THE FALLEN CLERIC

Last week I was driving home from visiting a friend in the hospital in Detroit. On my radio a deejay was talking about her friend, a young mother of several children, who was struggling with cancer. Then she mentioned an eight year old boy also fighting cancer. Through tears she asked for prayers for these two people in her life.

I found myself beginning to pray through tears of my own, but the words would not come out. I was puzzled by this, as I certainly felt strongly for both of these people and wanted to pray for them. But I became aware of a mounting anger inside. Paying attention to that anger, I now found words to say what I wanted to say to God.

I want to pray but I can’t. I am overwhelmed with the fact that sometimes you are our only hope, and it seems like you’re really not much. I can’t make heads or tails of the fact that the God I serve allows children to die of awful diseases. Remember, God, when I prayed for little Christopher Chapman a few years ago? Remember that prayer? ‘Lord, this doesn’t have to happen. Speak the word and this boy will live.’ But Christopher died anyway, at eight years of age. Remember my cousin Abe? Wasn’t Abe about that age when he died? Didn’t he have godly people praying for him? What about Holly? 20 years of age, and gone last month from cancer. Of course the list is endless. In every corner of the earth, someone is grieving over a child who is about to die, crying out to you for deliverance — knowing you are their only hope — and maybe feeling like that’s not much.

What do we do when we realize that you’re our only hope and that doesn’t seem like much?

Tonight is another time when I’m finding it hard to pray. There are times I just feel lonely — far away from my wife, my children, my God, even far away from myself. I lose my way. I forget who I am, who I have been called to be. I long to go home again, to find my way back somehow, but I continue to run. I busy myself with tasks. No task is too small to get a piece of my attention if it will keep me from confronting the shell I sometimes become. Even now I write because I could not pray. I sat there in the silence and I said, “I am lonely.” I sensed my self-imposed estrangement from the One who calls to me. Perhaps even now, in writing, I am avoiding prayer. On the other hand, writing IS a kind of prayer for me.

So if in this post I have been praying, what has my prayer really been?

My God I miss you. I miss my time with you. I want to know you in a way that exceeds what I have stored up in my head. I want to have faith that stays in the middle of chaos and confusion and pain. I want to be a person who does not run from my own emptiness. I want to know you love me. I want to love you too. And even on the days when I am far from you — during the times I am running — I want to know you are still there, right where you kissed me goodbye — standing on the front porch, waiting for me to return. I want to see inside myself, to understand the mysteries of why I run. There are times I cannot pray. Pray for me. Pray in spite of me. Pray with my weakness. Pray with my muteness. Pray with my prayerlessness. Pray with my emptiness. Pray with my pain. Pray with my lack of love. Pray through me, to you, with or without me. Pray for my fallenness. You are my only hope. There are times that doesn’t seem like much. Be all that I need. Help me to trust that you are.

Originally posted 2002-12-11 07:05:00. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

I had an intense experience with my wife this evening. No need to stick fingers in ears and shout, “La, la, la, la, la,” etc. It wasn’t that kind of intense experience.

Tonight my wife and I sat down at the kitchen table and took one another by the hands, and we prayed for each other. I don’t mean that we said grace before a meal. I don’t mean we begged God for help through a desperate crisis. I mean we prayed for one another. I don’t want to say what we prayed about, because we prayed about things that only we know about each other; hurts and struggles that have sometimes been the source of arguments and/or tremendous pain between us, relieved of their destructive power as they were fashioned into prayers of compassion and grace and love.

In prayer tonight, Christy told God things about me that she hadn’t directly told me. Good things. Things I had hoped she thought about me, but wasn’t sure. Things she probably assumed I knew. I’m sure she heard me say things to God about her that she didn’t know I felt either. The things I said to God about Christy were good things too.

I know… this isn’t supposed to be a new thing for me. I’m a pastor. Christy is a pastor’s wife. I’m sure many people assume we sit down (or perhaps kneel) daily to lift one another in prayer to the throne of grace, where God sits eagerly waiting to smile upon our heartfelt and earnest pleas. Please! Prayer is a central aspect of our lives together in many ways. We pray around each other all the time. We even pray for each other occasionally in public times of prayer. Our family prays together (each of us in turn) every night at bedtime. But my wife and I praying for one another, just the two of us? Uh-uh.

We used to do this once in a while back when we were dating. Back before the arguments started piling up, and we were saddled with every couple’s burden — that history of painful things that are said and done that can never be unsaid and undone. We prayed together in a more innocent time, when there was less to be sorry for, so prayer required less humility. We prayed together before we went through tragedies that shook my faith to the core and I lost interest in things like that. By the time I recovered my faith again, something had happened. Those hurts I was talking about. Not to mention, I really did have so much to be sorry for.

Your spouse sees you the way no one else sees you. They see you when you are at your worst. Some of the most shameful things I have ever said and done, in fact most of them, I have said and done with Christy looking on. No one has ever seen me uglier. How do I act in these ways, and then ask her if she wants to pray with me? Will she think I’m a hypocrite? Will I think I’m a hypocrite, or wonder if she is? All these ugly moments, these regrets, these things we have to be so sorry for — most of them are sin. And sin does what it always does — keeps us from wanting to pray. And when we do want to pray, sin helps us find reasons not to — locks us into silence toward God. It takes a lot to get past that. Joint prayer, like sex, is an implicit act of trust in our spouse. Trust that I can be as vulnerable as true prayer requires me to be. Trust that my spouse won’t get the wrong idea – that she knows that I know I’m not perfect, and that in prayer I’m not pretending to be.

So we sat down tonight and prayed. We had our awkward moments before we started, but we trudged through it and prayed. I told my congregation last week that sex can do for a relationship what nothing else can do. That is true. And so can prayer.

Originally posted 2007-05-28 04:41:00. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

A church leader in England says, “I do not want to exercise [an attitude of] indulgence towards my Church. I am ashamed of it and angry at it. I want to kick it into getting up.”

The same needs to be done for our increasingly self-sidelined evangelical churches in America, and I hereby pledge my boot to the endeavor.

— WorldNet News Daily

Here, here… So do I.

Originally posted 2002-03-06 21:40:00. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

A person can never begin to understand who God is until the moment when he/she is forced to live as if God is all there is. We say (we being 94% of the American population) we believe in God, yet few of us live like it. That goes for those who call themselves believers as well as for those who do not. A crisis pops up in our lives and we either pick up the phone and call everyone on earth to talk it out, or we get stoic and decide not to confront it at all. The one thing we don’t do is pray first. In fact we usually wait until we have exhausted every other possible option before we pray.

Then, when we do pray, we do it in a way that is so half-hearted as to almost not qualify as prayer at all. We do not expect our prayers to be answered, and in our honest moments would have to admit that we often do not expect that they have even been heard. We are jaded by all those times we have prayed and situations have not changed. We are afraid to ask, lest our faith is further shaken in the wake of not receiving.

Should I be angry that I am 33 years old, have grown up in the church, and have never learned a single thing about prayer other than it’s important for some reason and that, for the same reason it is important (whatever that is), we should do it? I mean, what if prayer has been misrepresented? That’s not even a question, it’s a fact. Prayer HAS been misrepresented.

It is misrepresented by the way it is practiced in the church. Certainly thousands of books have been written on the topic, and many of those books contain some of the “secrets” I have just begun to learn about prayer, but why is prayer by and large not practiced properly in the church? I’m not saying it’s wrong to open or close a church service with prayer. But it is wrong when in most church services prayer has nothing else to do with what happens. It is as if prayer is an ornament — something we hang on a public service to make it look nice.

But prayer is more than an ornament. Prayer is not fundamentally about asking, nor is it fundamentally about listening. Prayer is fundamentally about breathing. Prayer is that mechanism whereby we become attuned to the spiritual world. Prayer prepares us to live in that world. It brings us into that world. It reveals to us things from that world that we otherwise could not possibly have known. If believers are citizens of two worlds, prayer is the naturalization course where we learn the ways and means of God.

This is a logical place for me to stop, seeing as I have already said enough about prayer to give someone the impression that either a) I know a considerable amount about the topic, or b) I have read about it and am stealing the thoughts of someone else. Neither of these things is true. I feel myself at the beginning of an adventure in prayer, and these are simply the most cursory thoughts on the topic.

Originally posted 2002-01-22 04:34:00. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

In a recent post I said that I have recently faced the fact that I am a hopeless believer.  It was a new discovery when I wrote it, but I have now had a couple weeks to see how this might play out in my life.

John Eldrege wrote in one his books, “Let the world feel the weight of who you are.”  Because I have discovered my identity as a hopeless believer, I have recently found it in myself to do just that.  I used to obsess about non-Christians understanding me.  I wanted everyone to think me a rational person.  I wanted respect from all non-Christians and to feel like they thought of me as intelligent even though I was a Christian.  I didn’t want non-believers to think ill of me for any reason.  I was so sensitive to this that I would listen to a non-believer ramble on and on about his/her beliefs and would remain relatively quiet about my own.  I would rarely invite anyone to my church because I didn’t want to offend or make anyone uncomfortable.  I was an apologist for Christianity in the worst way.  Christian apologetics, properly understood, is simply defending and arguing for belief in Christ as the way to God, and all that that entails.  But I was not really this kind of apologist.  Instead, I felt like my life had to be an apology for all the wrongs done by all Christians to all non-Christians throughout all history.

I am finished with that.  I’m done with Christian guilt.  In Blue Like Jazz, Donald Miller describes setting up a confession booth on the campus of a liberal university.  But instead of hearing confession, he was the confessor, apologizing for two thousand years of abuses by Christians and the Christian church.  Though part of me admires this, part of me has decided I’m done apologizing.  Do things differently?  Absolutely.  Point to a new way of understanding God as a Christian?  Count me in.  Let go of the prejudice that has plagued Christianity for so long?  Sign me up.  Apologize for wrongs committed by others who call themselves Christians?  Not so much anymore. 

Every time a white person commits a crime, do I feel the need to apologize for my race?  Every time a left-handed person says something idiotic, do I feel a need to appear extra intelligent on behalf of left-handers everywhere?  Do I feel a need to be extra intelligent in order to compensate for the presence of stupid bald guys in the world?  Of course not. 

You could say that in a sense I am coming out.  Having realized I am a hopeless believer, that I could not disbelieve if I wanted to, I have found freedom to be who I am.  I do believe in a universe created by a God who cares for us and wants to know us.  I really do believe that Jesus Christ came as the embodiment of God and that his death was the price for my sin and for yours.  I do believe in a life of constant transformation as we seek God through prayer and other spiritual disciplines.  I do believe in the church as the hope of the world when it’s at its best.

As others talk about their beliefs, I will talk about mine.  I will not worry about offending non-believers with my faith anymore than most non-believers worry about offending me with their lack of it.  It’s not that I have come to respect others less, it’s that I have finally decided to respect myself equally.  Not more, but equally.

I have carried a deep peace with me since discovering this.  A conflict that raged up in me almost 20 years ago has finally begun to settle.  Because of that, the world will feel the weight of who I am.  Not everyone will like that.  And I can accept it.

Originally posted 2007-06-23 02:27:00. Republished by Blog Post Promoter