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Meeting Temptation

“The choice between God and every other god is a real choice.  Both make promises, both demand loyalty.  It is possible to live by both.  If there were no real alternative to God, all [humanity] would choose [God].  Indeed, God is the more difficult choice to justify in terms of provable results.

“The chief difficulty is that God demands of us that we live by faith:  faith in [God], [God's] sovereignty over the future, [God's] sufficiency for the present; while, on the other hand, the various other gods whom we can serve appeal to us in terms of the things which we can see and the forces which we can calculate.  The choice between the life of faith and the life of sight is a choice between a God whom only faith can apprehend and gods whom one has only to see to understand.”

-DT Niles in The Bible Through Asian Eyes

 

Making Peace with the Psalmists

In a conversation with my daughter last night, I have come to the awareness that we know little what to do with our emotions as those who follow Christ.  Of course, she is 13 and I do expect a little (OK…a lot) of irrationality, she also voiced an ideology that I think runs rampant among us.  Even if we don’t say it out loud, we – in the depths of our souls – believe it.

The conversation (translation::argument) began when I told both of my kids the time of night had come to read.  She complained of “not having anything to read” (translation::I don’t want to) to which I suggested she read a portion of the Scriptures.  This began a whining session full of thirteen year old rebuttal as to why she did not want to do that.  She didn’t like the fact that I had TOLD her to…it didn’t feel authentic.  She doesn’t like to read her Bible very much…and isn’t that just being a hypocrite toward God when she does?  She didn’t FEEL like it…and since God knows her heart anyway, it wouldn’t “count”!  (Please don’t judge her harshly….she is a great kid and honestly, I am sure I have thought many of those things, but just don’t have enough honesty to say them out loud.)

After the snow flurry of emotion subsided a little, I tried to logically reason with her.  Bad mistake!!  I just go more of the same rhetoric from before.  Then God opened my eyes and let me catch a glimpse into what (perhaps) He sees.  What I saw was a beautiful, young woman on the precipice of a new place in her spiritual formation (in being formed by His story).  Up to this point (and still all around her) she had received the message that God is awesome, and fun, and amazing, and He talks to you, and He makes you feel good, and answers your prayers and when we are full of good emotion we worship Him…..

Now, many of those things are true, but when that is how we view God, we begin to love God for what He gives us – the fun, emotion, good feelings, answered prayer, etc.  At that place in our spiritual formation, we love God for pleasure’s sake.  And I don’t think that is inherently bad.  When we are new believers (or young in our faith), God feeds us just like a mother nurses her baby.  I explained to her that just like when an infant cries, her mother responds to her with gentle caresses, something to eat, taking care of her every need…so God does that in our early life with Him.  He does this because He knows this moves the soul toward spiritual things because of the pleasure we get from them.  It moves us into the process of being formed by His story, but then something switches inside us.  Sure, we know the spiritual pleasures are given to us from God, but the pleasures become the goal of what we think our relationship with God is all about.

Both my thirteen year old and I laughed at the idea that she would still be breastfed at her age…in fact, she wrinkled her face up and used the term “That’s gross!!”  We talked about all the other food she now enjoyed but only because she had to give up the first infant pleasure.  We also talked about all the food she doesn’t enjoy, but knows she needs to eat in order to stay healthy.  I reminded her that God loves us so much that He will not leave us to get caught in our pleasure seeking faith, but brings about a discontentedness in order to move us away from loving Him for pleasure’s sake.  (What a great risk on His part!)

Instead, it feels as though He begins to pull away.  He doesn’t give the feelings as much any more, nor does it seem like He answers prayer like He once did.  What was once fun and happy-slappy-clappy, becomes boring, dull and dry.  And in it all, He works to grow our soul to abandon loving Him for pleasure’s sake, and learn to love Him for love’s sake.  This is a love based on a real relationship between two persons (with all the good, bad and ugly) and involves a letting go of the key barometer being pleasurable feelings.  I explained that it is like a mom who takes care of her baby.  That baby does not always give her pleasure, and in fact, many times brings the absolute opposite of it, but she loves that baby anyway because she CHOOSES to.

We went on to talk about how it is not “being a hypocrite” or being “inauthentic” to read our Bible, pray or worship when we don’t feel like it.  It is actually entering the next place in the formation process; it is choosing God even when the feelings (pleasures) aren’t there.

And then I was reminded of one of my favorite books in the Bible…the book of Psalms.  The poetry and imagery are often as raw as that discussion with my thirteen year old.  The feelings abound…God is questioned…He is accused of having left and taking His pleasures with Him.  But each psalmist comes back to a solitary conviction….despite the feelings (which God is big enough to handle, by the way!), it is always good and right to worship God for Who He is and to pursue Him for love’s sake.

That is the journey my thirteen year old is on….she must, at some point, make peace with the psalmists.

 

Another Idea for Lent…and Kids

Just wrote this post yesterday on my business blog…what our family will be practicing for Lent.  It is an exercise in thanksgiving….inspired by a book I am currently reading.

May we all learn to see the wonder before us and give thanks for the small gifts that God gives!!

 

 

 

Epiphany

image and words copyright Tara Malouf::2010

 

Christmas

Merry Christmas to all!!  May we all celebrate the irrationality of the season and allow the bright and wild blossoms of love to unfurl within us!

 

Doubt

Image by Tara Malouf::copyright 2010

 

Cleaning Up

Ever noticed how when it comes to taking pictures, we like to clean up, wear our best and look amazing?  I have always laughed with my clients (I’m a professional photographer) that the family portrait is a depiction of about 30 seconds out of our 365 days in a year!  A true family picture would be a little rougher on the edges – a shirt untucked, a dirty faced kid, at least two people looking off doing their own thing and that one slightly crazy family member that we are never sure what he will do!

While I enjoy the “cleaned up Christmas greetings” I receive in the mail, I am worried we sometimes do that to the picture of the birth of our Savior too.

See…one of the things my family does during Advent is to go back to the beginning – to Genesis – and read the stories over again.  We read of a Creator God, a Redeeming God, a Delivering God and we read the true, unedited and NOT cleaned up escapades of humanity.  In fact as we read the account of Abraham, Lot and Sodom and Gomorrah the other day, I was struck by the fact that these are not “children’s stories”.  (Try reading those accounts with your kids straight from the Scriptures and see what sort of questions you have to field!!)  But the cool thing is…this is the picture God has given us.  And He is not embarrassed!!  Abraham is a mess sometimes and he is considered the “father of faith”.  I find that comforting!

During the season leading up to Christmas, we also hear lots of songs that I think have skewed our thinking.  “Silent Night”??   While it is a lovely son, all I can say is “I think not”!  I have delivered two children and there was not silence, nor calmness, nor lack of a mess.  I looked anything but angelic after the process and the red, pruny babies I held really did cry!!  I think of Mary – in a barn, exhausted, trying to figure out how to nurse her Son, puffy-faced from the water she was retaining and from the pushing during delivery.  Of course, she is amazed and staring sweetly at this Newborn but I imagine she is also super hungry, shivering and – had she known what it was – would have loved a hot shower at this point in the journey!  Of course, add to all this the scandal of being pregnant before she was married and trying to come up with a insane story of how angels talked to her and this baby was somehow God’s Son….well, I all I can say is I think we have the “slightly crazy” member of the family picture in place!

And then there are nativity sets…Now I love a good nativity scene as much as the next person but it has always struck me as a little too “cleaned up” for reality.  Maybe we should all go get a little wet and moldy grass to put down under the creche (or maybe a piece of poop to add a little realistic, pungent aroma?). The shepherds probably looked far less like the creator of my nativity imagined and more like the homeless guys I pass as I drive out of Costco.  And then there are those strange “Magi” guys.  True, they may not have arrived that night, but since most nativity set include them, I will too.   These men were some mix of kings AND astrologers!!  They sought the signs in the skies and though astrology is clearly forbidden in the Old Testament, God still invites these men into the picture through a language they understood.  Once again….God is not embarrassed of the people in the picture nor asks them to “clean up”.

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To all this I say, please keep sending the lovely Christmas card greetings, but let’s not try to clean up the Christmas story too much.  It was real, it was human, it included people we would have never picked to be in a family picture.  But they are there….and God is not embarrassed by their presence.

 

Live in Expectation

I wrote a piece for what is rolling around in my soul for this Advent season – about the difference between living in illusion and living in expectation.  (You can find the post here on Christine Sine’s blog.)  And as is often the case after I write something, I am all the more challenged with the thoughts.

Perhaps my Advent journey this year is more about “naming the illusions” – to borrow a phrase from Rohr – that I have lived in for so long.  It is about no longer turning inward and creating my own false story, but rather turning outward to God and waiting for His true story to unfold.  Just last night I was struggling with a deep sense of being inadequate (for anything in my life) and I had to name it as an illusion.  Not that I have it all figured out now, but the simple first act of naming an illusion loosens its grip on my soul.  To see it as false reminds me that God has a better (more true) story for me.  But it is hard work with the Spirit nonetheless.

When I was little, we used to go to my grandparents house all summer long.  They lived on a lake and the days were spent swimming, boating, laughing and playing (for me at least!).  I am so grateful their house has been passed down and remains in the family!  Now my kids get to go there and have some of the same experiences I had as a child.  However, a few years ago as we walked on the lawn of the front yard, I began to find pieces of broken glass – a lot of them!  Realizing that this wasn’t just one broken bottle, but the yard was filled with shards of broken glass, we went to work to dig them out of the ground.  I obviously didn’t want a dangerous sharp edge lurking just below the surface of the earth to pierce anyone’s feet.  We picked up as many pieces as we could and then hired a guy with some machine to come in and dig up the rest.

That’s what I feel like is going on in my heart during this Advent season.  Illusions are being exposed and the danger they pose to me and others means they must be addressed.  I just wish there weren’t so many of them!!

 

2010 Advent Calendar Page

Wow!!  The year has flown by and here we are standing on the threshold of a new Christian year!    It has been a full (and sometimes tough) year for me…and because of that, there will not be a printed version of  the StoryFormed Calendar this year.   Printing costs are up and I felt like my creativity was diminished this year.   However, back in the summertime, on a road trip, I had a vision for what I wanted the Advent page of the calendar to be (if we would have printed one).  Well…I had a flurry of creativity the other day and decided to design it.

I want to give the Advent page as a gift to anyone  wanting to shape life around God’s story.  You may download the PDF below and print it up yourself (it is an 11×17) at a local printer, or use the “smaller pdf” if you just want to see it on your own personal electronic media.  And tell anyone else who might be interested….just remember, the picture IS copyrighted and not to be sold or used in print or electronic media – other than personally – without giving credit to the author (Tara Malouf/Red Thread Photo).

The door of Advent is opening to us…let us live in expectation of what God wants to do in this new year!!

Advent_2010

Advent_2010_smaller

**All images copyrighted 2010 :: RedThreadPhoto.com