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MOVEMENT THREE True

I remember the first time I was truly in awe of God. I was caught up for the first time in my life in something so massive and loving and transcendent and . . . true. Something I was sure could be trusted. I specifically remember thinking the universe was safe, in spite of all the horrible, tragic things in the world. I remember being overwhelmed with the word true. Underneath it all life is somehow . . . good . . . and I was sixteen and at a U2 concert. The Joshua Tree tour. When they started with the song “Where the Streets Have No Name,” I thought I was going to spontaneously combust with joy. This was real. This mattered. Whatever it was, I wanted more.

I had never felt that way before.

I remember surfing Trestles—the legendary beach between Los Angeles and San Diego—for the first time. I paddled out on a gorgeous day, and as I sat there on my board, a couple hundred feet off shore, surrounded by blue and green and sunlight and quiet, a dolphin jumped in the water next to me. I thought my heart was never going to start beating again. Beauty can be crushing at times, can’t it?

I remember when my first son was born and I couldn’t speak. Which for those who know me well was an act of God in itself, perhaps equal to the birth of a child. I will never forget standing there by the bed and hearing the doctor ask me what my son’s name was and being unable to answer. I just couldn’t answer. I tried so hard, but I couldn’t get the words out. I couldn’t get anything out.

What I find fascinating is how many of us have had moments like these when we were overwhelmed with the presence of something or somebody so—and it is hard to find words here—so good, so right, so true, so safe.

Warmth, comfort, terror—but the good kind of terror. Maybe we should say “awe.” You have your own ways of describing these moments.

Some friends of mine just returned from Haiti where they spent a week holding babies in an orphanage. They are still trying to find words.

But it isn’t just extraordinary experiences when this happens, is it? It also happens in the day-to-day, ordinary moments. I was with my friends at one of our favorite restaurants the other night. We had been there at least three hours when I noticed we were the last ones in the place. The employees were starting to stack chairs and vacuum the floors, and we were still talking. I was looking around the table at my wife, whom I just adore; our friend Shauna, who may be one of the best storytellers on the planet; Tom, whom I would take a bullet for; and Tom’s wife, Cecilia, who is one of the most loving, authentic people I have ever met. And I’m sitting in this restaurant looking around the table, soaking it in, totally overwhelmed with the holiness of it all. The sacredness of the moment. That sense that in spite of everything awful I have ever seen, we’re going to make it. I know that sounds like it’s from a greeting card, but I know you know what I’m talking about. Ordinary moments in ordinary settings that all of a sudden become infused with something else. With meaning. Significance. Hope.

The neighbor kids, Malcolm and Isabel, were over a few nights ago with their dad, Tim. My boys got out plastic sleds, and we were trying to see who could sled down the hill in our front yard . . . in September. Cars were slowing down as they drove by, filled with people wondering if these kids were actually sledding on grass. And I was standing in the front yard laughing and pushing the kids down the hill. The trees overhead were just starting to turn color, and Tim was telling a bizarre story about what had happened to him that day, and the kids were laughing, and everything was in its right place.

I assume you have had moments like this when you were caught up in something so much bigger than yourself that you couldn’t even put it in words.

What is it about certain things that ignite something within?

And is that something actually someone?

Whatever those things are that make you feel fully alive and like the universe is ultimately a good place and you are not alone, I need a faith that doesn’t deny these moments but embraces them. I need a spiritual understanding that celebrates these kinds of transcendent moments instead of avoiding them. These moments can’t be tangents. They can’t be experiences that distract from “real” faith. These moments can’t exist on the edges, because they are a part of our faith. A spirituality that is real will have to make sense of them and show us how they fit. They are expressions of what it means to live in God’s world.

Something Bigger

I was in Rwanda a few years ago, and a group of us went hiking in the slums of Kigali with a woman named Pauline. Pauline spends her free time caring for people who are about to die of HIV/AIDS. She agreed to take us to visit one of her friends who had only hours to live. We hiked through this slum for what seemed like miles, and as we got farther in, the shacks became smaller and smaller until all we had to walk on were narrow trails with sewage crisscrossing in streams that ran beside, and sometimes under, the shacks.

Eventually we ended up in a dirt-floored, one-room shack about six-by-six feet. A woman was lying under so many blankets that all we could see was her mouth and eyes. Her name was Jacqueline. Pauline had become her friend and had been visiting her consistently for the past few months. As I knelt down beside her on the floor, I watched Pauline, standing in the corner, weeping. Her friend was going to die soon. What overwhelmed me wasn’t the death or despair or poverty. What overwhelmed me was the compassion. In this dark place Pauline’s love and compassion were simply . . . bigger. More. It is as if the smallest amount of light is infinitely more powerful than massive amounts of dark. The ground was holy.

I’m sure you have had similar experiences. In the strangest of settings, maybe with people you barely know, you become aware that the ground beneath your feet is holy. It is sacred. There’s something else, something more, going on here.

I went to a funeral several years ago and walked into the lobby of the chapel and immediately thought I was the first one there. Then I realized I wasn’t the first one; the husband of the woman who had died was there, standing over the open casket. I walked over to him as he stood over her body, put my arm around him, and didn’t say anything. Just the two of us in this big open room, looking down at his wife’s body. He just kept saying over and over, “She was such a good woman; she was such a good woman.” And we stood there together for a while with my arm around his shoulder, and I listened to him repeat, “She was such a good woman.” The ground was holy.

A young woman in our church gave birth last week to a two-pound baby who died the day after being born. My friend Matt went to the hospital to visit them. When he entered the room, he realized the baby was still there. And the couple was sitting in shock, stunned that this had happened and happened to them. Matt walked in, greeted the couple, and then took the baby in his arms and kissed it.

I wasn’t even there, and I can feel the moment. The pain, the anguish, the sense that something else was going on in that room that we only get glimpses of from time to time.

Because it isn’t just concerts and surfing and the high points, and it isn’t just those beautiful moments in the midst of the everyday and mundane; it is also in the tragic and the gut-wrenching moments when we cannot escape the simple fact that there is way more going on around us than we realize.

Everywhere

Last year some friends asked me to be the pastor for their wedding ceremony. They had been together for a while and decided to make it official and throw a huge weekend party, and they invited me to be a part of it. They said they didn’t want any Jesus or God or Bible or religion to be talked about. But they did want me to make it really spiritual. The bride said it in her own great way, “Rob, do that thing you do. Make it really profound and deep and spiritual!”

So we decided to meet the morning of the wedding to actually plan the ceremony. It was a stunningly beautiful day, and we met on a cliff overlooking a lake in the midst of a thick forest. The wind was blowing the tops of the trees way up above us, the sun was coming through in yellow-and-white beams, and at one point an eagle flew overhead. I kept waiting for someone to cue the orchestra.

Anyway, I asked my friends why they wanted to be married in such a natural, organic setting, since it was four hours from where we all live. They talked about the beauty of nature, its peacefulness, and the way they fell in love in this part of the state. Then the groom said something I will never forget: “Something holds this all together.”

Something holds this all together.

So then I asked them if they thought it was a mistake that they had found each other. And they said, no, they believed they were meant to be together and it was no accident that they met and fell in love. I then asked them, “Do you think whatever it is that holds all this together is the same thing that has brought you two together?” They said yes. Same thing.

So I said that maybe what makes their relationship so meaningful to them is that it’s a picture of something much bigger. The same force that brought them together holds the whole world together. I then asked, “So today, your wedding is about something far more significant than just the two of you becoming husband and wife, isn’t it?”

They then said they would call this glue, this force, “God.”

I tell you all this to point out that my friends already intuitively believe certain things about the universe and the way the world works. All I was doing was asking questions about things they already knew to be true.

I didn’t have to convince them of anything. Now I could go on about the ceremony and the party afterward and the way it ended up being one of the most sacred things I have ever been a part of, but I want to leave you up on that cliff having that conversation.

The ancient Jewish prophets had these same kinds of spiritual experiences that we do, and they had the same sense that something holds it all together. The prophet Isaiah had a vision of heaven, and in his vision angels were shouting, “Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory.”1

The Hebrew word for glory here is kavod, which means weight or significance.

The whole earth is full of the weight and significance of who God is. The prophets were deeply influenced by this understanding that the earth is drenched with the presence of God.

The writer David said, “The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it.”2

He later prayed, “Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?”3

According to the ancient Jewish worldview, God is not somewhere else. God is right here. It is God’s world and God made it and God owns it and God is present everywhere in it. In the book of Genesis, a man named Jacob had a dream in which God spoke to him and reminded him of his destiny and purpose. When Jacob woke up, he said, “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I was not aware of it.”4

God has been there all along, and Jacob is just beginning to realize it. He’s waking up from physical sleep, but he is also waking up from spiritual sleep. I’ve heard people tell stories about something powerful that happened and then at the end of the story say, “And then God showed up!” As if God were somewhere else and then decided to intervene.

But God is always present. We’re the ones who show up.

For the ancient Jew, the world is soaked in the presence of God.

The whole earth is full of the kavod of God.

For the writers of the Bible, this truth is everywhere. It’s here. It’s there. It’s all over.

And not only is truth everywhere, not only is the whole earth filled with the kavod of God, but the writer Paul makes a fascinating observation about people in his letter to the Romans. He says at one point, “Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves.”5 Gentiles is his word for people who don’t follow God, and law is his word for the scriptures. So he says that people who don’t know anything about God are able to do the right thing on a regular basis. Without having any instructions from God or the Bible, these people are still able from time to time to live as God created us to live. For Paul, truth is available to everyone.

Truth is everywhere, and it is available to everyone.

But Paul takes it further, because for him truth is bigger than his religion. Notice what he says in the book of Titus. He is referring to the people who live on the island of Crete when he writes that even one of their own prophets has said, “‘Cretans are always liars, evil brutes, lazy gluttons.’ He has surely told the truth.”6

So Paul quotes one of the Cretan prophets and then affirms that this guy was right in what he said. “This testimony is true.” What the prophet said was true, so Paul quotes him. For Paul, anybody is capable of speaking truth. Anybody, from any perspective, from any religion, from anywhere.

And these words from the book of Titus, the quote from a Cretan prophet, are in the Bible. So the Word of God contains the words of a prophet from Crete.

Paul affirms the truth wherever he finds it.

But he takes it further in the book of Acts. He is speaking at a place called Mars Hill (which would be a great name for a church) and trying to explain to a group of people who believe in hundreds of thousands of gods that there is really only one God who made everything and everybody. At one point he’s talking about how God made us all, and he says to them, “As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’”7 He quotes their own poets. And their poets don’t even believe in the God he’s talking about. They were talking about some other god and how we are all the offspring of that god, and Paul takes their statement and makes it about his God. Amazing.

Paul doesn’t just affirm the truth here; he claims it for himself. He doesn’t care who said it or who they were even saying it about. What they said was true, and so he claims it as his own.

This affirming and claiming of truth wherever you find it is all through the writings of Paul. In 1 Corinthians, he tells his readers, “All things are yours, . . . and you are of Christ, and Christ is of God.”8 He essentially says to them, “It all belongs to God, and Christ is of God, and you are of Christ, so . . . it’s all yours.”

Claim it.

If it is true, if it is beautiful, if it is honorable, if it is right, then claim it. Because it is from God. And you belong to God.

The philosopher Arthur Holmes is known for saying, “All truth is God’s truth.” It is such a great statement, because what other kind of truth could there be?

So as a Christian, I am free to claim the good, the true, the holy, wherever and whenever I find it. I live with the understanding that truth is bigger than any religion and the world is God’s and everything in it.

I was traveling in Turkey awhile back and kept noticing that a large number of the homes there seemed unfinished. Piles of wood and brick beside the house, half a foundation built, construction equipment everywhere. It looked like a lot of homes had been started and then the workers went to lunch . . . for a year. I asked my friend, who has spent a lot of time in Turkey, about it. He said the reason is that the Muslim culture doesn’t allow for financial debt, so people only build with cash. They work for a while, run out of money, save up, keep working, and eventually get the house done, which they own, debt-free. I was struck with how different Western culture would be if we had a similar aversion to debt. How many people do we know who are crippled with financial debt? Having less debt is a better way to live. I affirm this value of the Muslim people of Turkey because it is true, it is good, and it is a better way to live. It doesn’t matter where I find it, who speaks or lives it, or what they believe, I claim and affirm the truth wherever I find it.

All things are mine.

Why would we ever be surprised when truth turns up in strange places?

Logos

Do you know anybody who grew up in a religious environment, maybe even a Christian one, and walked away from faith/church/God when they turned eighteen and went away to college?

Whenever I ask this question in a group of people, almost every hand goes up. Let me suggest why. Imagine what happens when a young woman is raised in a Christian setting but hasn’t been taught that all things are hers and then goes to a university where she’s exposed to all sorts of new ideas and views and perspectives. She takes classes in psychology and anthropology and biology and world history, and her professors are people who have devoted themselves to their particular fields of study. Is it possible that in the course of lecturing on their field of interest, her professors will from time to time say things that are true? Of course. Truth is available to everyone.

But let’s say her professors aren’t Christians, it is not a “Christian” university, and this young woman hasn’t been taught that all things are hers. What if she has been taught that Christianity is the only thing that’s true? What if she has been taught that there is no truth outside the Bible? She’s now faced with this dilemma: believe the truth she’s learning or the Christian faith she was brought up with.

Or we could put her dilemma this way: intellectual honesty or Jesus?

How many times have you seen this? I can’t tell you the number of people in their late teens or early twenties I know, or those I have been told about, who experience truth outside the boundaries of their religion and abandon the whole thing because they think it’s a choice (which is a fatal flaw in thinking we’ll address in a moment). They are experiencing truth in all sorts of new ways, and they need a faith that is big enough to handle it. Their box is getting blown apart, and the faith they were handed doesn’t have room for what they are learning.

But it isn’t a choice, because Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, the life.” If you come across truth in any form, it isn’t outside your faith as a Christian. Your faith just got bigger. To be a Christian is to claim truth wherever you find it.

It’s not truth over here and Jesus over there, as if they were two different things. Where we find one, we find the other. Jesus is quoted in the book of John saying, “I and the Father are one.” If Jesus and God are one, if Jesus shows us what God is really, truly like, and God is truth and all truth is God’s truth, then Jesus takes us into the truth, not away from it. He frees us to embrace whatever is true and good and beautiful wherever we find it.

To live this way then, we have to believe in a big Jesus. For many, Jesus was presented to them as the solution to a problem. In fact, this has been the dominant way of explaining the story of the Bible in Western culture for the past several hundred years. It’s not that it is wrong; it’s just that Jesus is so much more. The presentation often begins with sin and the condition of human beings, separated from God and without hope in the world. God then came up with a way to fix the problem by sending Jesus, who came to the world to give us a way out of the mess we find ourselves in. So if we were to draw a continuum of the story of the Bible, Jesus essentially shows up late in the game.

But the first Christians didn’t see Jesus this way, as if God were somewhere else and then cooked up some way to solve the sin problem at the last minute by getting involved as Jesus. They believed that Jesus was somehow more, that Jesus had actually been present since before creation and had been a part of the story all along.

In the first line of his gospel, John calls Jesus the “Word.” The word Word here in Greek is the word logos, which is where we get the English word logic.

Logic, intelligence, design. The blueprint of creation.

When we speak of these concepts, what we are describing is the way the world is arranged. There is some sort of order under the chaos, and some people seem to have a better handle on it than others. Some understand math, some the human psyche, and others can speak clearly and compellingly about the solar system. When we say someone is intelligent, we are saying they have insight as to how things are put together.

And the Bible keeps insisting that Jesus is how God put things together. The writer Paul said that Jesus is how God holds all things together.9 The Bible points us to a Jesus who is in some mysterious way behind it all.

Jesus is the arrangement. Jesus is the design. Jesus is the intelligence. For a Christian, Jesus’s teachings aren’t to be followed because they are a nice way to live a moral life. They are to be followed because they are the best possible insight into how the world really works. They teach us how things are.

I don’t follow Jesus because I think Christianity is the best religion. I follow Jesus because he leads me into ultimate reality. He teaches me to live in tune with how reality is. When Jesus said, “No one comes to the Father except through me,” he was saying that his way, his words, his life is our connection to how things truly are at the deepest levels of existence.10 For Jesus then, the point of religion is to help us connect with ultimate reality, God. I love the way Paul puts it in the book of Colossians: These religious acts and rituals are shadows of the reality. “The reality . . . is found in Christ.”11

Labels

It is dangerous to label things “Christian.” The word Christian first appears in the Bible as a noun. The first followers of Jesus were called Christians because they had devoted themselves to living the way of the Messiah, who they believed was Jesus.

Noun. A person. A person who follows Jesus. A person living in tune with ultimate reality, God. A way of life centered around a person who lives.

The problem with turning the noun into an adjective and then tacking it onto words is that it can create categories that limit the truth. Here’s what I mean: Something can be labeled “Christian” and not be true or good. I was speaking at a pastors’ conference several years ago, and a well-known pastor was going to be speaking after me. I thought I’d stick around when I was done because I wanted to hear what he had to say. It was shocking. He essentially told the roomful of pastors that if their churches weren’t growing and they weren’t happy all the time and they weren’t healthy and successful, then they probably weren’t “called and chosen by God” to be pastors. I can’t imagine the messages his talk put in the hearts and minds of those pastors who were listening. I couldn’t begin to understand how he made those verses mean that. And it was a Christian pastor talking in a Christian church to other Christian pastors. But it wasn’t true.

This happens in all sorts of areas. It is possible for music to be labeled Christian and be terrible music. It could lack creativity and inspiration. The lyrics could be recycled clichés. That “Christian” band could actually be giving Jesus a bad name because they aren’t a great band. It is possible for a movie to be a “Christian” movie and to be a terrible movie. It may actually desecrate the art form in its quality and storytelling and craft. Just because it is a “Christian” book by a “Christian” author and it was purchased in a “Christian” bookstore doesn’t mean it is all true or good or beautiful. A “Christian” political group puts me in an awkward position: What if I disagree with them? Am I less of a Christian? What if I am convinced the Christian thing to do is to vote the exact opposite?

Christian is a great noun and a poor adjective.

I was playing in a punk band a few years ago, and we were playing clubs and bars and festivals and parties. People would regularly ask us if we were a Christian band when they found out I was a pastor. I always found the question a bit odd. When you meet a plumber, do you ask her if she is a Christian plumber? I realize now why I chafed against the question.

My understanding is that to be Christian is to do whatever it is that you do with great passion and devotion. We throw ourselves into our work because everything is sacred. I love how Paul put it in Colossians: “Whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus.”12 He is teaching people to live as Christians, and then whatever they do will be sacred, holy work. Music already is worship. Music is praise. Music is sacred. Music is good. Creation doesn’t need a label to make it sacred or acceptable or blessed. When God made the world, God called it “good.” Now obviously anything can be corrupted and desecrated and used for purposes other than those which God intends, but making music is sacred enough. Paul put it like this: “For everything God created is good.”13

This is why Jesus wouldn’t have blessed the food before he ate. He blessed God for providing the earth, which provides the food. The food is already blessed, because it comes from the earth, and “the earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it.”14

This is why it is impossible for a Christian to have a secular job. If you follow Jesus and you are doing what you do in his name, then it is no longer secular work; it’s sacred. You are there; God is there. The difference is our awareness.

This truth has significant implications for how churches function.

Somebody asked me the other day why our church doesn’t support the arts because we don’t have dramas and short-act plays in the services. I realized the question, as with almost every question, goes back to creation. I don’t believe something has to be in a church service to be “for God.” As if the only acting that is “for God” is acting in a church service. A church is a community of people who are learning how to be certain kinds of people wherever they find themselves, so they can do whatever it is they do “in the name of the Lord Jesus.” The goal isn’t to bring everyone’s work into the church; the goal is for the church to be these unique kinds of people who are transforming the places they live and work and play because they understand the whole earth is filled with the kavod of God. God isn’t in one building only. Doing things for God happens all the time, everywhere. If you are an actor, the goal isn’t for you to do your work in a church building in a church service. Please go wherever it is in the world that people act and do it well. Really well. Throw yourself into it and give it everything you have.

So the labels ultimately fail, no matter how useful they are from time to time, because the life of Jesus is just that, a life that is lived by people who have oriented their entire lives around being true to Jesus’s teachings.

One of the first things God does in creating the world is separate dark and light. The ancient rabbis say the first thing God does is distinguish between dark and light, and the rest of the scriptures is God teaching people how to distinguish between dark and light. Huge sections of the book of Leviticus are devoted to God teaching people how to discern between life and death, light and dark, clean and unclean. The Ten Commandments are God teaching people how to discern, and how to live well in relationship between right and wrong with their creator. The Bible is filled with stories of God teaching people how to think. How to discern. How to sort and sift and figure out what is true and what isn’t. What is good and what isn’t. What brings life and what brings death.

Being a Christian is about engaging the mind and heart more and more, not shutting them off or letting someone else think for you. The writer Peter urged Christians to be alert.15 Paul tells his listeners in Thessalonica to test everything and hold on to the good.16

The danger of labeling things “Christian” is that it can lead to our blindly consuming things we have been told are safe and acceptable. When we turn off this discernment radar, dangerous things can happen. We have to test everything. I thank God for the many Christians who create and write and film and sing. Anybody anywhere who is doing all they can to point people to the deeper realities of God is doing a beautiful thing. But those writers and artists and thinkers and singers would all tell you to think long and hard about what they are saying and doing and creating. Test it. Probe it.

Do that to this book. Don’t swallow it uncritically. Think about it. Wrestle with it. Just because I’m a Christian and I’m trying to articulate a Christian worldview doesn’t mean I’ve got it nailed. I’m contributing to the discussion. God has spoken, and the rest is commentary, right?

Tour Guides

In the same way that something can be labeled “Christian” and not be true, something can be true and not be labeled Christian. Paul quotes Cretan prophets and Greek poets. He is interested in whether or not what they said is true. Now to be able to quote these prophets and poets, Paul obviously had to read them. And study them. And analyze them. And I’m sure he came across all kinds of things in their writings that he didn’t agree with. So he sifts and sorts and separates the light from the dark and then claims and quotes the parts that are true.

It is as if Paul is a spiritual tour guide and is taking his readers through their world, pointing out the true and the good wherever he sees it. Notice what he does in the book of Acts. He visits the city of Lystra, which hasn’t heard of Jesus or the God Paul believes in, and he tries to figure out how to explain his Christian worldview to them. He tells them, “[God] has not left himself without testimony: He has shown kindness by giving you rain from heaven and crops in their seasons; he provides you with plenty of food and fills your hearts with joy.”17

Paul essentially asks his audience: Have you had enough food? Who do you think it comes from?

Has it rained so your crops could grow? Who do you think did that?

Have you ever laughed? Who do you think made that possible?

Missions then are less about the transportation of God from one place to another and more about the identification of a God who is already there. It is almost as if being a good missionary means having really good eyesight. Or maybe it means teaching people to use their eyes to see things that have always been there; they just didn’t realize it. You see God where others don’t. And then you point him out.

Perhaps we ought to replace the word missionary with tour guide, because we cannot show people something we haven’t seen.

Have you ever heard missionaries say they were going to “take Jesus” to a certain place? What they meant, I assume, was that they had Jesus and they were going to take him to a place like China or India or Chicago where people apparently didn’t have him.

I would ask them if people in China and India and Chicago are eating and laughing and enjoying things and generally being held together? Because if they are, then Jesus, in a way that is difficult to fully articulate, is already present there.

So the issue isn’t so much taking Jesus to people who don’t have him, but going to a place and pointing out to the people there the creative, life-giving God who is already present in their midst.

It is searching for the things they have already affirmed as real and beautiful and true and then telling them who you believe is the source of all that. “I am here to tell you where I think it comes from . . .”

And if you do see yourself carrying God to places, it can be exhausting.

God is really heavy.

Some people actually believe that God is absent from a place until they get there. The problem with this idea is that if God is not there before you get there, then there is no “there” in the first place.

Tour guides are people who see depth and texture and connection where others don’t. That is why the best teachers are masters of the obvious. They see the same things that we do, but they are aware of so much more. And when they point it out, it changes the way we see everything.

In the books of Matthew and Mark, Jesus has dinner with a group of religious leaders and a woman crashes the party, pouring expensive perfume on Jesus’s head. The people Jesus is eating with are mad. This perfume could have been sold and the money used for all sorts of worthy causes. But Jesus defends her. He says, “She has done a beautiful thing to me.”18 Jesus and his dinner companions experience the exact same event, yet they see it from totally different perspectives. Jesus sees another dimension to the events: For him it is a profoundly moving, spiritual, worshipful experience. He points out the beauty of it. The others miss it. He sees it. He is a tour guide. Pointing out the holy and sacred that are present, right here, right now.

Our Story

We claim the beautiful and the good and the true wherever we find it, because all things are ours. Several years ago I was hanging around after one of our church services, and a young woman named Yvette walked up to me and told me she had been listening to me for the last few weeks and hated everything I was saying and totally disagreed with my teachings and the whole time she just wanted to stand up on her chair and yell at me.

I immediately liked her.

She went on to say that she was studying witchcraft and was totally opposed to the things she heard me saying.

I responded, “But you keep coming back.” And then I told her I was thrilled that she kept returning to our gatherings. I hoped that our community would continue to be a safe place for her to question and study and discuss and hear that God loves her exactly as she is.

The Sunday after 9/11 I talked about the need to forgive people when they wrong us. The word forgive in the Greek language actually means “to send away.” People hurt us and harm us, and we end up carrying around these debts they owe us wherever we go. To forgive is to refuse to carry those debts anymore. After the teaching, I walked off the stage and saw Yvette lying facedown on the floor, sobbing. She later told me she had been raped years ago and had been carrying rage and anger around with her that controlled her entire life. She realized she had no hope but to turn all of that bitterness and hurt over to Jesus, who had suffered far more than even her. And while she was at it, she might as well turn her will and her life and everything else over to him.

So I saw her a few months ago, and she handed me a sheet of paper with her email and phone number on it. I asked her what it was for, and she started telling me stories of the women she had been meeting who were witches but wanted to become Christians, and if I met any, to send them to her. And the more she talked, the more excited she got, telling me how she’s “an expert in this.”19

Beautiful, isn’t it? I claim Yvette’s story. And you should too. Her story is our story. And our story is God’s story. So many of us have been conditioned to think of our faith as solely an issue of us and God. But faith is a communal experience. A shared journey. I have heard people say their stories are not exciting. I can only imagine how deeply offended God is with comments like this. Not exciting? If the story is about me, then, yes, it is only exciting to a certain degree. But the point of our stories and our faith journeys is that they are about something much bigger. So now that you have heard a bit of Yvette’s story, claim it. I tell my story and my wife’s story and my friends’ stories—I tell every story. I want others to see how they are all connected. So if you think your faith story is boring, take someone else’s.

All things are yours.

Being a Christian is not cutting yourself off from real life; it is entering into it more fully.

It is not failing to go deeper; it is going deeper than ever.

It is a journey into the heart of how things really are.

What is it that makes you feel alive? What is it that makes your soul soar?

Recognizing God

A man named Moses is tending his sheep in the land of Midian when he comes upon a burning bush. He moves closer to see more and hears the voice of God, speaking to him about his people and their need to be delivered from the land of Egypt. God tells Moses to take off his sandals, for the ground he is standing on is holy.20 Moses has been tending sheep in this region for forty years. How many times has he passed by this spot? How many times has he stood in this exact place? And now God tells him the ground is holy?

Has the ground been holy the whole time and Moses is just becoming aware of it for the first time?

Do you and I walk on holy ground all the time, but we are moving so fast and returning so many calls and writing so many emails and having such long lists to get done that we miss it?

Remember Jacob’s words after his dream?

“God is in this place, and I wasn’t aware of it.”

Let’s go back to the cliff, planning a wedding with my friends. When they resonate with the peace and harmony of unspoiled nature, I believe God made it unspoiled by speaking it into existence. And Jesus is the life force that makes it possible. So in the deepest sense we can comprehend, my friends are resonating with Jesus, whether they acknowledge it or not. And when they look into each other’s eyes and there is love there—real, passionate love, the kind that would lay down its life for another—I believe that love is made possible by God in Jesus. Their laying down their lives is a picture of God doing the same for every single human being in Jesus, whether we affirm it or not. Jesus was up on that cliff with us that day. It is not that God is over here and real life is over there. If it is real, then it’s showing us God.

It is not that passion and love and exhilaration are in one place and Jesus is somewhere else.

Wherever you find those, you are finding God.

In affirming and celebrating all that they did that day on the cliff, my friends are closer to Jesus than they could ever imagine.