just be here

I’ve just come home from a weekend at home—which is an odd-sounding statement, now that I’ve written it, but nonetheless true. I am in my home as I type this, and yet I was at home twelve hours and two hundred miles ago as well, home in the house I grew up in and with the people who know me best.

This tension always makes me wonder if we were meant to live like this, separated from our people. For most of human history we’ve lived in tight-knit communities, from the familial clans of the patriarchs to small colonial towns. With industry and progress and technology have come a much larger world, for better or worse. Now we hardly bat an eye at the idea of living states or even continents away from our parents, maintaining our relationships almost entirely by digital means. Those of us in the suburbs often live a stone’s throw from houses full of people we’ve never met beyond a “hello” on the way to the mailbox—people whose pantries we can’t imagine borrowing from, people we’d never dream of asking to babysit our children, people who might not even answer the door if we’d locked ourselves out of our house without a phone late at night (ask me how I know).

I walk through my neighborhood and see large houses full of stuff and empty of people, divided by tall fences. I walk through my grocery store and hope I don’t see anyone I know that I might have to make small talk with. I wonder how to fix it, even as I perpetuate it. Community, generosity, hospitality—these are all such warm kingdom words, and I long for them, but still instinctively steel myself against them, because as warm as they are, they’re not safe.

Perhaps what my generation missed, with all its Do Hard Things and Radical and “You were made for more,” is that the opulent, individualistic, global Western lens through which we view concepts like “hard” and “radical” and “more” renders our interpretation utterly different from that of Christ. We tend to think only of going bigger and better, when the truly hard and radical thing to do is get smaller.

Smaller is harder. More intimate, more vulnerable, more terrifying. It’s harder to share the Good News with someone you see every day, because they will immediately measure your life against your creed. It’s harder to commit yourself to a tiny, local assembly of believers, because they will soon be elbows-deep in the muck of your life. It’s harder to serve your own immediate family faithfully day in and day out, because the very people we love the most can be hardest to love when it’s an every-minute-of-every-day demand on our energy.

I’d love to think that the most important thing for me to do is shatter the universe with wisdom shouted from a platform overlooking millions—grand and impersonal, safe from the discomfort of being known, set up on a pedestal to be admired from afar—but in the words of John the Baptist, “He must increase; I must decrease” (John 3:30).

Even Jesus modeled the power of small. The effects of His ministry were universe-shattering, of course, but the means were hardly grand. Twelve men. Just three in His closest circle. He let them watch Him, learn from Him, live with Him for three years. In the end, it was one of these men who betrayed Him, and it was the other eleven who carried His mission forward into the next two thousand years.

In our day of Twitter and virtual-everything and Church, Inc., it’s so easy to forget that every massive work of God in the Bible started small and moved slowly. He multiplied Abraham in to a nation over the course of four centuries, most of which the Israelites spent in slavery. He relentlessly pursued and tirelessly loved that nation through a thousand years of rebellion, repentance, idolatry, exile, and return. He finally sent the Messiah in the form of an embryo who would take 40 weeks to develop and be born a baby—a baby who would then take 30 years to mature into ministry. And He’s been continuing that ministry now for more than two millennia.

God is on a different timeline than I am. Even if I do the biggest, wildest things with my life, it will still be miniscule when it plays out on His stage. My 27 years, or 87 if I’m given them, can never be more than a blink when the scope is this large.

So I will just be, and I will just be here: faithful and small, loving my little circles well, knowing that God created me with limits but that when I am obedient in my limited part, He can better do His work in the infinite whole.

just be

At that time the disciples came to Jesus, saying, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” And calling to Him a child, He put him in the midst of them and said, “Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.

“Whoever receives one such child in My name receives Me, but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea.”

Matthew 18:1-6 ESV

One of my favorite things is watching Clara get lost in her own little world of play. She appears to forget all about me as she unstacks blocks, pulls apart puzzles, pretends to burp her baby dolly, or examines the intricacies of a stick of lip balm. She is sometimes silent, but more often chatting softly to herself and her toys. “Bah! Tickatickaticka. Oooh.” Sometimes one of the cats, watching a bird or a squirrel through the sliding door, catches her attention. “Tor!” she might exclaim, and make a beeline to enthusiastically pat him on the head, which he endures with a longsuffering grimace. When he inevitably loses patience and saunters away, she picks up her tiny Lowly Worm Word Book and practices pointing to each little picture, pretending to read the words.

Before Clara, the only real experience I could call upon to interpret a Bible passage like this one from Matthew 18 was my own dim memories of being a young child. That helped some, to be sure, but I obviously can’t remember anything from the purest childlikeness of being just a year old, all my needs lovingly met and not a care in the world except whether I could coordinate putting one block on top of another without toppling them both over.

Now I think I see: Jesus’s disciples wanted to know what kind of rankings exist in God’s kingdom—what kind of righteousness demands the highest reward—and Jesus pointed them to the ones who never would have thought to ask such a question.

Clara’s life is about 60% sleep, 30% play, and 10% food. She doesn’t have any goals or checklists when she gets up in the morning except to grow, to learn, and to let me meet her needs. She’s not concerned with being good at anything or earning her keep or leaving a mark on the world. She’s content to just be.

Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.

We get a glimpse of this as God’s initial intention all the way back in Genesis, when He charged His image-bearers to “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it” (Genesis 1:28). They were to be cultivators and keepers, partners with Him in the joy of creating and caring for what was created; they were to increase the numbers as well as the borders of this garden paradise until it covered the whole of Creation.

Obviously, the story went awry, and that was never achieved. But the vision is still pertinent, for the King has come, and He is taking His Creation back! This is not the time for distractions of legalism or delusions of grandeur. It’s time to become children again.

It’s time to rest in the generous provision of the Lord. It’s time to do away with self-important pursuits of individual impact. It’s time to stop asking what more we can do to please God and simply trust Him, for in this, He is pleased.

I think He delights in watching us love our spouses, raise our children, care for our neighbors, and create beauty in the world much as I delight in watching Clara interact with her toys and learn how to be a person. I’m not annoyed with her for not helping me make dinner; her job is merely to receive dinner once it’s done, and to enjoy her little world in the meantime. Likewise, it’s not about what I accomplish in my lifetime to show for the years God gave me, but about what He is accomplishing over the course of millennia as He guides history to its stunning climax: to a New Creation, an everlasting reunion of God and His people who were rent apart by sin. My job is to rest in Him, to receive from Him, and to glorify Him, which in its most honest form is usually a rather un-glorious-looking matter—but nonetheless beautiful.

the unbelieving believers

What do fully-vaccinated mask-wearers and a lot of Christians have in common?

This question popped into my mind while I was reading one of my favorite books on walking with God called Sidetracked in the Wilderness, written by Michael Wells. In the first few chapters of the book, Wells makes the case that most Christians, despite their miraculous born-again status, are living in a state of defeat borne out of none other than the original sin: unbelief.

Stay with me.

As we’ve probably all heard by now, the CDC recently changed their guidelines regarding masks for the vaccinated population, causing a lot of businesses to relax their rules about wearing masks indoors. At Spuds, we are no longer requiring customers to wear masks, under the assumption/ideal that those who choose not to have had the Covid-19 vaccine.

Inevitably, this has created yet another us-them dichotomy in the general population. Over the course of this pandemic we’ve had the maskers and the anti-maskers, the vaccine-enthusiastic and the vaccine-hesitant, and now we have the “masked vaxxed” vs. the “unmasked vaxxed.” Today during my shift, we had two middle-aged women with two completely different approaches; one of them saw our “Masks Optional” sign on the door and immediately took her mask off, saying she was vaccinated; the other pointedly told me at the cash register, “I’m vaccinated, but I’m not taking this thing off.”

One of the women believed that because she had received the vaccine, her body had created the antibodies necessary to protect her from the virus, and her mask was therefore unnecessary. The other probably also believed in the efficacy of the vaccine, or she wouldn’t have bothered to be vaccinated—but she did not trust that her body would do its job if she came in contact with the virus. She kept her mask on.

These two women remind me of what Michael Wells writes:

Let me explain that an unbelieving believer is someone who is a Christian, is born again, and will arrive in heaven; the problem is that this person has never believed in the Lord Jesus with his whole being. That is, with his mind he receives and believes all that is told him about the grace, care, concern, and love of the Lord Jesus; he is a believer. Yet at the same time, he feels that he is in charge of every aspect of his Christian life, that he must change the lives of those around him, bring transformations into his own life, and work to make himself pleasing to God. That is, in his emotions he is unbelieving.

- Sidetracked in the Wilderness

I think we can all identify with the concept of the “unbelieving believer” at some point, or perhaps at many points, in our walks with God. We are all sometimes the fully-vaccinated mask-wearer—the wholly-justified do-gooder. We are all sometimes tempted to add our own works of righteousness to the complete work of Christ on the cross, even though “all our righteous deeds are like a filthy garment” (Isaiah 64:6). We all have days of fear, doubt, and uncertainty when we’ll slap a germ-laden cloth over our mouth and nose just in case the power within us isn’t as powerful as we once believed.

For some, the lifestyle of the unbelieving believer, like that of the masked-vaxxed, becomes a religion—a system of rules that slowly blinds him to the truth, binds him with fear, and ultimately leads both himself and others away from God. Have you ever wondered why, as a “Covid precaution,” your takeout at McDonald’s is now handed to you on a tray—when you know that someone had to touch the bag to get it on the tray in the first place, so what’s the point? Then you might also be apt to wonder why the Pharisees tithed “mint and dill and cummin, and have neglected the weightier provisions of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness” (Matthes 23:23a) or, more pointedly, why you can read your Bible and pray every day but still walk through life in the defeatedness of legalism and stubborn self-reliance.

I will venture a suggestion: It’s because you—we—do not trust that the power of God is truly within us, or that if it is, it’s truly enough.

If you’re vaccinated, the scientific research currently indicates that you are at extremely low risk of contracting Covid-19. If you somehow do get sick, you are almost certain to have an extremely mild or even asymptomatic case. There is no data to suggest that vaccinated people pose a risk to unvaccinated people. So your mask, if you choose to wear it (which is totally fine, I’m not here to tell anyone what to do), does nothing but betray your fear, inhibit your breathing, and signal your views to others.

So it is when we try to layer our self-powered good works onto the perfect sacrifice of Christ. He paid our debt in full; our mere pennies of righteous acts are an insult to that magnificent price, and if we insist on throwing them at His feet anyway, it’s because we are acting to appease our self-focused fears and to impress those who might be watching, not because they have any value with which to pay the debt we owe.

It is Christ alone who has done the hopeless work of reconciling our lost souls to God, and it will be the Spirit alone who does the equally hopeless work of sanctifying us into His likeness. Jesus says, “Unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:20b). How can any of us outdo those who followed the letter of all 600+ commands of the Law, right down to the very last jot? Only by receiving our righteousness from Someone else, and then living freely and wholeheartedly in the reality of it.