Tag: Perspective

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.

More

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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.

To Whom Do We Answer?

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A pagan king with a bloated ego set an ultimatum. Pay homage with deep obeisance to his self-monument or burn alive. Three teenage boys stood their ground in a sea of groveling sycophants. They told a rage-maddened king that they didn’t answer to him, knowing full well the mortal consequences of doing so. The petty selfishness of a human ruler had no power to bring them to their knees because they served the King of kings. That King could have brought their enemy to his knees, destroyed him and set the boys up as kings in his place. He could have rained down His own fire on the misguided people who submitted to the despot. Instead, He merely stood in the fire with three teenagers, a shield that made rage impotent.

The great council of elders, appointed by Rome to judge matters considered beneath the empire’s notice and beholden to empirical favor for any authority they wielded, held its own people in a dictatorial vice. Independent thought threatened council members’ precarious position and status; developments not specifically approved by them exposed the lie in their carefully crafted image of themselves as the hands of God. When two fishermen gave sight to a blind man under their very noses at the gate of the temple and declared the council’s guilt of murdering God rather than serving Him, the council used its most drastic measures in retaliation. No longer allowed power over life and death, the members imprisoned the outspoken fishermen and sought to intimidate them with threats and posturing. The fishermen stood their ground in a sea of desperate faces, knowing that the consequences might well involve long-term imprisonment or even being handed over to deadly Roman discipline on false charges, calmly informing the power-crazed council that they did not answer to it. The conviction of the fishermen and their impossible healing paralyzed the council, exposing its true focus and stripping from it the fear it had cultivated in the people it ruled. The fishermen were released and their message flooded the city with hope and courage.

An egotistical man imposed his will on a group of faithful men and women. Unwilling to bend his will to any authority, he twisted the words of God and maligned any who challenged him. He isolated the group from outside influence, refusing to offer welcome to faithful visitors and ostracising any who defied his refusal. The same fisherman that faced the great council wrote to a faithful member of that beleaguered group, setting the example of conviction and encouraging the faithful to remember that they did not answer to any arrogant man. Their joint refusal to comply would sterilize his threats and free them to do the work of God.

Evil has many tricks to confuse our attention, to trick us into answering to the wrong demands. Not only does it launch open attacks from the outside, it creeps in through the chinks to sow doubt and confusion. A misguided sense of respect for human prestige, fear of temporary consequences, and overprioritization of human desires all result in forgetting the Authority above all authorities. Of what are we truly convicted? To whom do we truly answer?

We’ve Come So Far?

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2000 years ago, the Romans possessed the skill to build aqueducts using stone blocks shaped by hand and stacked without mortar into columns and arches over thirty feet high, with more layers of arches on top. They laid roads of stone that spanned an empire stretching from India to Great Britain to Africa. Both were feats of engineering that still stand largely untouched and usable today, baffling and challenging modern architects. Yet humanity has come so far?

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Five thousand years ago, the Egyptians built massive pyramidal monuments to their dead kings. Using methods we can only guess at, they carved and hauled multiton blocks of stone up an incline and set them together so closely that a sheet of paper can’t fit between them. The pyramids still stand as marvels of engineering, marked but far from disintegrated by time. Yet humanity has come so far?

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Three thousand years ago, the Mayan people built stepped temples of stone that rose high above the rainforest canopy to celebrate the sun. They carved complex astronomical calenders into solid rock to order their lives. The people are long gone, along with all record of their lives except for those untouched temples and carvings. The stone still rises above the trees, perfect feats of architecture preserved from a hidden past. Yet humanity has come so far?

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Roughly three or four thousand years ago, an ancient semitic nation carved their lives inch by inch out of the desert mountains. Slowly their rough cave settlements grew into vast cities, polished red sandstone walls gleaming and ornate gateways towering over grand entrances. The people with the dream to create these monumental dwellings had no fear of the desert; they also possessed the knowledge and technology to pipe water into the city through sophisticated systems from nearby springs and rainwater cisterns. This indomitable people faded into history, replaced by interlopers and usurpers, but their mountain cities still stand to awe modern travellers. Yet humanity has come so far?

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Two thousand years ago, a tribal people in the Peruvian desert left their unique mark upon the face of the earth itself. With precise geometric knowledge and application, the Nazca etched stylized drawings of native animals into the rocky desert floor, along with a complex system of perfectly straight lines that stretched for miles. The drawings are so large they cannot be viewed in entirety from the desert floor; they must be viewed from the distant mountain peaks or from the air. No one now knows why the Nazca created their mathematically precise art, but despite millenia it is still visible and wondered at by modern civilization. Yet humanity has come so far?

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Some thousands of years ago, knowledge was handed down through song. Children were apprenticed early to scholars, who painstakingly tutored them until they could recite every word and intonation perfectly. Religion, history, and science were all passed from generation to generation in complex rhymes and rhythms; tales of heros like Beowulf and Gilgamesh shared memory with medical instruction. Not a word was lost and much knowledge was added over centuries of time, without a word being written down. Yet humanity has come so far?

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A little less than a thousand years ago, every book was created by hand. Tools were handmade and carefully customized by the artist, who then mixed his own pigments and meticulously painted every letter and line of every page. A single page represented days of work and incredible artistry, with intricate scripts enhanced by brilliantly detailed images and scrollwork. Yet humanity has come so far?

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Not Helping

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“Aren’t you on medication? I thought it was helping. Why do you feel so bad?”

If you have a chronic illness, you’ve probably heard some variation of this ad nauseum. We live in a culture that expects some version of Star Trek medicine, where every problem can be fixed, every ailment can be cured, with the pass of an instrument or the click of a button. Or the swallowing of a pill. When reality doesn’t live up to expectations, confusion and suspicion of the sufferers reigns.

Now, obviously, some of those who say such things have the best of intentions. They genuinely care that another person is hurting and they want the hurt to stop. Then there are those whose voice is just a little too sharp, whose smile is just a little too forced, whose eyebrows rise a little too high. They don’t understand why help us not helping according to their expectations.

The problem is the expectation, not the help. Humans don’t exist in cookie cutter shapes, and our lives are as unique as we are. There is no pill, no therapy, no trekkie fix that can make every person fit the same mold. When wiring goes wrong, when internal connections “leak” or don’t match, there is no quick fix. There may be no fix at all. What help exists may simply make symptoms easier to endure.

Until it doesn’t. A hot day, a disagreement, a small pain, a touch, a deadline. Maybe today the brain can’t communicate with the hands. Maybe every sensation is magnified. Maybe sensations are so muted that the brain doesn’t have the tools to make decisions. Without outside help, those things can result in brutal public meltdowns or complete functional paralysis. With help, those days may allow getting out of bed, being able to muster a smile, have a conversation. They may allow the ability to say, “I can’t fulfill obligations today because I feel horrible.”

When society forces a cookie cutter ideal on sufferers of invisible illnesses, a new illness grows. It’s called self-doubt. “Maybe there’s nothing really wrong with me. Maybe I’m just selfish. Maybe I’m making it up. Maybe I should stop using my help. Maybe I’m just stupid and worthless.” Charybdis yaws, drowning talents and hope and purpose in the depths of misery.

“Aren’t you on medication? I thought it was helping. Why do you feel so bad?”

Enough

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The apostle Paul wrote to Timothy about the contrast between those who pursue earthly wealth vs those who are content. His words have been used to justify hatred for those with wealth as well as to excuse laziness and irresponsibility. The popular maxim that money is the root of evil is twisted from this conversation. But what was the real message Paul wanted the young man to understand?

The word “content” or “contentment” literally means “enough.” Paul said that reverence (godliness) with enough was provision for our lives. We have provided nothing for ourselves and are nothing within ourselves alone. Timothy lived and taught in a city famed for its wealth; the focus of its citizens was to maintain and grow that wealth by any means necessary. Idolatry and vice was big business for the Ephesians, and conversion to faith in Christ meant not only a loss of wealth but a loss of livelihood for many. It would have been difficult come to terms with for people whose entire lives were wrapped in opulence.

Paul wanted Timothy to help the Ephesians understand who truly provided for them and why. He told them that those whose lives revolved around getting money, who saw that as their purpose, lived in a prison of dissatisfaction. Because their purpose was getting more for themselves, they could never have or be enough. Life would be miserable, wasted chasing what could never be obtained.

Timothy was to remind the Ephesians that God Himself provided whatever they needed. If they possessed monetary wealth, God had provided it. If the most basic of needs were met, God had provided it. Every person’s job was the same: share what they had, work at things that embodied good (God), and to set their hearts toward attitudes that reflected the heart of God. If they did that, if their faith settled on the power greater than themselves, if their purpose was to serve rather than to gain, then it would matter to them whether they were rich or poor.

God’s purpose for man has never been to pursue personal gain, monetary or otherwise. His purpose for humanity is to love Him, be like Him as our children are like us, share Him with those who don’t know Him. For some, that will involve rubbing shoulders with the rich and powerful of this world. If wealth, respect, or fame are required to accomplish that purpose, God will provide. Others are called to reach the poverty-stricken, pain-drenched, forgotten masses. For them, money and power may mean far less than the ability to empathize. Paul told Timothy that whatever God chose to provide would be enough to fulfill His purpose. Even if all that He chose to provide was food and clothing, the person who received those blessings would be enough, not for themselves, but for God.

The Faith of Free Will

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The story of Abraham and Lot is well known to many. When the herds grew too large to be supported together, Lot moved to the green river valley while Abraham continued to travel in the wilder, less fertile areas. There’s more to this story, however, that we should take the time to consider.

Abraham, in the culture of the time period, was head of the clan. Although Lot had his own household, he still lived under the authority of his uncle. Probably the closest comparison in our western culture would be the mayor of a small town, although theirs would have been a town composed of family and their employees. When the need for separation arose, Abraham had the right to rule as judge on the future of both his and Lot’s households. He could quite easily have ordered Lot to take his herds in any direction, ensured that Lot’s future took an approved form.

Instead, Abraham gave Lot not only a choice, but the first choice. Given the types of choices we see the younger man making after this moment, it’s likely that Abraham knew Lot’s penchant for bad decisions, but he still respected Lot’s need to choose. The reputation of the inhabitants of the river valley was well known and Abraham must have worried a great deal about the outcome of his nephew’s choice, but he knew that choice was out of his control.

We live in a society full of people trying to make other people’s choices for them. Each is convinced that his or her own choices are the right ones. If we didn’t think our own choices were right, we wouldn’t have made them, so this attitude is not a negative trait. It’s how we were designed. The problem only arises when we forget the simple fact that every other individual was designed the same way.

Abraham could not stop Lot from making the wrong choice. By doing so he would have denied God’s design of free will, of individual responsibility to choose. I’m sure, like all who have raised children to adulthood, he agonized and prayed for Lot’s heart to be more eternally focused. We know that he did his best to provide opportunities for his nephew to redirect; he even went so far as to raise an army to rescue Lot from being the spoils of war. When God made the decision to destroy the cities of the valley for their hardened rebellion, Abraham pleaded for Lot’s life despite all his nephew’s mistakes. But not once did he run in and drag Lot away or take control of his life.

Abraham recognized something that many of us have forgotten. Every choice carries its own consequence. God designed humans to learn through our choices. For example, if we touch something hot, it burns, and we learn not to touch hot things. No parent wants to see their child in pain, so often we go out of our way to prevent our little ones from the possibility of touching hot things. Sadly, our efforts fail, because ultimately choice is impossible to deny. Ingenuity and determination will only strengthen until the burn has been experienced and the lesson learned.

Abraham trusted God’s design of His children more than he trusted his own choices to be the right ones. Abraham had seen God use his own bad choices to teach him, help him grow into a stronger relationship with the Creator. Abraham had the faith to know that the God who created the free will of humans knew how to show Himself to us even through our poorest choices.

Free will, the responsibility of each for our own choices, is a frightening reality to accept. It requires accepting true individuality, the absolute certainty that every other person in the world will make choices that are different from ours. It requires accepting that every person in the world will make both right and wrong choices. Even more importantly, accepting free will requires the recognition that as a person my own choices will certainly not always be good ones. Free will requires faith in the One who created it. It requires certainty that He is greater than any human choice, and can use even our worst choices to call us closer to Him. Indeed, He already has.

Isaiah 53:7 (CSB): He was oppressed and afflicted,
yet he did not open his mouth.
Like a lamb led to the slaughter
and like a sheep silent before her shearers,
he did not open his mouth.

Luke 23:34 (CSB): Then Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, because they do not know what they are doing.”

“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.