When Peter Pan had to Grow Up: On Favre vs. The Packers

I was an idealist.

When Brett Lorenzo Favre retired, I deemed that my childhood had officially ended.  It was that moment where the man who I had watched quarterback my beloved Green Bay Packers for so many years had rode off into the sunset through a tear-filled press conference that I watched on my laptop with two other grown men who were at the onset of tears as well.

“What a perfect ending to a perfect career,” I thought. I can cherish this in peace.

What has ensued since has been the best real live enactment of “bizzaro world” from Seinfeld that anyone could ever conjure on this planet.  Favre unretires. Drama. Packers say they don’t want him. Drama. Favre demands to be traded. Drama. Packers offer $20 million to be a spokesperson. Drama. Favre gets traded to the anthesis of Green Bay – New York – with a specific stipulation that the Jets would forfeit their first round draft picks for the next three years if they flip Favre to the arch nemesis Vikings.

Drama. Favre plays, almost reaches the playoffs, then retires. Again.

Drama. Favre hints at coming back to – the VIKINGS! He’s in, he’s out, he says no.

Wait – No! With a week of training camp left to play, Favre says he’s in. And in a white bronco, he speeds from the Minneapolis Airport to training camp and then leads his team to a 3-0 start with an unbelievable come-from-behind victory.

Seriously folks – this isn’t scripted.  Just listen to the talking heads for a while.

The most read piece on my blog is what I wrote about Favre a year and a half ago. It was everything I loved about growing up watching #4 play his heart out. I’d been waiting to write it for years. I had a storehouse of memories that I was anticipating to get out of my head and into print as to how a quarterback shaped a boy, who became a man, and who still picks up a football and thinks he can be like Brett.

But that wasn’t the way it was to be. And I can’t help but think how life mirrors what we’ve seen with the Favre drama.

As much as I pulled all the lessons out of Favre’s life, I can’t help but think how the last 18 months have illustrated the dark side as well. And ironically, in the last couple of years, I’ve experienced more of the dark side of life than I’ve ever seen before. When experiencing great disappointment in life in the past, there was always #4 to watch at one point in time to see that life wasn’t going to, as U2 sung in Acrobat, “let the bastards grind you down.” (My second favorite U2 song).  Brett might not have won every game, but he always went down fighting. He wouldn’t let the bastards grind him down.

But for the Packers’ faithful, this week it becomes real. Favre isn’t in some bizarro world. We’re the bastards grinding him down now. It’s real.  And the one constant we would watch to remember to just keep going…is now the opponent. He’s the enemy.

And that goes against every bone in my body. I’ll be cheering against Brett Favre.

I can’t believe I just wrote that.

Are there any happy endings anymore?

The longer I live, the harder it is to be an idealist.  I see so few happy endings. The more experience I get in all areas of life, the more I see how sin has really stained the world. It’s just not as it should be. Ministry teaches you that more than ever. Whoever thought people in ministry are sheltered needs a reality check – if you do your job right, you’ll encounter sin as you’ve never seen it before – even in the holiest of people.

I’ve seen several friends who have abandoned happily ever after to the good ol’ American, “Yankee Pragmatism” where we settle for good ideas to be partially realized and partially fulfilled, and spin the partial failure into success. It’s because our image-conscious society wants winners, and if you don’t win you aren’t worth talking about. If you can’t sum it up in a 10 word pithy statement, it’s not worth saying now, is it?

Question: If all things are being made new, then why is Favre wearing a Vikings uniform?

Question: If all things are being made new, why do we feel pain and brokenness more deeply once we’ve begun following Jesus.

However overly dramatic this might be, the whole bit of this week’s drama for Favre vs. the Packers reminds me of one thing: The world isn’t as it should be.  Peter Pan should never have had to grow up.

Getting naked with the stakes never higher.

How’s that for a title?

News flash – the entry is just slightly more boring than the title…I’m just prepping to preach at my church this Sunday.

I’m procrastinating by blogging.

Can you relate?

I speak in front of students pretty regularly, but it is different speaking in front of my church. Students I can be a little more off the cuff and informal.

Not at my church.

It was nearly 20 months ago when I last preached at my church. The experience was memorable to say the least.

Imagine the leader and figure that meant the most to a church for 26 years leaving the congregation after things didn’t end as everyone dreamed. The one person who was the constant; the person who was there for baptisms, confirmations, weddings, funerals, and most every Sunday preaching from the pulpit.

Imagine the departure – the final sermon, the tears, the good-byes, the hugs, the kind words.

Now imagine being the guy preaching the next week after he leaves.

I was that guy.

Big shoes to fill? That’s an understatement.

I chose to bring my students with me to share about our experience living in a garbage village in Cairo, and how God met us in the midst of what many would consider the one of the most hopeless places on earth.

Hope was what we needed that day. I tried my best to share hope through the gospel that rainy November day. With tears, the pastors wife greeted me afterwards and thanked me. Even if it was just for her, it was a good day.

This week, 20 months later, I find myself in a very different place in the life of my church. I’m an elder. I’m helping search for our new pastor. I’m having conversations about diversity and missional church and everywhere I go I feel like something is on the brink of exploding – either as an outpouring of love or an imploding of frustration.

They don’t write dramas this good on TV. Except LOST. And 24.

(P.S. I am Jack Bauer)

Twenty months ago, I was on the fringe of the church. Now I feel like I’m in the center of a tornado. Now I’m about to speak about it.

Whenever a preacher steps up to the pulpit, the stakes are high. One of my favorite authors, Frederick Beuchner, says it this way:

So the sermon hymn comes to a close with a somewhat unsteady amen, and the organist gestures the choir to sit down. Fresh from breakfast with his wife and children and a quick runthrough of the Sunday papers, the preacher climbs the steps to his pulpit with his sermon in his hand. He hikes his black robe up at the knee so he will not trip over it on his way up. His mouth is a little dray. He has cut himself shaving. He feels as if he has swallowed an anchor. If it weren’t for the honor of the thing, he would just as soon be somewhere else.

In the front pews the old ladies turn up their hearing aids, and a young lady slips her six year old a Lifesaver and a Magic Marker. A college sophomore home for vacation, who is there because he was dragged there, slumps forward with his chin in his hand. The vice-president  of a bank who twice that week seriously contemplated suicide places his hymnal in the rack. A pregnant girl feels the life stir inside her. A high-school math teacher, who for twenty years has managed to to keep his homosexuality a secret for the most part even himself, creases his order of service down the center with his thumbnail and tucks it under his knee…

…and Henry Ward Beecher is there. It is a busman’s holiday for him. The vestry has urged him to take a week off for a badly needed rest, and he has come to hear how someone else does it for a change. It is not that he doesn’t love his wife, but just that, pushing sixty, he has been caught preposterously off-guard by someone who lets him open his heart to her, someone willing in her beauty to hear out the old spell binder, who as a minister has never had anybody much to minister to him…

…The preacher pulls the little cord that turns on the lectern light and deals out his note cards like a river boat gambler. The stakes have never been higher.

I wonder sometimes why in the world anyone would ever have the audacity to step into a pulpit and preach. Seriously.  I talked with one of my professors in this, and here’s how he described preaching:

“Next to love-making with one’s spouse, preaching is the most self-revealing activity you do.  It leaves you naked.”

Doesn’t that sound exciting?  Getting naked with the stakes never higher.

Why do I do this again?

The Enigma of Failure: Jim Collins, How the Mighty Fall – 1

I enjoy business books.

Even though I’ve been in campus ministry and out of the for profit sector for six years now, I still think much about my time spent at Intergrated Project Management Company as hugely formative, and realized the power a great company can have on both individuals and communities. The Wall Street Journal seems to agree as well, naming IPM as one of the top 15 small workplaces in the country last year.

It was there when I was first introduced to Jim Collins, and his two business classics: Built to Last, a book primarily based on how enduring companies are built, and Good to Great, a response born out of a question from Collins’ friend who didn’t know how to take his good company and help it become great.  Jim Collins has spent a lot of time talking about success.

Until now.  In How the Mighty Fall, Collins turns to the dark side and analyzes how those companies that had all the advantages fell from the top.  And it isn’t pretty – it’s like analyzing a train wreck.

How the Mighty Fall is going to be criticized pretty heavily by several folks. People will likely talk about how it doesn’t have the same rigor as the other books, and they may be right.  They’ll probably say that Collins had an idea and sought to prooftext under the guise of research in order to align with his works in Good to Great and Built to Last.

Whatever.  They may be right, but I think there is something else that is deeper than people’s criticism that underlies their motivation: America has an aversion to failure.

We are scared of it.  We love winners – when the US Olympic Basketball Team lost for the first time, which was inevitable, the players felt like they let the country down.

How the Mighty Fall is an analysis of tragedy. Perhaps it’s just the dark side of me, but I kinda like looking and analyzing failure.  I remember my freshman year of college having dinner with one of the lead engineers in the Challenger Shuttle explosion, and hearing his seething anger combined with intense sorrow over what had happened. It shook him to the core. It shook me, a 17 year old freshman, in a way that I’m still not sure if I understand.

Even (and especially) in my own life, I’ve learned more from my failures than any of my successes. An old high school friend that I’d lost track of long ago facebook messaged me and asked me about being successful. I laughed out loud when I read the message.

I think several people can look at me on the outside and think I’m successful – and I’d be lying if I didn’t say I wanted to be considered successful. But I truly think I’ve failed more than I’ve succeeded. I hide failure well – but I can point to at least one epic fail I’ve had in school, in business, in ministry, in relationships, in family, in church, etc.

It’s so much so that when I speak openly about failure, people have this strong need to correct me that I didn’t fail because I learned from it. That’s true – but it’s like saying that you prefer to buy a pre-owned car rather than a used car.  A subtle change in terminology doesn’t change the fact that someone else used the car before you. Similarly, a subtle change in terminology doesn’t change the fact that I really screwed up.

Failure used to scare me – a lot. I still don’t like it, but more than ever I believe failure has been the genesis of my growth. Why? To quote Rich Lamb, “Grace is only possible past the limits of our success.”  And our limits of success are discovered only through experience. Experiencing failure. We can only experience epic grace when we’ve epically failed – or, as Jesus said, “she has loved much because she has been forgiven much.”

I only really understand grace through entering failure.

The biblical characters who haunt me most are Saul (the tragic Old Testament King) and Judas (the disciple who betrayed Jesus). Both were filled with the presence of God, either being filled with the Holy Spirit or being with Jesus. Why did they fail? They were more preoccupied with the perception of others view of their success and managing their images than true obedience to what God called them.

I’m going to be looking at each of Jim Collins stages of destruction of a company – both looking at what Collins says regarding business, but apply it to other areas – in ministry, and in our own lives with God.

From How the Mighty Fall, by Jim Collins

Why? Because the exposing the dark side for what it truly is allows for us to strip it of it’s power. Evil that presents itself clearly as evil is so easy to detect. We watch films and hear the darker musical score and know evil’s coming. Life isn’t the movies – real evil doesn’t have a soundtrack.

The power of evil comes through masquerading as goodness. The best lies aren’t the bold face ones – it’s subtle deceit that twists the truth and leaves us in a place that we never wanted to be, wondering how we got there.

We are afraid of failure because we’re afraid of being exposed – that what we be seen for what we really are.  Shame and failure are linked. Fear of failure is a lie that keeps us from really knowing that we can be loved unconditionally. Exposing failure for what it is allows us to see more than we could ever dream – but it requires a rigorous assessment of what’s really there without dressing it up.

So, let the failure stripshow begin.

Working Together: The Whole Word to the Whole Campus

This was completed several months ago, but it was recently released by 2100 Productions, InterVarsity’s Multimedia company (who are simply awesome).

done

This is part of a training cirriculum we are using with students across the country in helping building authentically multiethnic ministries in colleges and universities across the country.

Enjoy!

What’s wrong with the world? I am.

I thought that as I aged I would become more wise and understanding of how to deal with evil in the world.  There are times when I wish I was more tolerant of evil for my own sanity.  Case in point – an older gentleman at my church decided to tell a university student to stop talking on his cell phone in a very curt and rude manner today at the worship service at my church.  Me? Let it go?

No way.

I tracked him down, and sternly told him that was not acceptable behavior (all while quivering in anger and fear at confronting someone at least thirty years my senior as his “elder”) for becoming a welcoming community.

Wouldn’t it just be easier if I could accept evil? Why don’t I just let it go and make my life easier?

G. K. Chesterton, when asked to write an essay by The Times of London on the subject, “What’s wrong with the world?”

Chesterton gave this simple response.

Dear London Times,

I am.

Sincerely Yours,

G. K. Chesterton

As much as I and other folks like Bono in today’s New York Times still expound on the problem of evil, and the church’s lack of response, the problem will never be addressed in full until we come to understand in our minds, hearts, hands, guts, and soul that the problem lies first and foremost within us.  Bono lauds Buffet and Gates – but they give out of their abundance, not sacrificially.  What if Buffet and Gates chose to give sacrificially in solidarity with those who they seek to serve – like the woman who gave her two copper coins?

The values that I and other staff have had for becoming agents of justice and righteousness in the world have infected many of our students.  One of the blessings that I have seen over the years is that many of my students have been involved in the global engagement summit at Northwestern University – a way they can engage the campus, partner with those who are far from God in engaging God’s purposes.

Sometimes I wonder if what we are seeing is an authentic revival of the activism we saw in my parent’s generation in the 1960’s that could truly change the world.

At others I cynically wonder if it’s just youthful optimistic high from an overdose on the self-esteem movement that will crash at the experience of real evil – the kind that etches it’s way into your mind and heart like a tattoo that can never be removed.  Students who I have taken among the poorest of the poor suffer often suffer from depression because the despair they encounter is contageous.

Sometimes I wonder if they will cope in the same way we saw those 60’s Hippie’s that today drive the SUV’s, built the big homes, ran businesses like Enron and Arthur Andersen, and now blame others for our planet’s problems.

Those are the days when I want to throw in the towel, and wonder if it is really worth it…am I just enabling a faith that is a “college thing” that will die once students hit the real world and the hot idealism is tempered.

This is why I need hope as much as any – for giving up means I’m just as much a part of the problem.

Today was especially impactful – when the liturgy of my church gives words when I have only groans.

O Risen Christ, you asked for my hands, that you might use them for your purpose.  I gave them for a moment, then withdrew them, for the work was hard.

You asked for my mouth to speak out against in justice. I gave you a whisper that I might not be accused.

You asked for my eyes to see the pain of poverty.  I closed them, for I did not want to see.

You asked for my life, that you might work through me.  I gave a small part, that I might not get too involved.

Lord, forgive my calculated efforts to serve you – only when it is convenient for me to do so, only in those places where it is safe to do so, and only with those who make it easy to do so.  Father, forgive me, renew me, send me out as a usable instrument, that I might take seriously the meaning of your cross.

Then later we sang from Christ is Alive:

“In every insult, rift, and war, where color, scorn, or wealth divide,

Christ suffers still, yet loves the more, and lives, where even hope has died.

Christ is alive, and comes to bring good news to this and every age,

Till earth and sky and ocean ring with joy, with justice, love, and praise.”

The hope of Easter is that Christ is alive.  Hope is only needed when it seems absent, and that the hope of all was killed made hope disappear.  But the resurrection proves that death doesn’t win in the end and that my job is just to hold on, be faithful, and not give up.  The setbacks of today will be pushed forward with or without me,  just as he will make all things right in the end and judge justly. Or as Fydor Dostoyevsky says in The Brothers Karamazov,

“I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, of all the blood that they’ve shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened.”

Saturday: Waiting

Last night was much about waiting in the Emergency Room for a diagnosis of my friend – it was very difficult.  But one of the things we did to pass the time was talk about when he lived in Israel and experiencing Easter there.

The big thing in Jerusalem is not Good Friday, nor is it Easter Sunday. It’s Holy Saturday.

Holy what?

Exactly – here in the west we don’t celebrate Holy Saturday…because what would you do on this day? Nothing. Jesus didn’t die, nor did he rise again.

Which is exactly what those in Jerusalem are doing (or did) right now.  They gather together and await the flame to be passed from person to person to person and then walk out together.  It’s their belief that the Spirit came on this day and arose Jesus from the dead on Sunday.  The fire represents the Spirit.

But really, I think this day typifies what it means to be a Christian.  Philip Yancey, one of the most influential authors in my life, ends his book, The Jesus I Never Knew, with this profound truth:

The other two days have earned names on the church calendar: Good Friday and Easter Sunday. Yet in areal sense we live on Saturday, the day with no name. What the disciples experienced in small scale – three days, in grief over one man who had died on the cross – we now live through on cosmic scale. Human history grinds on, between the time of promise and fulfillment.  Can we trust that God can make something holy and beautiful out of a world that includes Bosnia and Rwanda, and inner-city ghettos and jammed prisons in the richest nation on earth? It’s Saturday on planet Earth; will Sunday ever come?

That dark, Golgothan Friday can only be called Good because of what happened on Easter Sunday, a day which gives a tantalizing clue to the riddle of the universe. Easter opened up a crack in a universe winding down toward entropy and decay, sealing the promise that someday God will enlarge the miracle of Easter to cosmic scale.

It’s a good thing to remember in the cosmic drama, we live out our days on Saturday, the in-between day with no name. I know a woman whose grandmother lies buried under 150-year-ld live oak trees in the cemetery of an Episcopal church in rural Louisiana.  In accordance with the grandmother’s instructions, only one word is carved on the tombstone: “Waiting.”

Waiting is hard for me, but I’m learning. I’m learning to believe in hope, and to perservere that hope is certain and Resurrection Sunday is comin’.  That the not-yet of the Kingdom will be now, and that someday all sad things will be made untrue.

I’m waiting.

Eavesdropping on Angels: Merry Christmas from a different perspective

Merry Christmas from the Bilhorns

From J. B. Phillips – a fictional conversation between two angels:

“Do you mean that our great and glorious Prince.went down in Person to visit this fifth-rate little ball?  Why should he do such a thing like that?” The little angel’s face wrinkled in disgust.  “Do you mean to tell me,” he said, “that he stooped so low as to become one of those creeping, crawling creatures of that floating ball?”

“I do, and I don’t think he would like you to call them ‘creeping, crawling creatures’ in that tone of voice.  For, strange as it may seem to us, He loves them.  He went down to visit them to lift them up to become like Him.”

The little angel looked blank.  Such a thought was almost beyond his comprehension.

Scars: Signs of Pain, Signs of Healing

I recently had surgery to remove a small lump from my chin.  At first I thought it was a zit, then I realized it wasn’t and thought it would go away on it’s own.

I was sitting among a group of friends on Sunday after church, and we decided to spend some time sharing the needs in our life and praying for each other.  One man shared that ha friend at work had a lump on her neck and he told her that she should get it checked out with a doctor.

She did.  Two weeks later she died.

So I decided to call the doctor on Monday.  The doctor thought it was fine.  I called a dermatologist, just to be sure.

What was a “small lump” ended up being the size of a quarter and the incision took four stitches to heal.  So I have a scar on my beardline right now – I’m trying some scar cream to see if it actually reduces the scar.

I rub Mederma on the incision three times a day.  I wonder if it actually works.  But each time I rub it on, I think about other scars in my life – not just where my body has been stitched up, but where I have scars in my heart, soul, and mind.

Is there a cream that reduces those scars, too?

I’ve always loved Jesus’ disciple Thomas in John’s gospel – often known as “doubting Thomas.”  I’ve struggled with faith and doubt throughout my life – it’s not a secret to those who know me well.  Thomas has been a companion in my doubt.  And I don’t think his doubt was primarily intellectual – it was because he was disappointed and let down.  He was ready to go with Jesus to die with him.  His doubt would only be subsided when he put his hands in the holes in Jesus’ hand and side to feel hope once again embodied as really real.

Which to me begs an interesting question: why did Jesus have holes in his hands and side?  Was his new body complete with…scars?

Maybe Jesus’ resurrected body wasn’t airbrushed like the models on the checkout line as I pick up my groceries.

Maybe the scars meant something more than just physical manifestations of the healing process.

Maybe the pain he went through wasn’t meant to be overlooked or glossed over, but a the scars were a validation of the healing of wounds so deep that the pain is not forgotten, but healed.

Scars serve of memories of wounds, but they also remind us that we are able to be healed.  Perhaps the mark of a follower of Jesus shouldn’t be that they are an airbrushed model (like so many Christians are perceived) but one who has the marks of healing in their life.

Too cool for [Christian] school?

I must say, I feel strange on a Christian college campus.

For those of my friends and only walk in the door of a church for weddings and funerals, you’ll find this strange.  For those of you who know me only in the context of the Christian community, you’ll also find this strange.

Welcome to my paradoxical world…but being at Wheaton is certainly not my normal world.  More like bizzarro world.

I walk in to grab a cup of coffee and I hear Christian praise music in the background.  I see a woman who is reading from her Bible out loud with a sign that says, “40 Days of Declaring God’s Word over Wheaton.”

I think about how that would be received at the universities I’ve served over the years.  I laugh out loud.

She looks at me.  I stop laughing.  I try not to be too cool for Christian school.

Even more so, it’s weird as I walk into Caribou Coffee (who’s wireless is awful, by the way, but they do have free refills on their coffee…but it’s not as good as my beloved metropolis, intellegensia, or even starbucks) I find people talking with Bible’s open in front of them.  People are praying.

I feel…weird. I’m just not used to Christendom in the 21st Century.

Am I in bizzarro world?

I was at Wheaton for one of my intensive weeks of class this week – 48 hours of class time in 6 days.  Monday through Friday, I was in class from 8:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m.  My brain was full at the end of each day.

Not only was it intensive in the concentration of work, it was intensive in the nature of the discussion.  My afternoon class got to the point where one person stormed out of class and we basically had to call a timeout.  Then we start praying for the professor, praying for the student who walked out.  People start crying and experiencing healing. The professor and the student reconcile and hug.

I walk out of class for the day and think, “that wasn’t quite a typical day of class.”  That would never happen in my undergrad.

Wheaton is a phenomenal institution.  The quality of the faculty that I have engaged are top flight folks.  It’s not just about information – you can tell that the faculty care about their students.  I already am setting lunch appointments with my professors to talk more about ministry and life.  They are real people who care about real things.

Two things that stuck out from my courses.  The first was on Preaching. Quote of the week:

“Next to love-making with one’s spouse, preaching is the most self-revealing activity you do.  It leaves you naked.”

I don’t know about making love to a spouse, but I will say that preaching is freakin’ scary.  If you really preach to connect with folks, you have to talk about yourself in a way that does reveal who you are.  Preachers are subjected to so much criticism.  People feel free to say what they want about you and judge you everytime you walk up to the pulpit.  But have you ever thought about what it’s like to step up to the pulpit – have you ever thought about what is going on in the lives of our audience everytime one of us pulls that lecturn light, or grabs the microphone?  It’s absolutely terrifying to consider how high the stakes really are.

Why do I do this again?  Can I go back to my normal life?

Second was a class in apologetics – or defending the Christian faith.  20 years ago, this was considered super important.  Like people wrote way too many books on this.  As we’ve moved into postmodernism (or post-postmodernism), logically or rationally defending the Christian faith simply isn’t as important as it once was.  Even if I provided an air-tight defense of the Christian faith, my friends would say, “So what?  Show me why this is worth living.”

We all concurred – the best apologetic is the body of Christ living out it’s calling.  And it’s much easier to intellectually prove the faith than it is to live it out in reality.  Some were greatly encouraged by this – that postmodernism only helps us in this regard.

Sadly, the experience I have with the body of Christ just as often looks like an ugly whore than a beautiful bride – and I realize how much more difficult it is.  When the body of Christ gets it right, it’s absolutely beautiful.  But when it doesn’t, it hurts people and pushes them far from God.  And it’s even worse when it doesn’t admit it.

I was asked to develop a personal approach to apologetics and to find my “communication style.”  I was told by preaching professor that my preaching style is conversational – I’m able to connect with people through the intensity of my eyes and my authenticity.  From my apologetics class, I want my approach to be humble.

I hope I can do both well.

Chicken or the Egg: Foreknowing Tragedy

I think I’m getting better at my job sometimes when I say something that makes me pause and realize something deeper is going on inside of me as well.

Good stories (and good theology) typically bring up more questions than answers.  While we westerners love the systemitized, compartmentalized, neat and tidy answers, I grow more and more skeptical of these as I get older.  It’s not that I don’t like them; nor do I wish they weren’t true.

So one student asked a variation of the question that many theologians and aspiring theologians have pondered over the past 500 years:

Do we have free will or did God predestine it all?  More specifically, did God predestine the fall?

I used to try to answer this question systematically, or with a tidy analogy.  I can go Calvinist or Armenian on you, but neither really satisfy anymore – I never want to be heard regurgitating someone else’s B-movie script answer to this question.

I’ve learned to take more pages from Jesus’ teaching style in that as a Rabbi, he typically responded to questions with questions and stories.  Questions and stories make people think, and learn, and hopefully grow.

So here is my best shot at this question:

Who is a person that you love very much?  I mean, someone you really love…maybe you love them even more than you love yourself.

Now imagine the tragic disintegration of your relationship.  Imagine every painful step of this tragic spiral from the first step where they don’t return your phone calls, to where they have nothing more than superficial conversation.

Now imagine that they give curt, one word answers when you express your love to them. They don’t even look you in the eye.

Finally, they ignore your existence.

They no longer trust you, even though you have been nothing but trustworthy.  You love them, but they don’t love you back at all.  You give them everything they ever would want or need, and they throw it back in your face.

Now imagine all of this will certainly happen, and you know it all beforehand.   You can’t make them change, and you can’t force them to love you – because that really isn’t love.  Forcing someone to love you isn’t really love, is it?

Does it make it any less painful that you know this tragedy before it actually happens?

They say the best ideas come from holding two opposing points in tension.  I get that with free will and predestination.  I’m OK with the tension to comprehend God as both fully loving, and so allowing humanity to choose to love him freely, and yet being fully in control and knowing what will ultimately happen in the end.

When two people get married, we don’t ask the question – who’s decision was it to get married?  We know a healthy marriage is that both people have made this decision – that one person’s decision doesn’t make a healthy marriage.  Being part of God’s family is like a healthy decision to get married – it’s both fully our choice and fully God’s choice.

When it really comes down to it, if God is love as John says (mull on that one for a few decades), then what is more mindblowing (or heartblowing) is that God had to endure the knowledge that his beloved creation which he loved so dearly chose to give him the finger.

What escapes me is how God’s heart can take it all.