All the strangeness of the phrase aside, there was an even more pernicious problem with it that for many years was lost on me. This linguistic play/ploy was frequently used by youth pastors (myself included) to manipulate youth into more passionate service, more disciplined devotion, more evangelistic zeal. We held up to the admiration of the youth group/congregation those who were the most zealous, the most passionate, the most obviously “on fire” for Jesus.These became the model that we were to imitate, and we were inculcated with a steady diet of what “on fire” would actually look like (clearly we were flagging if we weren’t inviting enough people to Wednesday night church). This language truly defined and shaped the culture of not only our youth groups, but much of our congregational life. We had youth rally’s, stadium events, see-you -at-the-pole prayer meetings; all of these led by those “on fire” for Jesus.

Yet, for all that youthful fervor, I would watch over the course of the past decade and a half many of the most zealous wind up spiritually bankrupt, agnostic, hard-hearted, burnt-out, under-developed, imprisoned, alcoholic, drug-addicted, Pharisaical, blown apart by the weight of their own supposed “fire.” Of course all of us wanted to love God more. Of course all of us wanted to love our neighbor more. Yes, our problem was that many of us weren’t “on fire” enough. Yet we were being taught, ever so subtly, that the solution to our lack of zeal was to work harder to gain more zeal. DO MORE. WITNESS MORE. READ YOUR BIBLE MORE. PRAY MORE. And yet most-if-not-all of us found that the drone of more, more, more, the weight of sustaining zeal was an impossible burden to bear. None of us loved as we ought. Not God. Not others. The fact is that we were even less dispassionate and burnt-out than we ever supposed. We were dumping gasoline on wet logs hoping for spontaneous combustion. In theological speak we were treating law-breaking with more law. “Do this and live” was being met by “do more and live.”

In this manner the cross and resurrection of Jesus began to diminish in our view. It became increasingly irrelevant to the lives we were leading out – either the burgeoning Pharisee or for the tax-collectors among us. We were finding more persuasive ways to live – being on fire for either sin or religion. Some cast it off like the younger brother, others cast it off like the older brother. But both of us were estranged from our Father.

What we needed was the elders who had gone before us to tell us not to be “on fire” more, but to tell us that falling short is a way of life we must get used to, and that repentance was a bloody but necessary business, and that God’s ability to forgive was far greater than our ability to sin. We needed not to have our zeal fanned into a white-hot but short lived flame that they could vicariously live through to feel good about their ministry successes, but to have the barely flickering flame that was alive inside us to be nurtured with the grace of a Father who gave His Son who sent His Spirit, and to not be inundated and crushed with massive logs of zealous obligation to stoke the flame.

The law of love does not provide what it demands. We owe perfect, sincere, pure love to God and our neighbor. But all the law of zealous love does is tell us what we owe to God and others. There its power ends. The law of “being on fire for Jesus” cannot give what is commanded. And tragically many spiritual lives were laid waste by its misuse.

Really, what we needed to be reminded of, in a rich and compelling manner was “not that we have loved God, but that he first loved us and gave His Son as a propitiation for our sins.

 
The Deeper Meaning
On a completely different level this interaction points to the power and sovereignty of God.
This entire interaction would never have occurred had I not been wearing that particular shirt today.  The fact that I wore a Show Hope shirt today was no accident.  I actually thought precisely and particularly regarding that choice.  I wanted to wear a shirt that meant something. 
I considered about a Shatford House shirt (for reasons IWU students will understand). 
I considered some Bowman House shirts that displayed specific spiritual themes.
I considered a Talbot theology shirt in order to display that I was not only a theology graduate, but also from California .
I decided on my Show Hope shirt. 
 
I thought I decided on it for my own reasons.  I thought it was simply my desire to display a little of my story.  I thought it was wholly my decision. 
I don’t think that anymore.  I truly believe that God was with me in that decision, taking part, co-deciding.  I believe The Spirit of God wanted to bless my spirit and someone else’s today. 
And I believe He knew that in order to do that I would have to choose a specific shirt to wear to Starbucks.
 
And if that is true, one can only respond in worship. 
…What must God be like?

Ten years ago, I might have heard these words and have had no idea what they actually meant.  I thought young people were supposed to be worked to death.  I didn’t know we were supposed to tend to our souls.  What would that mean anyway?

I had a chance to find this out first hand when I worked for a few months after hurricane Katrina, doing relief work in Mississippi.  I lived just outside a quaint little town called Ocean Springs which escaped partially intact and partially splintered into piles of house and tree.  I came a few weeks after the hurricane, was picked up from the airport by my friend, Matt, and taken to the little tent city that would be my home until Christmas.  

It was one of the most incredible seasons of my life. While I learned most of what I know about soul care during my two years in an intensive graduate program, my most intensive field experience was certainly while in this extreme environment.  The remainder of this post will be spent explaining some of the concepts I learned in books and lecture, and then how they are applied to intensive work situations.  

What I Learned in School

1) You are experiencing life consciously and unconsciously, and if you are not intentional about opening yourself to what is happening unconsciously, it will take its toll on you and what you are trying to accomplish.  

2) You need other people to help you find out what is going on with your heart and help you process the unconscious material.

3) Your body will give you clues.  Pay attention to them.  

4) Be suspicious of any voice, yours or others, that is telling you that it is all up to you.  

5) Intense reactions to intense situations are normal reactions. Blase reactions to intense situations are abnormal reactions and we ought to be suspicious of them.

How I Lived What I Learned

1) We are absorbing it all.  I realized quite quickly after arriving in the gulf that I was not in California any more. Though it was nowhere near the kind of culture shock one might experience doing relief work in another country, it was still different and I could feel that I was coming from a different culture and that I would have some adjustments to make as would others to me.  I could feel the panic, the stress, the sadness in the thick southern air.  I felt lost for my first two or three days, but lostness was in the air also.  I knew that I was picking up on some things that were not all me, and these experiences gave me even greater compassion and empathy for the displaced residents of the gulf.  In the way one can sometimes walk into a room and know if two people had just had a fight, I felt the unconscious realities of the gulf, though no one had shared a singe sad story with me yet.  I was aware of all of these things because of my commitment to a rhythm of introspective analysis of my experience and because I was taught how to value and engage my own intuitive dimensions.

2) We need to come up for air.  As I settled in and became more acquainted with the people I was working with and the stories of the residents, dinner time debriefs became essential as were nightly trips to the local video store to rent our way through the first season of Lost.  I needed community, fun, people who were in having some of the same experiences I was.  We needed each other to talk with, laugh with, pray with, and cry with.  All of us became aware of our needs for time together and alone, rest and play, and we had to be there to remind each other that was okay.  We didn’t have to be with residents all the time.  We could only do what we could do.  Locals invited us to BBQ’s and Christmas concerts.  Had we only seen ourselves as helpers, we might have missed out on these awesome experiences. Without people to mirror all of this, them to me and I to them, I would guess all of our time there would have been a lot more stressful, a lot more neurotic, and a lot less effective.

3) Our bodies are cluing us in.  While I was there, I needed a lot more sleep than usual.  I am a pretty clockwork 8-8 1/2 hours of sleep kind of person, but while I was there, I went to bed really early most of the time. My body could not handle it’s normal rhythms.  When I would tour new volunteers around the area to let them know what they were getting into (namely large piles of splintery wood with FEMA trailers parked next to them) many followed the experience with an aspirin or a cigarette.  This phenomenon struck me as so telling.  These volunteers, pastors, sometimes even mental health professionals, were more often then not, unaware of the ways that their bodies were holding the emotional stress of the environment.  In these moments it is more important than ever to attend to what the body is saying and give it voice.

4) There is a time for work and a time for rest. I know from my current life rhythms that I need about 8 hours of sleep to be at my best.  Can I go for a day or two with less? Of course, but if that pattern persists, I would likely get sick or at least become not particularly helpful to the world and quite grouchy.  Rest is also the spiritual discipline of saying, God, I am NOT the one who holds all things together.  I DO NOT have the solutions for the gulf, for this resident, for this child, for this country.  Sleeping is a discipline of letting it all go every night.  When we avoid this, there is a problem.  That said, I also believe God makes provision for us in times where intensive perseverance is needed.  There is a discernment process in knowing what season we are in and we need to be awake enough to think straight to determine that. 

5) There is a time to dance and a time to weep. Both of these experiences, in intensive situations, take intentionality, but my experience would be most people make more effort to be intentional about the dancing part than the weeping part God gave me a tremendous provision in a woman named Joan, who worked at the church where I was living.  She was always available to pray over me and help me weep.  Yes, sometimes we need help in weeping.  When I say weep, I certainly mean crying and tears, but I also mean expressing with presence of heart and mind the realities we have experienced.  For some people this will not result in actual tears.  Whether physical tears are present or not, there is something about sharing our experiences with presence, not just reporting, that allows us to remain whole and fully integrated with the reality of our life experience.  When we do this, we exist rightly oriented to our own weakness and the containment of God, in whose work we have been given the great privilege of participating.

6) Resist the temptation to grandiosity.  This temptation is certain to be there to the degree we pretend we are unaffected by the work we are doing. When we do not acknowledge the toll it takes, when we do not share our weakness with others, shed tears, sleep, and choose only to dance and not to weep, we are tempted to think that our work matters in a way that is dangerous.  To refuse to be affected is to commit the sin of Peter who in ignorance promises to follow Christ to the death. We know how effective his zeal was for the long hall.  His ministry became a ministry of making messes for Jesus to clean up.  God forgive us for the ways we have all done just this in Jesus name. 

While I give all of these examples in the context of relief work, and intensive ministry situations, all of these concepts are completely applicable to anyone who participates in the work of the Kingdom. What are ways you have seen any of this at work in your own life and ministry?  What clues have you found helpful in assessing where your soul really is?

I think this is a temptation many have succumbed to in the spiritual formation movement. The temptation here is to take one’s eyes off of Christ and turn them to becoming conversant within a niche group of spiritually interested people. It often leads to a failure to take the theology behind the practices and cultures seriously, adopting the fruit without paying attention to the roots. Spiritual hobbies, furthermore, tend to slowly and subtly share more in common with worldly spirituality than with Christian spirituality. Christianity becomes replaced with spirituality.

Have you seen this at all? Let me suggest one tell-tale sign. When people give up on the church, they are often succumbing to the temptation to turn spirituality into a hobby.

We know her family and whereabouts and how she conducted her days, but we don’t know what she was called.

Her story is told in Judges 11, when her dad makes a vow to God that,

“If you give me victory over the Ammonites, I will give You whatever comes out of my house to meet me when I return in triumph. I will sacrifice it as a burnt offering.”

So Jephthah (the girl’s father) led his army against the Ammonites, and the Lord gave him victory. In this way Israel defeated the Ammonites.

When Jephthah returned home to Mizpah, his daughter came out to meet him, playing on a tambourine and dancing for joy. She was his one and only child; he had no other sons or daughters. When he saw her, he tore his clothes in anguish. “Oh, my daughter!” he cried out. “You have completely destroyed me! You’ve brought disaster on me! For I have made a vow to the Lord, and I cannot take it back.”

And she said, “Father, if you have made a vow to the Lord, you must do to me what you have vowed, for the Lord has given you a great victory over your enemies, the Ammonites. But first let me do this one thing: Let me go up and roam in the hills and weep with my friends for two months, because I will die a virgin.”

“You may go,” Jephthah said. And he sent her away for two months. She and her friends went into the hills and wept because she would never have children. When she returned home, her father kept the vow he had made, and she died a virgin.

She died with no husband.  She died without ever planning a wedding, or making love, or hearing the laughter of her child.  She died with no visible legacy, and yet a legacy worth recording in the canon of Scripture.  She died with dignity and willingness.  How?

Granted, I’m sick with a cold in bed and have been listening to Anne Lamott and Charles Spurgeon talks all morning, so can’t say I’m altogether lucid, but a few reasons stand out.

She knew how to celebrate.

She knew how to grieve.

She knew her desires.

There’s vulnerability in good celebration.  As a little girl, I thought my dad hung the moon, but I can’t remember running to him in jubilant song and dance post about age four.  Why?  Because kids celebrate better than adults do.  We “mature people” get stuck in our fancy insecurities and sequin covered clothes that need a glass of wine to be ourselves.

Not our unnamed hero in this story though.  This gal knew how to party well and how to recognize a victory worth partying for.  We don’t know her age, but can safely assume she’s out of childhood.  And she danced with childlike joy at the sight of her daddy.

What’s most scary to you about being yourself?  What happens when you envision Jesus coming toward you with a tambourine and song of joy, simply because he likes you and is glad you’re home?

Grieving well is not something most of us are good at.  I remember reading an article in college about Eastern treatments of a miscarriage.  Westerners may say it’s a life, but tend to treat it like an ooops on God’s radar screen.  In not knowing what to say, we say little and move on. Cope.  Bury ourselves in another mask.  These Easterners actually treated it like a life lost and mourned accordingly.

This gal in Judges knew how to grieve, too.  And she knew why.  She knew that God could handle her pain.  She knew that she needed space and time and community to counsel her aching soul.  She knew that grief was the way back to joy.  She knew that grief was the way into hope beyond the hopeless scene before her.  Maybe she knew that the grief of the Cross would come before the gain of the Resurrection.

Where do you feel like life has let you down?  Or God hasn’t lived up? What might it look like for you to go into the hills, maybe alone or maybe with friends, and weep over this sorrow?  To cry out to God in your pain and longing?  And as we learn from this daughter, not with an end in mind of fixing your pain, or longing, but of finding hope in a God who listens and hears you and answers.

Girls, especially, like to mention that, “God gives us the desires of our heart.”  A lovely and true phrase from Psalm 37:4.  But often a misshapen one.  We cherry pick words and neglect the whole of the verse, Psalm, book of Psalms and Bible.  We assume that anything we desire is from God.  And anything desirable should be given to us by God.  That’s not what the verse says though.  It says to delight ourselves in Him, to enjoy and embark upon His ends, and then He will give, which for me oftentimes means replace, my felt desires with His.

Jephthah’s daughter desired a husband—badly—and yet God had somehow awakened in her a desire for something else.  Something bigger.  Something more vital.  She acknowledged her desires to marry and have sex and bear children, and she grieved letting them go.  Not in hopes of getting them back, but in belief that grief was the road to hope beyond their loss.

What desire are you clinching most tightly?  What are you most afraid to hand over to God?  What decision, or job, boyfriend, husband, or baby, outcome, income, weight, or prognosis, feels like it would satisfy your every being?  And what might it look like for God to step into your dance with that desire and offer Himself instead?  “Delight yourself in Me, that is, and I promise to give you the most lasting and satisfying desires of your heart.  You are not just a daughter to this world; you are My daughter, forever chosen, sculpted and named.  I call you Beloved.”

The evangelical church seems to waffle between some form of antinomianism (a rejection of God’s law as no longer binding for spiritual growth) and its equal opposite moralism (an affirmation of God’s law as the solution to spiritual growth). We struggle profoundly with knowing exactly how to change, how to exert our will without feeling like we are trying to “earn” God’s grace, how to obey without viewing it as “meriting” God’s approval. We want to affirm “it is by grace that you have been saved, through faith” but tend to view that as an initiatory reality, i.e. what got us “in” on God’s favor. “That’s all fine and good” we might say, but how do I go from getting in to going on in grace and faith?

The apostle Paul puts it this way, “For the death he [Christ] died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus (Romans 6:10-11).” In other words Paul’s addresses the issue of how to go on or grow in the Christian life as fundamentally a reflective move wherein we consider ourselves as being in Christ, as identifying with his story (specifically his death and resurrection). The fundamental trajectory Paul gives is that in Christ’s resurrection He was raised alive “to God,” and so we consider ourselves as “alive to God.” We used to be dead to God, but now we are alive to Him. The gospel, God’s work in Christ through His life, death, resurrection, and ascension, applied to us through the ministry of Word and Spirit has reoriented us to a fundamentally “Godward” life, i.e. we live toward God now.

To re-frame this idea think of it in terms of blindness and sight. Where once we were blind to God and couldn’t see Him (dead), now we have been given sight and do see Him (alive). Matthew Myer Boulton, channeling Calvin, puts it this way “Though God palpably indwells and sorrounds and cares for humans; though a basic human vocation is ‘to contemplate God’s works, since [humanity] has been placed in this most glorious theater to be a spectator of them’; though the universe is nothing less than a ‘living likeness’ of its creator – despite all of this, left to their own devices, human beings remain dismally oblivious, becoming over time ‘more and more hardened in their insensibility (emphasis mine).’” It is this oblivion that has been chiefly overcome in the gospel, that is we have come to see God where we did not perceive Him before.

It then is this seeing that enables us to detect sin for what it is and to understand obedience for what it is. This in fact is exactly where the apostle Paul goes continuing in Romans 6; “Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness?” The sense here being that when we are made alive to God through the gospel we are transferred from one form of slavery to another – where we see slavery to sin as a cruel and abusive system in which our master, Sin, taunts and tempts us only to trick and mislead us unto destruction and death. In seeing sin for what it really is we also see God for who He really is; though we are His servants He never tricks or misleads us, He speaks truth to us, provides for us, protects us, loves us, and instead of seeing us as fundamentally His slaves He views us as His beloved children. 

Finally we can say it this way – we can and do change as Christians through the gospel which enables us to see sin for what it is and God for who He is. We see obedience to the wiles of sin ultimately as cruel torment and obedience to God as life and joy. As Christians we view the commandments of God as His own Son did, and obey in the manner of the Son, for whom obedience was joyful love. “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in His love. These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full (John 15:10-11).” The questions is not so much then “how do I obey” but rather “whom do I obey?” How you answer that question and how you see the one you obey will determine the texture and quality of your spiritual life. And to be sure “seeing” is not an all at once proposition, we “see through a mirror dimly” and as the blind man in Mark 8, the healing of our vision is progressive.

It took me a few seconds, but I realized they were squacking at me. “What did I do?” “I am just on a prayer walk.” These were the sentences that went through my head. With each step they swam closer and closer to me. Finally I paused, turned and looked directly at them, and waited to see what they were going to do. To my surprise one of them flew out of the water directly at me. I was shocked and struck with fear.

Thankfully the goose stopped short and simply resigned hiimself to squacking at me some more. As I walked back to my office I was puzzled. What in the world were those geese thinking? The simple and delicate image I had of Canadian geese had been radically altered. They were no longer simply beatiful and majestic creatures. They were wild. They were untamed.

I continued to ponder my experience with the geese. As I thought about creation I was moved to consider the Creator. I suppose much like these geese our Creator is wild as well. No surprise of course, his creation does reflect who he is. The truth was they were truly beautiful, but at the same time completely wild. They weren’t safe, but in a way it made them more beautiful and majestic.

Isn’t this the truth of our God? So often our concepts of God have contained him, made sense of him, tamed him. He certainly is beautiful, but he is indeed wild. He cannot tamed. He cannot be controlled or managed. In a sense, he is not safe.

As we encounter God’s wildness we are struck with reverence and respect. We are wrought with holy fear and adoration.

“Safe? said Mr. Beaver. “Who said anything about safe? Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good.” -Mr. Beaver, “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe”