Tag: enemies

Eps 160 | Love Over Fear; Guest, Dan White Jr.

My guest is Dan White Jr, teacher, writer, and much more.

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The Familiar Enemies

RiskBelow are some of my “field notes” I collected from this extended and uncut interview with Brené Brown on Krista Tippet’s show “On Being”

 

[emotionally toxic / unhealthy] people suffer from similar traits:

• Perfectionism

• Self-righteousness

• Tying self-worth and personal value to productivity and success

• Wanting to perform and get validation

• Using exhaustion as a badge of honor

• The quest for certainty

 

Quote/snippets
• The enemy of creativity is comparison.

• Vulnerability is the core the heart and the center of meaningful human experience.

For woman the biggest fear/risk looks like this: “do it all and do it well and look perfect doing it”.
For man it looks like this: “do not appear to be weak”.

If people have never really struggled with adversity it shows up as hopelessness.

Hope is not an emotion; it’s a cognitive behavior process that is a function of struggle [and resiliency]. It doesn’t happen in the absence of pain or when we are spared pain.

Our defining moments (what makes us who we really are) happen not in joy but in adversity.

(Vulnerability is uncertainly, risk and emotional exposure ….and it’s courage. —my note: all things artists and innovators MUST have.)

When we don’t have space to be vulnerable and have fears we become dangerous.

If these sound like helpful, juicy nuggets to you, listen here:

Prayer of Communal Lament: For Franklin Regional HS

FR

 

My small hometown–Murrysville, PA–is undergoing a time of shock and pain because of the Alex Hribal’s attack. Two steak knives and a blood bath. Many heroes were made, but the event was and is traumatic–rocking the community to its core.

My young niece (the daughter of my brother’s who is a Franklin Regional Alumnus from the 1990s) was not allowed to attend her classes at the elementary building at Franklin Regional and her street shut down as FBI, State Police, and legions of first responders, media, and others have swarmed the scene. 

My family’s church, the church were I was married, mourns as an entire community and feels trauma and pain deeply because several from their youth group teen were wounded. Some of them have undergone surgery.

All are expected to survive. Praise be to God for that grace.

It would be easy to say this youth of 16 years old is a monster, but students attest that he was very nice. Answers for why it all happened are left unanswered at this time.

 

In these times, the community of faith raises its voice in communal lament. We are comforted by each other and by a good God who is with us in our pain.

Sadly, violence has become a normal occurrence in school settings… and it may be your hometown that suffers next. But, parish the thought!

If not that, than surely you and your community will encounter pain and loss.

 

For that, here are some thoughts on Communal Lament.

 

1. About 1/3 of the Psalms are songs of lament. They are meant to be sung as prayers. They can be read with that in mind.

2. God invites us to cry out in our pain, not to suppress it, or put on a “happy face”. That kind of honesty dignifies our feelings and helps us feel our emotions fully,  so we can move toward healing.

3. Communal laments are always meant to be expressed in the context of ongoing faith and trust in God. 

4. Our laments (communal and individual) are a normal response to the pain and loss of life and living; they help us experience greater bonds of community and healing from God.

5. Laments of the psalms are unvarnished. That is an important quality to understand. They depict the anguish, desperation, pain, and messy feelings that often smack of ill-intension toward enemies and abusers, in parts. They may seem to condone retaliatory violence. But, that’s not the end of the story (song)…

6. If the reader or hearer pays close attention, she or he will notice each song ends in hope and trust in the Lord. This is key to the communal lament. All is left in God’s hands. 

(In this way, our burdens lift and our faith grows.)

7. Communal laments are a cry from a whole group for Justice (things to be put to rights) and this ultimately necessitates the elements of…

• Mercy

• Forgiveness

• Reconciliation

• Restoration

• Redemption

 

Here is a resource on the types and categories of Psalms. May they be of comfort to you.

 

Join with your community and raise your voices in lament when your hearts are heavy with sadness, pain, and grief.

 

For your reflection:

Psalm 63

A psalm of David, regarding a time when David was in the wilderness of Judah.

1 O God, you are my God;
I earnestly search for you.
My soul thirsts for you;
my whole body longs for you
in this parched and weary land
where there is no water.
2 I have seen you in your sanctuary
and gazed upon your power and glory.
3 Your unfailing love is better than life itself;
how I praise you!
4 I will praise you as long as I live,
lifting up my hands to you in prayer.
5 You satisfy me more than the richest feast.
I will praise you with songs of joy.

6 I lie awake thinking of you,
meditating on you through the night.
7 Because you are my helper,
I sing for joy in the shadow of your wings.
8 I cling to you;
your strong right hand holds me securely.

9 But those plotting to destroy me will come to ruin.
They will go down into the depths of the earth.
10 They will die by the sword
and become the food of jackals.
11 But the king will rejoice in God.
All who trust in him will praise him,
while liars will be silenced.

The “Praying for Enemies” Misconception

waterhouseRemember 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.

 

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I Want the High Ground, But I Can’t Find It (guest contributor, Ed Cyzewski)

The 2nd contributor in The Spiritual Guidance for Bloggers Series is author, blogger, and friend of rabbits, Ed Cyzewski.

I’ve enjoyed Ed’s blog and books for years. Simply put, Ed is consistently top notch, and I can’t say that of too many bloggers, even ones I enjoy. His current Women in Ministry Series is giving women who love the Lord a chance to tell their stories in an environment of love, encouragement, and support. Don’t miss it.

Today he shares, with personal candor and razor keenness, a theme that foils many Christian bloggers: polarizing narratives. 

If there was ever a cesspool of troubling ideas about Christianity, it had to be a series of radio shows on this Christian radio station in my home town. Not all of the shows were cesspools mind you—only certain shows.

The cesspools were the shows that revolved around creating an “us vs. them,” barbarians at the gate narrative for Christians and the surrounding culture. The enemies could be liberal politicians, liberal media, and even “liberal” Christians—all terms that were tossed about loosely for anyone who was “dangerous”—whatever that meant.

We live and breathe on narratives. The majority of our narratives revolve around some sort of conflict.

What I’ve found is that I haven’t necessarily abandoned the structure of that old conflict narrative I grew to reject. I still see myself in terms of how I oppose other perspectives when I blog. The difference now is that the barbarians at the gate are the ultra-conservative fundamentalists with oppressive practices and damaging theology.

I still think of myself as somehow preserving true Christianity or the truth—whatever that means. The trouble with this narrative is that once I set myself up as the defender of anything, I’m creating a disingenuous conversation—one that is especially toxic when I tap it out in a blog post.

I’ve run into this conflict dynamic in both directions when I debate people about women in ministry. For those who oppose women in ministry, they often frame the discussion where they’re preserving the truth of scripture. Therefore the entry point for the conversation is that I, as a supporter of women in ministry, am somehow attacking the Bible.

On the other hand, I believe that anyone who denies the full equality of women in the church is denying them their fundamental rights. I can quickly use this to frame my “opponents” as oppressors before the conversation even starts.

Either way, we can create an uneven playing field where neither side can see eye to eye because one side has set itself up on higher ground.

I don’t like confronting perspectives that oppose my own. Nothing has changed in that regard, even if I’ve swapped sides sometimes. Nevertheless, I still like to think of myself as the hero, the one who is standing up for truth.

The reality is that we’re all stumbling around, trying to sort out what we believe and what we should do each day. We’re all over the map, and perhaps some points on the map are closer to the ever elusive truth. However, the topography is quite level. We all go into this with the same limitations and bias.

The world continues to spin even though there are churches who won’t let women pray in the company of men and other churches led by strong, Spirit-filled female pastors. It’s hard to believe some days.

I can still have an equal marriage, even if there are some who believe women must take a subservient position with their husbands.

I can still learn from women, even if women are silenced in some churches.

I can even keep cute and cuddly house rabbits in my living room, even if some people raise them as livestock for dinner.

I wish I could take the high ground. I wish I could be 100% correct. I wish I could judge. I wish I could win. If only I could find that high ground, it would all be so easy. As I shift from one perspective to another, I’ve learned that no one really knows where that impregnable high ground is.

I’m trying to leave the conflict narrative behind. I don’t need more enemies. I need allies. That means I don’t try to convert those who disagree with me into allies. I just try to find allies.

If someone who disagrees with me wants to chat, then I’m all for it. However, I hope to leave behind the high ground days where I roved from one conversation to another as a warrior for truth who defended his supposed high ground no matter what the cost.

Thankfully, God has found the high ground, and he’s not letting me or you anywhere near it. We’re all just stuck on this unending plain together, and the sooner we leave each other be, without incessantly poking every person who disagrees with us, the better.

 

Ed Cyzewski is the author of Coffeehouse Theology: Reflecting on God in Everyday Life and Divided We Unite: Practical Christian Unity. He blogs at www.inamirrordimly.com.