A Lesson (Overheard)

Many years ago I attended a conference of a campus ministry. The event was several days long encompassing worship, teaching, prayer, and service. The last night of the conference (which happened to be New Year’s Eve) was to feature a concert with several nationally-known bands. The venue was packed with 3000 college students having just experienced a day of teaching and worship. The headlining band was Switchfoot, who, at the time had just broken out into the “secular” market with their album The Beautiful Letdown. The opening act, on the other hand, was a folk artist whose style contrasted greatly with Switchfoot’s southern California rock stylings. As the folk artist began her set, many of the attendees made their way toward the exits preferring to return when the main act arrived.

After the folk artist had finished her performance, the stage was reset, the drum kits and guitars brought in. Gradually the people, too, returned, taking their seats in anticipation of Jon Foreman and Co. I had taken for myself one of the quickly abandoned seats and now sat in the second row from the front.

The seats filled in around me and I was able to overhear the conversation of my neighbor. In reality, everybody was able to hear their comments for they had to shout to be heard over the pre-show playlist. Their exchange went something to the effect of: “That [folk artist’s name] was horrible. It was just her and a guitar. Yeah, she just sucked.”

I’ll be honest, I was somewhat ashamed by their comments but I was even more ashamed when I looked directly ahead of me in the first row and saw the folk musician sitting in for Switchfoot’s set pretending not to hear the criticism coming from directly behind her.

The Biblical author James tells us that our words are “a restless evil and full of deadly poison. With it [the tongue] we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse men who have been made in the likeness of God. From the same mouth come both blessing and cursing. My brothers, these things ought not to be this way.”

We live in an age of citizen journalism and personal expression unprecedented in all of human history. We all have a platform whether it is our circle of friends, Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. And that’s a good thing. It encourages government accountability. It gives voice to the voiceless. It allows the disenfranchised and lonely to find a people to identify with. Truly innumerable good flows from our technological advances. Yet… yet we often use our voice, our platforms to tear down, to criticize, to bludgeon our enemies rather than love them

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Can a fountain send out both fresh and bitter water? James asks.

Our voices; our platforms give us the opportunity to speak life and hope into the world and into the lives of our circle of influence. We must wield well this piercing weapon of our words. Truth and honesty we must speak, but always they should be tempered with the additives of grace and love. Let us speak well; speak richly with words that build up; words that bring life.

Especially with an election approaching…

Beginnings and Endings

I’ve been thinking of life today as more fluid with less defined beginnings and endings yet pressed on toward the goal of full salvation. My best, most Christ-like moments are neither my beginning nor the end of my story. My most loathsome sins are neither the conclusion nor the start. Beyond conception and death (though that too, is not final) there are no true beginnings or endings here on earth. Our initial salvation began not with our momentary assent but with God’s prevenient grace which sought us and drew us imperceptibly through the peaks and valleys of our lives. Even our conversions are not truly complete until we see Christ face to face. Instead, they are a halting, staggering ascent on the best days, a dreadfully regretful decline on our worst. Still, this is (thankfully) not the end of us; the end of our story. We are drawn along always, on our best days and our worst by the thread of His grace which is offered in spite of our sin and regardless of our victories.

We tend to view life as a novel with a beginning, middle, and a conclusion because it is neat, orderly, and makes a simple testimony for church services. In doing so, we both rob the Lord of the glory He would otherwise receive for the pardoning grace which covers ALL of our faltering steps and only serves to confuse the sinners (that is, all of us) when we compare such sanitized repentance fables with our own messy, incomplete, yet grace-filled biographies.

My true life is not a solid ascent. It is a story of transcendent peaks, pathetic falls, and seemingly mindless slogs. Yet I am drawn on, ever on, by the pursuit of the one whose pardon covers it all; the one whose beauty pulls me back from the brink a thousand times (and a thousand more); and for whom even a passing glance or a solitary word is enough to devote my entire existence to. So I go on, some days running, some days erring, some days pulled, toward the promise of my full inheritance by His limitless grace.