Category: Soul

How to find peace on the roads, part two

In part one, I told you that it’s entirely possible to find peace on the roads, that the stress of driving comes down to an animal/biological/physiological response: Fight or Flight.

The question is this: Can we, how do we check out of this game?

First the bad news: Just like everything else Jesus tells us, it’s hard work and requires continual awareness. But freedom is on the other side, folks. It will be worth it.

Let’s talk about fear first.

Fear is an appropriate response to danger. The roads are sometimes dangerous. And yet we’re very clearly told to “fear not.” What this does not mean is that we are to go doing stupid things like jumping off of cliffs. What is does mean is that if you do everything you can to be safe but still cannot avoid a potentially dangerous situation, do not worry, for God is with you.

We have to drive: You gotta go to the store and get food for your family or yourself. You have to go to work to provide for your family or yourself. On vacation, you need to get out of town to see God’s creation, to renew. You need to visit your parents. Etc.

So drive carefully and wisely. Beyond that, do not fear.

Ok, that’s flight. What about fight? What about anger?

I am convinced that as Christians we do not own anger, except in the rarest of situations: righteous anger (e.g. somebody is about to hurt a child and you need to step in to stop it).

Almost all of our anger comes from ugly places. For instance, pride says, “I would never do such a thing!” Truth is, yes you probably would if you were in their shoes, if you had their upbringing, life circumstances, etc.

Let’s talk about a situation you know far too well: Let’s say you’re going to a concert and there’s a very long line to exit the freeway. Somebody in the lane to your left speeds all the way down the line as far as they can, and then pulls into a gap near the front of the line. Infuriating, isn’t it?

It shouldn’t be. You don’t know their life situation overall, and you don’t know what’s going on with them right that moment. You really don’t.

A quick story: Many years ago, my dear wife was in the car rushing my son to a place where he could get medical attention because was having great difficulty breathing. She didn’t have time to get an ambulance. She had to hurry to save his life. Someone, most probably thinking they were going to “show” my dear wife and not let her speed, repeatedly pulled in front of her to prevent her from proceeding at that pace.

Ok, you say, that’s for sure a cautionary tale. But that kind of situation is, like what, one-tenth of a percent of speeders? What about the other 99.9%?

Easy answer, tough to execute: Jesus tells us to “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” If a person is simply an idiot, I mean really an idiot with little regard for others, they’re not going to repent and change their lives because a stranger is angry with them.

Give up judging aggressive drivers –turn that over to God. Drive wisely and carefully. Get out of people’s way. Swallow your pride and anger*. Admit that you don’t know everything. Pray for those who persecute you. Take comfort in knowing that God’s got it all covered.

*Regardless of how long you’ve been driving, you will almost certainly have a very large amount of built-up anger, fear, frustration, and disappointment. You have to find a way to get that out so that you can find peace! Cry it out, talk it out, whatever it takes. Counselors can help. Identify it and do the work to remove it from your life.

Suffocation

Sunrise in Moab, August 2023

We don’t like being told what to do, even by God himself. We don’t like rules. They are a suffocating blanket. Freedom is what we want.

Are God’s rules suffocating? Is it freedom from Him that we really want?

In Psalm 119:97-99, we are told that God’s commands for us are to be “desired more than gold,” that they are “sweeter than honey.” That they “give [us] more understanding than all of [our] teachers,” “make wise the simple,” “delight the heart,” and “enlighten the eyes.”

Ok, wait a minute. What the psalmist is telling us here seems to strongly conflict with our idea of freedom. What’s going on?

Because we are dull in wisdom and hard of heart, Jesus sums it up for us all in Matthew 22:37:

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”

So that’s it? All those rules and regulations come down to this? Love God and other people?

Doesn’t sound suffocating to me at all.

Only our broken nature could make a hell of heaven, a bad guy of the source of all goodness. We are called to give up our little kingdoms of one and join the Kingdom of God. He’s the only one who can give us true freedom.

How to find peace on the roads, part one

You’re a well-put-together person. You’re kind to strangers, hold the door for the person behind you at the shopping mall entrance, always tip well, and love your spouse and children. People just really like you.

All that changes when you get behind the wheel of an automobile. Have you ever stopped to wonder why?

How is it that you can be such an amazing human being off the roads, and then turn into either a) a selfish monster from hell — willing to mow down grandma in order to get a thirty foot advantage over the next car, willing to endanger the lives of a sweet, little family in a minivan just so you can get to your destination four minutes earlier — or b) a quivering ball of cowardly jelly?

Let’s say that early one Saturday morning, you decide you want to surprise your still-sleeping family with breakfast. Happy and hopeful for the day, you jump in the car to take a quick jaunt down to your favorite local donut shop. You don’t get a quarter mile from the house when some bozo in a jacked-up Ford F-350 decides that, of all the open spaces on the quiet streets of your little neighborhood at 6:30am, he likes the space about 48 inches from your rear bumper. Instantly, your mood goes from happy and hopeful to furious or scared. Or both.

Why do you respond this way? Why do we respond that way? The simple answer is that the threat represented by the jerk in the Ford causes an autonomic, physiological, biochemical response called “fight or flight.” Those are the two possible responses to such stress: anger and aggression, or fear and the need to quickly get away.

Fight or flight comprises the great messy stew that are the roads. Somebody cuts you off, you get angry, so you cut the next guy off. Somebody scares you by pulling up on your tail, so you speed up and tailgate the next guy. Next thing you know, you’re either fearfully pulled over to the far lane driving 30 when everyone else is doing 70mph, or you’re the one in the F-350, terrorizing good people.

It seems an inescapable cycle. But it is possible to decide to check out of the game and find peace on the roads. In the next post, I’ll tell you how.

How does one find contentment?

The great Hebrew prophet Isaiah tells us that contentment is to be had by staying your mind on God.

What does it mean to “stay” your mind?

It means to keep something at the forefront of your consciousness, put your attention there and keep it there.

Ok, I’m staying my mind on God. What’s next?

It is from this position of focus that we must yearn for God, earnestly seek him.

As Jesus tells us, if we seek, we will find.

And when we find, we’ll also find that — to our great happiness — contentment has been thrown in as well.

Who is this man?

Albrecht Dürer: “Selbstbildnis im Pelzrock”, 1500, Öl auf Holz, 67 × 49 cm, Alte Pinakothek München

To understand Christ, we have to start with the Trinity, which consists of one divine being, God, who is comprised of three distinct persons, each with a unique role: The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Christology is essentially the study of the person of Jesus Christ, the Son: who he is in relation to the other two persons of the Trinity, his divine and human natures, and his mission to save humanity from its otherwise inescapable fallenness.

In the historic Apostles Creed, we are told of:

Jesus Christ, [God’s] only Son, Our Lord,
Who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried.
He descended into Hell; the third day He rose again from the dead;
He ascended into Heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of God, the Father almighty; from thence He shall come to judge the living and the dead.

The Holy Spirit overshadowed Mary and nine months later was born the savior of the world. He lived the life we should have lived, taught us the true nature of God. He was condemned by the rulers of his own people and handed over to a Roman leader named Pilate, who did what was reasonable to try let the man go free. But in the end, Jesus was treated as an exceptional criminal, as a traitor to the Roman republic, and received the horrific punishment of being beaten, scourged, stripped naked, and nailed to a cross to die.

Jesus was given a fairly normal Jewish burial, though in a tomb beyond his family’s ability to pay, but was not given with the standard burial treatment due to it being the Sabbath.1 Three days later, he arose from the dead, the firstfruits of the new kingdom he has initiated and will eventually complete when he returns in glory to judge all people.

Christology, then, consists of making sense of this man, this God, for Jesus was both God and man. He was both one with the Father, equal in power and glory, as well as a man, born of woman and with all the limitations of humanity.

1 The women who discovered the empty tomb had come to complete the task of preparing Jesus’ body 

How does one become wise?

Deschutes National Forest, Oregon

Wisdom is a path rather than a door. It’s a left/right/left/right/left rather than a couple of days spent with a self-help book. Here are five practices that will make you wise:

1. Know God: Find ways to pound it into your heart that He is absolutely committed to you. As someone else has said, you would be no more loved and accepted by God if you were to obey for 1,000 years than the day you first believed.

    2. Know yourself: Since wisdom requires that one be in touch with reality, wise people know they are broken and foolish. One must be prepared to engage in “ruthless yet non-traumatic self-examination.”


    “What I’d like to understand,” said the Ghost, “is what you’re here for, as pleased as Punch, you, a bloody murderer, while I’ve been walking the streets down there and living in a place like a pigstye all these years.”

    “That is a little hard to understand at first. But it is all over now. You will be pleased about it presently. Till then there is no need to bother about it.”

    “No need to bother about it? Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”

    “No. Not as you mean. I do not look at myself. I have given up myself. I had to, you know, after the murder. That was what it did for me. And that was how everything began.”

    C.S Lewis, The Great Divorce

    3. Know your friends: The fool is an individualist; a wise person is always asking for help and advice. Wisdom comes through community.

    4. Know God’s “best practices”: You’ve got to master, take into your heart, and meditate and reflect on Scripture. Every day of every week of every year.

    5. Know trouble: Do not despise or reject suffering.

    The cross is the beginning of wisdom. It is upside down to what the world says: you win by losing, rule by serving, obtain wealth by giving it away.

    Source: Tim Keller sermon “Training in Wisdom”

    Everybody worships

    Photo: Michael Stipe of R.E.M

    When your day is long
    And the night, the night is yours alone
    When you’re sure you’ve had enough
    Of this life, well hang on
    Don’t let yourself go
    ‘Cause everybody cries
    Everybody hurts sometimes

    So hold on.

    R.E.M.

    Whether you’re having a bad day, going through a bit of a rough patch, or having a bad life, I highly recommend watching R.E.M.’s 2008 Hyde Park performance of “Everybody Hurts” on YouTube. It’s wonderfully delivered and a very moving reminder of our common humanity. It’ll give you some comfort.

    Everybody hurts. It’s also true that everybody worships. It doesn’t matter if you’re Christian, Buddhist, a New Ager, Agnostic, or Atheist, something in between or none of the above, if you’re a human being, you will inevitably worship.

    Don’t be put off by the word. In this context, worship simply means to have something — a person or idea or philosophy, whatever — in which you place your hope, your identity, your meaning. What we put there often has to do with how deeply we hurt, whether we find ourselves moving towards despair.

    At the end of the day, we’ve got two choices in terms of what we worship: the Creator or the created. Put your hope in the latter and you’ll be disappointed every single time. Maybe not today or tomorrow, but eventually you will be let down.

    God will never, ever, ever let you down. Build your house on rock, not sand.

    A crushed spirit — and what to do about it.

    As I’ve said before, I like Tim Keller. The guy just speaks to me.

    In one of his sermons, Keller speaks of the wounded or crushed spirit — what causes it. His answer: “it’s complicated.” It can have one of four causes, or combinations of any the four.

    The first cause is medical/physical. The “we’re just a body” crowd tends to focus on this one. The most obvious example of this is biochemical depression, but it could also be a bad thyroid, physical exhaustion, or whatever.

    The second cause is emotional or relational. People into self esteem focus here. If you buy in to the lie that above all else you must “believe in yourself,” you’re in for some bitter disappointment: You will fail you.

    The third cause is conscience/moral. Many Christians tend to focus here. God implants in every human being a moral code. Ignore that code, as we all do as broken beings, and you’ll be haunted by a guilty conscience.

    The fourth is existential/philosophical. If you are honest with yourself and think — really think — you’ll come to realize (with Nietzsche and others) that there exists in this world a “ground note of sadness” that cannot be overcome. All joy ends in grief: It is a fact that if you think about the people whom you love the most, there will be one of you in that group who lives long enough to see every one else die.

    So what’s one to do about all this? Well, if it’s medical, get help. If it’s emotional or relational, do not put any person in a place that only God should be. For issues of conscience, you’ll do well to understand that we’re all deeply broken, confess your trespasses to God, and ask for forgiveness and strength not to repeat what you’ve done. (Also, remember: “There, but by the grace of God, go I.”)

    Regarding the fourth, the Bible speaks of the Tree of Life, which represents the fullness of life, absolute satiation. Problem is, post expulsion from Eden, we are barred from it by an angel with a flaming sword.

    Now is an in-between time. The good news is that we are saved by Christ, none of our sins are held against us, the price of justice has been paid in full. Yet still we weep. We must be content for now in the knowledge that soon enough the world we be set to rights. And God will dry every tear.

    Source: Tim Keller’s sermon at https://youtu.be/pkL3R27ZV1o

    Christian Marriage (Part Two)

    Christian friends, if you have no conflicts in your marriage then something is wrong. Marriage is a “great mystery” — no relationship between human beings is greater or more important. It is spiritual partnership, sealed by covenant, for mutual sanctification, making us day-on-day more like Christ. Its end is to develop mature character. It is wonderful but hard: burning joy and strength, yet blood, sweat and tears, humbling defeats and exhausting victories.

    A good marriage drives each of us to experience the gospel, the transforming love of God. You will see your spouse’s flaws to the bottom, see the other in complete nakedness. In the course of your life together, you will fail to do what you ought, want what you should, be who you should be. You will betray the other, will fail to love the other as you should.

    But, with maturity, you will come to truly love your spouse more fully than you could possibly have imagined.

    Source: The Meaning of Marriage by Tim Keller

    Christian Marriage

    Our current concept of marriage is a relatively recent phenomenon. It’s driven by romantic feeling, that wonderful experience of being in love. If you somehow lose it, basically if you’re not Romeo and Juliet 24×7 for the rest of your life, well you have a right — nay, an obligation — to move on. It didn’t work out, he or she was not the right one, I will now go find my true soul mate. Because I deserve that kind of love. Repeat until spouse number eight.

    Another choice is just to pretend that all is well in Verona, try to fool yourself and others that there’s not a deep, life-sucking disappointment at the center of your life, settle, give up your dreams, rationalize. (I’m not even going to address here those who have allowed “marriage” to devolve into a mere consumer transaction).

    Look, since we’re all big boys and girls, I’m going to let you in on a fact of life: No matter how hard you try, no matter how much one is determined to be Romeo to her Juliet, or Juliet to his Romeo, the feeling of being in love will fade. It may be six months, it may be three years. But it will go. There’s no getting around it.

    There is another way.

    True Christian marriage starts with the understanding that we are each deeply broken individuals in need of salvation. And while it’s true that marriage is in great part about raising the next generation, it has a more fundamental purpose: sanctification, of being made day on day more like Christ. We now find ourselves far, far from the land of daisies and chardonnay. In God’s plan, your spouse is your spiritual partner, picked by Him just for you expressly for this process of making the other holy. It’s a great returning. Needless to say, the business at hand is vitally, desperately important.

    Sanctification means pain and conflict, of eventually turning over to God all in you that needs to be burned away — and there’s a lot there that needs to change — of responding with love and resolve to the challenges to your very being forced upon you by your spouse’s God-given differences. It can only happen if both partners are committed to following God’s will and to sticking it out in sickness and in health, in times of plenty and times of want. In other words, of sticking by the promises you made on your wedding day.

    All of this makes what Navy Seals do look like a day at the waterpark. But what results is two beautiful human beings – “little Christs” who serve the Father – who in the process find (to their great amazement) that they love each other more deeply, and in a real, completely naked, and deeply joyous way than either could ever have thought possible.

    Take that, Romeo and Juliet.

    Photo credit: Ben Swayze, Zion National Park