Tag: children
21 Century- Divine High Places
We’re not so different than the ancients. Here’s why:
See the image below? It is a “high place”.
For the ancients it is, unquestionably, the best place to reach a (pagan) god.
A god of human making.
Not good.
2 Kings17: 7
All this took place because the Israelites had sinned against the Lord their God, who had brought them up out of Egypt from under the power of Pharaoh king of Egypt. They worshiped other gods 8and followed the practices of the nations the Lord had driven out before them, as well as the practices that the kings of Israel had introduced.9The Israelites secretly did things against the Lord their God that were not right. From watchtower to fortified city they built themselves high places in all their towns. 10They set up sacred stones and Asherah poles on every high hill and under every spreading tree. 11At every high place they burned incense, as the nations whom the Lord had driven out before them had done. They did wicked things that aroused the Lord’s anger. 12They worshiped idols, though the Lord had said, “You shall not do this.”b
Why a high place?
They built on the highest parts of mountains to tap into unseen power.
They erected “antenna” to communicate with the gods of their own making.
They knew that the high ground was a prime location in their pursuit of more of everything they desired.
They sacrificed their time, energy, blood, sweat, effort, animals and sometimes their children to get the upper hand the mountain high places could provide.
So do we. Yes?
On our high places we build towers to better our lives that would look like religious shrines to anyone one who stumbled on them millennia later.
And aren’t they, really?
Tech is certainly our Baal.
Instant access and fast communication are two of gods we love.
We love access to the internet, high speed wifi, speedy download times, cable or digital tv, reliable mobile phone service.
And we need our high places for all that.
It seems we don’t have moral superiority on this.
The ancients aren’t more foolish or more gullible than us…not as we may suppose they are.
Couldn’t the ancients accuse us of the same sorts of categorical trappings and devotions?
It is humbling.
Verse for reflection:
John 4:23 “But an hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for such people the Father seeks to be His worshipers. 24“God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.” -Jesus
On Camping and “The Chatter of the Mind”
For the last 10 years in a row, we’ve gone to Camp Swatara to…almost rough it as a family.
We just got back yesterday afternoon and began the de-camping process. 6 loads of laundry and putting things away for 3 hours. It’s more tiring than camping, and camping includes foraging for firewood to sustain your life.
For the first time, I didn’t take a single picture of our time away. (The photo above is from the camp website. It’s nondescript enough to resemble us.) It seems strange that I didn’t take any now that it’s done.
It’s an interruption to take photos sometimes, so honestly, I didn’t even think about it. My mind was chattering and I was more “in the moment”.
Later, off course, the photos come in handy to help you remember what happened. Right now, I think I remember something about killing 30 flies with the swatter and the surge of gratification that gave me–and something about S’mores.
My least favorite things about camping:
1. Too much humidity (Towels dry outside on the clothesline….never.)
2. Feeling covered in dirt and sweat 95% of the time
3. Feeling covered in sunscreen and bug spray over the layers of dirt and sweat
4. Bugs and all sort of biting and buzzing insects
5. Walking outdoors to use the indoor bathroom facilities
6. Thin mattresses that cause aches and pains
7. The hyper-vilgilengce about poison ivy and occasionally getting it.
(It all sounds like a dream-come-true, right?)
(some of) My most favorite things about camp
1. Having friends visit
2. The hospitality inherent in the camping community (sharing, chatting by the fire, friendly greetings as you walk around)
3. Family togetherness. Yes, it’s forced on you, but you can really start to enjoy it, usually.
4. The way things smell when the dew evaporates off the leaves in the morning.
5. How the day eases into the night and the darkness that comes to ease you into sleeping
6. Overcoming crisis together. Yes, it’s pretty awful at the time, but great memories and bonding come later.
7. Making fire and cooking with it, or using the firepit as a homing device. It’s hypnotic and primal and warm.
8. The refinement that happens when you realize what you truly need, compare to what you think you need. It turns out that you want things you don’t need.
What you really need: water, food, dry shelter and clothing, each other. What you think you need: a faster laptop.
In the end, you have kids that look forward very happily to the time away, and two parents (me and Tim, obviously) who are happy it’s part of our summertime, even though the whole process is challenging.
It’s actually the challenge that creates the satisfaction later, but you don’t know that unless you try it the whole way through.
If you aren’t psychologically ready to endure, you can get bitter or regretful (…um…so I’ve heard). Plus, it’s a dry camp, so there’s no wine to easy you into it.
The other thing is that intact families tend to camp together. I didn’t have this growing up and it’s a gift I give my children and myself now.
Yes, sometimes “split-up” families camp, too. But, mine didn’t.
Usually broken up families have a lot more scheduling issues and conflicts. Camping as an activity gets pushed to the side, unless you are very dedicated about it and keep it up.
And then there’s the Chatter of the Mind
And sometimes, though not this time, I get to hear less from the planning and inner monologue part of my “chattering mind”.
In general, this chatter may be telling you that you forgot ziplock bags at home or that, or that despite your efforts, you really aren’t worth much in the world, or that you should have cleaned out the vacuum filter more thoroughly, or that you made a mistake in explaining something, or that the people you were just talking to think poorly of you, or that you have to cook something that requires 14 steps… and how will be working out anyway, or the plans for the afternoon and where and how to apply sunscreen properly for it, or any number of things.
There isn’t much quiet in and about our minds, and not for very long.
It’s called thinking. It can be incessant. It’s not just me, right?
If you finally reach that place in time and space where the chatter dies down, it’s almost deafening, actually. At first.
It tends to happen, not on family camping trips, but when I retreat away from home and I go alone. After 2-3 hours of intensional quietness–dialing down everything things improve. But that’s only when I’m being disciplined about getting away and pushing every nuisance thought back, or submitting it to paper, each time one surfaces. If not, it can take days, and too often never happens at all.
And after you tamp down or divert each thought pelting your brain you realize you’ve been breathing all wrong for much too long. You haven’t been able to separate the planning from the enjoying and looking around. You’ve forgotten the things you love or you have not noticed the things you should.
It doesn’t happen all at once that the chatter starts bullying you, but it happens.
(To come to my next retreat trip, click here.)
The chatter is an adversary that comes in pretending to be helpful and careful, as if it has your best interests in mind. But really, it’s just making you weary by using up too much valuable “mental RAM”, like (foolishly) running windows on top of a Mac Operating System.
How’s your mental RAM these days, anyway? Up to snuff?
Can you remember the last time you didn’t experience “the chatter of your mind” for some length of time?
(If you’re thinking about that now, or much of anything, then now is not one of those times.)
And if settling it all down sounds too close to death, then it’s been too long.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on it.
The “Praying for Enemies” Misconception
Remember the Sermon on the Mount?
It’s the 4 chapters ( Click to read Matthew Chapters 4-7 ) where Jesus lays out this upside down, counter-intuitive foundation for the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. He shows how God’s ways don’t look like our ways. It’s a recapitulation of the law of Moses that was warped by God’s people over time and needed to be righted.
Disciples of Christ try to get this passage into their DNA and live it out. While many claim to be Christians few really follow or even grasp the framework Jesus lays out for the Kingdom. Maybe it’s too challenging.
In Matthew 5 Jesus covers the very unpopular idea of not hating our enemies.
• We like to side with people we agree with.
• We like to make sure people know where we stand and what we oppose.
• We love our own
(Much like today, the prevailing thought at the time was that your kin, tribe, or people group are your neighbors and you should love them. Everyone else? They could be treated like enemies. Jesus stresses that our enemies are our neighbors too and later he uses the parable of the Good Samaritan to make his point about what love and following God really looks like.)
But, back to hating our enemies…
(quote blocks cover Mathew 5:43-48)
“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbori and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven.
Loving our enemies means blessing them. Blessing our enemies means we enrich their lives.
But, what about the prayer part?
There’s a common misunderstanding that this verse implies that we should pray for blessing for our enemies, or pray that good things happen to our enemies, or perhaps the most common…we should pray that they will change.
(That’s one I’ve done quite a bit!)
Jesus’ point is different.
He’s not suggesting that we pray for circumstances to change or for our enemy to change, but that’s just what we do, isn’t it?
No. The point is that our enemies and the persecution works to change us into children of God, when we do as Jesus would do.
What praying “for them” means is that we are praying for them to be our teachers. We are praying for us. The trying experience shows us the potential to take on the nature of God. A nature that is so radically different than ours.
God’s ways are the ways of love.
• What does that mean?
It becomes more obvious as Jesus continues the thought and tells us something about God and his character.
How good is God? Thoroughly. Or we could say “perfectly good”.
In fact, he is so unsparingly generous in his goodness that…
He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.
Huh? That seems odd. He does good to bad people. . .
We think of justice as righting wrongs usually by giving someone a form of evil or payback for their evil, and rewarding good with more good. We like liking those who like us and we like punishing or casting out those we don’t like.
For instance, in two minutes on Facebook and you’ll see demarcation lines drawn. Outsiders and insiders. Good and bad. Idiots and smart.
We assume that praying for them (to change) is the godly option …
(because we are actually tempted to do something really nasty and let them have it…but, gosh, we are holding our selves back, you know, because of trying to be godly and such).
The godly thing to do is to think and act through the framework of love as our heavenly Father would.
This has nothing to do with feeling warm fuzzies or giving out hugs. It’s about fundamental fairness, as God defines it.
It’s about a shift is perspective.
Jesus tackles that next:
If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that?
So what should we do instead? Jesus says…
Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
Don’t trip over the perfection part.
The point of the statement is to show how God is thoroughly good and also quite different in his ways than you and me. Be like God.
Being like the good Father from heaven is the true aim. This portion of Matthew 5 isn’t truly centered on what to do about our enemies. Weird, right?
It’s about transforming our thinking and our ways into Kingdom ways.
(That’s what all of the Sermon on the Mount to geared toward.)
The more good and loving we are, (even to those who are unlike us, or who hate and mistreat us), the more we are like children of God and children of his kingdom (dominion).
The contention Jesus makes is that God doesn’t play favorites.
Most people don’t like this part and don’t truly go along with it. We do gymnastics to find some useable loopholes or other verses to avoid the this part, because we define ourself by who our favorites are.
Why doesn’t God play favorites?
Because he really loves us. It is the very nature of God, as defined and modeled by Jesus.
Evil is redeemed through generosity, forgiveness, and love.
Sounds crazy, of course, but we see this happen all the time.
• Remember the story of Officer Jeremy Henwood who bought a child a happy meal just a few minutes before he was violently gunned down in a random attack (and his good deed was caught on video)?
• Or the woman from Rwanda who’s only son was violently murdered. She not only visited the young man who killed him and visited him in prison, but later adopted him and became his mother when he had no place to go.
This stories make us want to be better people through just hearing the story!
• Think of Jesus dying for his enemies.
• Think about how true forgiveness makes things new.
Because we let the person off?
No.
It’s because we have transformed.
We stopped letting the offense trap and define us.
The next time you think about “praying for your enemies” remember:
• You are praying for you.
• You are praying for your mindset to change about what is happening.
• You are practicing being a child of God.
Don’t miss the next post in a day or so. Try the free Feedburner email delivery service (right sidebar signup form.)
Gleanings from Krasner
I got the great privilege to sit under the wise teaching of Dr Barbara Krasner yesterday. (Contextual therapy and a family systems-centered healing perspective.)
With 48 years of experience as a therapist and scholar can you imagine the depths of her knowledge and understanding? But, probably not.
Every sentence was 9 months pregnant with power and meaning. Each concept could be a textbook of its own. Wisdom. Truly.
Gleanings
One of the things that struck me was that she said the first 10 sessions of therapy is almost wasted. People come with certain expectations or barriers every time they first begin therapy, which delays healing.
• Often we simply just want the other person “fixed”.
• We are too ready and able to blame or judge, which the Dr says has zero value.
• We also hope for magic. They assume she will have powers and skills to quickly produce healing and normalcy for them.
She says that she sees her vocation not as a person who has the answers, or simple fixes, but as one can help others see resources they can use to help themselves. Resources they are unaware of or haven’t considered. Communication resources, options, starting points. She helps them look “under rocks to see what they’ve missed, to see what’s working, even if it’s the most basic thing. They may not realize that hope is a choice for them.
Communication and Transactions
Krasner says it’s important to “simultaneously translate” what a person is saying and what they are intending to say. What is heard is often misunderstood and one’s upbringing plays into how we hear others poorly.
• Understanding the context of the message and the person is critical for coming to points of healing and trust.
The biggest reason people divorce?
• They cannot disagree and still stay connected.
(This is true for other kinds of troubled relationships also.)
The most important things we can teach our children?
• Forgiveness (With grounding in loving-kindess: Hesed love.)