never fit inside the curves of a circle. Others, however, would sometimes slide through, or could be forced through, certain incorrect holes. A circle could actually fit through the square hole, even though its curves did not fill out the square’s corners.

From the time we are very small, our society pushes patterns of behavior on us. “Be normal,” we’re told. If we don’t fit the shape expected, we are labeled, separated, and therapied to death until we meet expectations or break. But who decided which shape is normal? When we played with the shape sorters, we might have begun by trying to fit everything into the same shape because we liked something about that shape, but eventually we learned that each shape had its own place. Can you imagine someone saying, “The only shape allowed in the world anymore is the square? Circles, triangles, stars – they are all wrong and must be redesigned into squares.”

Two terms that have become popular in recent years are neurotypical and neurodivergent. I understand the intent behind the use of these words, and occasionally use them myself in order to frame concepts in a way people can understand them. Unfortunately, these terms also reinforce the idea that only one shape is normal. Labels are created, therapies are invented, medications are prescribed. All of these have the purpose of making people with different shapes appear to be the preferred one. The focus is always placed on what is “wrong,” what is “abnormal,” that makes a person different then eliminating it.

But again I ask, what is normal? Just as every shape is unique and has its own place on the shape sorter (and it’s own mathematical purpose), every human is unique and has place and purpose. What is normal for one is abnormal for another. What one is capable of doing another is not. What one cannot accomplish another can. Corners and curves are both necessary; elimination of one or the other creates a world that cannot function.

What if, instead of looking for “normal” we strove to celebrate individuality? What if, instead of trying to shave off corners or flatten curves, we recognized the needed functions of both? It’s true that circles can fit within the square, but they don’t belong. Circles will never be able to reach into the corners and fulfill the purpose of squares. If forced to pretend to be squares, circles will always feel inadequate, and will never experience or even know their full potential as circles. Squares, on the other hand, can never fit in the circles as they are. They will either try to shave off parts of themselves leaving raw, gaping wounds in order to squeeze in, or they will be smashed against edges again and again until they break. Either way they lose their identity and their purpose and, like the ill-fitting circle, will never experience or recognize their potential as squares.

Our society has become adept at forcing round pegs into square holes. We admire the work and contributions of those circles who managed to find their circle holes and give us great discoveries or achievements, as long as we don’t have to acknowledge that they were circles in the first place. Because we carefully avoid recognizing the ill-fitting circles, we also prevent ourselves from seeing the broken squares. We have decided to be the infant trying to smash all the shapes into the hole that pleases us best, but unlike the infant, we don’t learn from our failures. We just keep smashing and screaming in frustration until everything is broken.

What if, instead of breaking others to look like ourselves, or breaking ourselves to look like others, we all found our own purpose as who we are? God doesn’t make mistakes. He made each of us exactly the way we are. He has purpose, specific and absolute purpose, for each and every individual exactly the way He created us. Imagine what we could all be together if every single one of us found our own.

God Culture

As an avid devourer of all things historical I have always loved learning about other cultures, both past and present. I am fascinated by all the different ways that humans find to express themselves and to celebrate their unique environments and backgrounds. Whenever I read about any particular culture being destroyed due to invasion or shifts in power, I always feel a sense of loss; an important part of human experience is lost in such a transition, often never to be remembered. On the other hand, watching a culture change as its environment and story develops is exciting; nothing is lost, only built upon.

Humans have an unfortunate tendency, however, to confuse culture with humanity, turning differences into the banners of annihilating armies. This tendency has prevented humanity from working together since the Tower of Babel, when the confusion of language intended to humble mankind instead was developed into an excuse for hate by the resentful and rebellious.

Through all the changes and wars, the thread of God’s culture can be found. Interestingly enough, this culture never seemed to be defined by fashion, music style, architectural design, economic constructs, or any other temporary arrangement. Abraham first wore the tasseled robes and intricately styled beards of the Chaldeans, then embraced the cushioned, portable tapestry of the nomad life. Joseph, as governor of Egypt, lived in the opulent stone palaces of the Nile, shaved his head, and decked himself with brilliant metal and jewels. Moses, born into the grueling and choiceless life of a slave, grew up in a culture of wealth , information, and power. He ultimately exchanged that for the homespun and weary roaming of a desert shepherd.

David spent a huge portion of his life wandering from cave to cave or fighting for hire, finding peace only in the songs he wrote. Esther wore the finery of a Persian queen and spent her life in a world of women. Daniel embraced the trappings of a culture that valued classical learning and rose as high as anyone could within it. Paul, though born into the Jewish elite and steeped in a social structure so rigid that no one could follow it accurately, excelled at adapting to any culture he encountered. He made tents with laborers, argued philosophy and theology with Greeks, taught in schools filled with intellectual elite, and spoke the language of the Roman ruling class.

In all of these cultures the faithful were acknowledged by God as securely His. Melchizedec, the priest-king of a Canaanite nation, was used to describe Christ because of his own unwavering faith. All of these cultures were mere physical constructs, born of shared experiences. The faithful didn’t exist outside of the cultures around them, they merely participated in a different kind of culture in addition.

God culture is also born of shared experience, but not physical experience. It is born of awareness of spiritual identity, of a purpose that transcends the mundane or even dramatic concerns of the physical universe. God culture does not conflate any specific culture with humanity; to God, our differences are what make us all beautifully human. Our creativity and capacity for identity are a direct inheritance from our Father, the One Who Is and Creator of all things. Those who participate in God culture cannot fathom using human differences as excuses to control or eradicate portions of humanity. God culture reaches with delight into the human experience, whatever it may look like, and demonstrates God within it. God culture embraces all human cultures, blending them into one shared experience, one superceding and absorbing identity as God people.

Unschool

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We’re the unschool crowd. Nope, not the uncool crowd; those extra letters are intentional. We don’t have to waste our time in car line or on the bus. We don’t have to follow dress code or wear uniforms. We don’t have to be confined to desks for hours or locked in one room. We don’t have to fill in bubbles to prove we know things. We definitely don’t have to raise hands and get hall passes to go to the bathroom!

We don’t have to wake up before dawn and rush to catch the schoolbus. We don’t have to go to bed before the sun goes down. We don’t have to walk in lines and we don’t get punished for running in halls. We don’t have to choke down cafeteria food in the five to ten minutes left after walking to and from a classroom and standing in line for a tray.

We don’t have to raise our hands to answer questions. We don’t have to complete extra busy work for a grade because the teacher has too many students to focus on one at a time. We don’t have to struggle to follow a lesson plan that doesn’t match our learning styles. We don’t have to be quiet and sit still.

We are the unschool crowd. We read every book we can find. We play every song, we paint every picture, we write every story. We watch the trees and the stars and the grasshoppers and invent new technology with what we observe. We play with computer codes in our living room and design complicated feats of architecture in our backyard. We run barefoot in the rain and harvest God’s bounty under the sun. We play games and watch tv, then create our own. We converse with the aged and cuddle the infants. We chase after dreams and make them goals. We trip over mistakes then use them as stairs. We are free to find out who we are as individuals and free to act on that knowledge. We are entrepreneurs and leaders, philanthropists and friends. We are the unschool crowd, and we are very cool.

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In an extraordinary act of self-surrender, the Creator and Lord of galaxies and chromosomes bound Himself within the limits of the Earth He formed between His fingers. His tangible presence in our sphere of perception carried the culmination of thousands of years of guidance, the ultimate demonstration that could be absorbed in every physical sensory way. Although He exists in a vastness incomprehensible to finite minds, He became part of the universe He held in the palm of His hand.

Humanity – souls bound into finite bodies, lifespans, and planet – has no tangible ability to expand or escape those boundaries. What we can see, hear, and feel is limited by the necessity of seeing, hearing, and feeling. He became part of us and returned to boundlessness to prove tonus once and for all that there is more.

On the sixth day after the dawn, the first moment of actual time, God filled a clay sculpture with His own breath, containing part of His own infinite identity within the boundaries of the measured universe. Despite our inability to sense it in any tangible way, we are in identity more than our physical limitations. When we surrender the insecurity inherent in such uncomfortable limits, when we acknowledge our true selves as part of God Himself, we return in a way to having access to more. We transcend the need to sense in order to know, and begin to know and experience what it means to be more than our limits.

When God became part of us, His vast nature couldn’t help but have an effect on our boundaries. Battles occurring outside of our physical limitations began to be visible, the voices of demons speaking through human mouths and the structure of natural phenomena defied. Because the full force of His infinity had been brought into finity, the foundations of the universe rocked and humanity caught an unignorable glimpse of more. As part of His infinite nature, we have less shocking but still indelible effects on our physical bounds. Our acknowledgement of and surrender to our infinite identity allows God’s vastness to shine through us in our character, our choices, our attitides, and our treatment of others. When we choose to be more, we fill Earth and all humanity with more. In our more, God is tangible again.

Wait

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This morning I found myself reflecting on my husband’s and my history. When I was a teenager my family attended an annual lecture series at the small college he attended. The students were responsible for a lot of logistics as part of their education, so we would have run into each other multiple times over the course of those weeks. He was 18-20, I was 14-16; we weren’t on each other’s radar and have no memory of meeting at all during that time. Ten years later, a mutual friend introduced us, and the rest is history.

There have been times I wished we had met earlier, had all that time to spend together. The truth is that if we had met as kids we probably wouldn’t be together now. Those ten years shaped the characteristics that drew us together, characteristics that we did not possess as teenagers. We both went through things: failed relationships, first jobs, successes and failures, and other challenges that helped us discover independently who we were. By the time we found each other’s orbit we both understood what we were looking for and how to recognize it.

It is a lesson I have worked very hard to take to heart. So often we try to rush life, demanding whatever we want in the moment as if the course of our lives depends upon it. We push harder and harder, younger and younger, and look back on our lives with regret and bitterness that our rushed decisions didn’t produce the fruit we wanted. My life would look very different now without those ten years. I would likely have ended up marrying one of those failed relationships I mentioned and it would still have failed, or chasing one of those challenges in a fruitless search for fulfillment. Even if a second opportunity to meet had arisen I would likely have rejected it based on first impressions, never realizing the change time could produce.

There is a right time for the right things to happen in our lives. We have to learn to appreciate the wait. Waiting is not wasted time; it’s growing time. What do you choose to learn from your experiences? What changes are you willing to make after your failures? What do you learn about yourself from relationship challenges, and what characteristics do you learn to pursue? No one knows what they really want until they have experienced all of those aspects of life. Celebrate the wait.

“They”

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We live in a society driven by the concept of “they.” When a problem arises, it’s “their” fault. When disagreements occur, “they” are wrong. When we feel insecure, “they” are oppressive. When we don’t get what we want, “they” are selfish. When dangers appear, “they” cause them.

Certainly there is fixed right and wrong, good and bad, so “they” seems to most a given separation. The problem with “they” is a deep desire for control born just after the beginning of time. “They” must believe what I believe, make me feel safe, give me what I want, do the same things I do, like the same things I like. If “they” are different from me in any way “they” must be immoral and immorality must be eliminated. “They” can’t have choices if “they” choose differently than I do.

God, the Creator of all things, gave us the ability to make choices. He also made each of us unique. That same Creator called for unity among His people, but that unity wasn’t to come from within ourselves. Because of His design, unity from ourselves is impossible.

At the beginning of time, when His children still had intimate connection with His spiritual realm, He imposed only one law: don’t eat from that tree. It wasn’t imposed to control His children; it existed to remind them to trust Him, to appreciate His love and provision. During the years following their failure of trust, His inspired writers recorded no laws set for humanity. Rather, those who longed for the intimacy that had been broken were rewarded by direct communication with Him, and sincere efforts at humility and commitment were accepted with great love.

Eventually, God set His people up as a physical nation, a country with physical boundaries. For them He set a system of laws, a structure. Most of those laws protected innocent life and property, and provided for the health and prosperity of the people. Although it was intended to be a theocracy, laws were even provided to govern the behavior and power of a king, because God knew humans would not be able to hold onto the idea of a King they could not see. The provisions made for worship rituals were not laws in the way we think of laws; they were instructions, provisions for the people to be able to approach a King who was beyond their reach. Indeed, all of the laws given on Sinai were for the purpose of education, a means of demonstrating the character of God for imitation by His people.

Throughout the history of that physical nation God continually spoke with grief of how its citizens misunderstood and mistreated that law. Instead of learning its deep principles of character, they treated it as arbitrary and inconvenient, even when they outwardly followed it. At times they even weaponized it against each other and against non-citizens of that nation, adding specifics and ignoring depth in order to gain power for themselves. When God Himself came in human form He broke the human misinterpretation of His law often, repeatedly emphasizing the lessons it was supposed to have taught. Then He performed the self-sacrifice that had always been the intended end of the physical country and its system of laws.

That sacrifice reinstated the intimate connection enjoyed in the beginning. It tore the curtain between the physical and the spiritual, allowing anyone willing to see the truth to participate in the spiritual while bound to the physical world. Such faithful individuals became citizens of a spiritual nation, a nation that exists as part of God Himself and therefore above the need for physical boundaries and laws. It simply is what it is, and it’s citizens are purified by it.

Sadly, the concept of “they” pervades the human organization perceived as the nation of God. Just like the citizens of the physical country, people today desire control, our own idea of order. Like children, and with a similar lack of experience, we organize a fictional world that makes us comfortable and assume that God agrees with us. Then, in our mistaken fervor, we weaponize our construction against “they,” and weep in confusion and frustration when our weapons backfire.

God addressed the concept of “they” throughout scripture. From that first breach in relationship, He told humans that one day He would restore it for any who wanted it. For the hundreds of years of the physical country He established, He told them over and over that His purpose was to restore true unity of purpose between Him and all of His creation. Even after He had torn the veil, He had to remind confused humanity that in His nation “they” does not exist. He is the unity, and all those who seek Him honestly and long to be a part of His character become citizens of His spiritual nation. These individuals reflect His perfection, the immutable Law of good without need of laws or rules. It is beyond our human understanding, a nation built on complete trust in Him and complete surrender of our own childish worlds.

When we surrender and step into that unity, we begin to understand the love God has for humanity. His children have never been “they,” an enemy to be destroyed. The only enemy is evil, the confusion that Satan seeds in us to pull us away from God and from each other. “They” is simply anyone who succumbs to confusion and forgets Him. “They” could quite easily be “me.”

Work

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It’s a bad word in our society, a lightning rod that attracts every social argument imaginable. Manual laborers view with contempt those who work with their minds, considering them lazy and out of touch with reality. Those in intellectually focused professions look down on manual laborers, certain that no one with ambition would waste time working with their hands. Both despise those who work in entertainment, considering them lazy, immoral, or both. Then, of course, there are those who receive public aid; whether or not due to true need seems irrelevant, whether they are exalted or despised.

Work as a concept is not that complicated. It is the process by which one contributes to one’s society. Every individual has a contribution to make, a way to work, that is unique to him or herself. That contribution may or may not be one that requires specialized knowledge. It may or may not include clocking in for a boss. It may or may not produce what are considered survival necessities. But it is still a necessary contribution.

Animals spend their lives chasing survival. They have little if any other motivation. They have no capacity for appreciation, for individuality, for true creativity. Only humans have such abilities, and as possessor of them, we are not meant merely to survive. We are meant not only to feed, clothe and shelter ourselves, but to learn, to imagine, to produce beauty and laughter, to touch hearts with language, to challenge each other in image or song.

The Creator declared the laborer worthy of his hire. What makes a farmer more entitled to compensation than a poet? What makes a doctor more entitled to compensation than an electrician? What makes a retail worker more entitled than a football player or actor more entitled than an entrepreneur? Does the poet do less work because it was mostly internal and not easily quantifiable? Does the entrepreneur not deserve the same recognition of talent and dedication to their dreams as the actor?

By the same token, because we are designed with such great potential, our lives should not be reduced to a daily grind. Our work should be drawn from our passions and character, and should encompass everything that is important to us as individuals. If we thought this way, the woman who chooses to balance time with her family as well as set hours performing a task for money would not be criticized. The man who pours all his resources into crafting products for sale and whose wife and children work alongside him would be heralded for his efforts instead of vilified for demanding fair pay for his efforts. The poet who poured her troubled soul into song to relieve another’s pain would never be expected to share her gift without pay. Every work would be understood to be essential, and would be compensated as essential.

The Choice of a Servant

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In the law given at Mt. Sinai, God set economic rules for physical Israel to follow. These rules included a form of servitude designed to pay off a debt. This servitude was completely voluntary, and when the time allotted for the debt had expired, the individual returned to full freedom. On occasion, however, the servant would build a life in servitude based on love and respect for his employer, a life that being released would destroy. In that case the employer would take the servant before all the people and stamp a hole through the servant’s ear against the employer’s doorframe, symbolically binding the servant with the employer’s household forever. Some would say that this binding was a sacrifice of freedom, a sacrifice of choice, but in reality it was the ultimate choice.

On a warm starry night many hundreds of years later, the God of Heaven arrived on Earth as a baby, completely dependent. He would live thirty-three years within restrictions vastly smaller than His own nature, serving His creation, paying a debt to them that they owed to Him. When the time of His earthly servitude expired, he allowed His creation to pierce Him, much as the servant’s ear was pierced, symbolically binding Him to His creation as He was bound to a wooden cross. Some would say that this binding was a sacrifice of freedom, a sacrifice of divine choice, but in reality it was the ultimate choice.

My ear has not been bored with an awl, my body has not been nailed to a cross. These are pictures, symbols, provided to help us understand our purpose and our relationship with God. Our service to Him is not forced; we have always been and always will be given a choice. Choosing to serve Him is choosing to know Him, to become a part of His life as He becomes a part of mine. Unlike human employers, who may not inspire pleasant feelings in their employees, God calls His servants loved children. Once experienced, that love cannot be easily relinquished, and our souls are pierced, joined forever with His. Our wills bend to please Him because we return that incomprehensible, unshakable love to Him. Some would say that this bond is a sacrifice of freedom, a sacrifice of choice. In reality it is the ultimate choice, a choice that is never changing, never ending. It is the choice of a servant.

Tag: Identity