Tag: Discipleship

Foreigner

T. M. Loewen-ElofsonLeave a comment

To be a Christian is to be a traveler. Our situation, say the Greek Fathers, is like that of the Israelite people in the desert of Sinai: we live in tents, not houses, for spiritually we are always on the move. We are on a journey through the inward space of the heart, a journey not measured by the hours of our watch or the days on the calendar, for it is a journey out of time into eternity [1].

—

There’s a couple of dreams I keep on having once or twice a week. I’ve been keeping tallies on the whiteboard in my room as a means of keeping track. I’m not sure why they keep coming back to me, but they do, as if something is nagging at the back of my mind.

I awake on my bed in my apartment. At least, I awake where my bed ought to be. It’s all but timber now, made brittle from the dry, cold air. It’s always the wind which wakes me, rattling the remnants of the shades in my room. What light is there is an unfeeling, blue-gray hue which colors the world around it.

The glass of the windows has been shattered – what remains is but shards which haven’t managed to fall out of place. The paint on the walls has long been stripped away by the elements and blasted by the sand which has appeared from somewhere. Exploring the apartment yields a similar result – a fraction of the door hangs on its hinges, the bolt long gone. The furniture is splintered. The lights, unworkable.

The sand seems to have gotten in here as well. I can hear it crunching beneath the soles of my feet into the threadbare carpet. No one has been here in quite some time.

Outside, I can see dunes where once grass-covered hills and roadways were. Off in the distance, the buildings which make up the campus of my university have been reduced to ruins. Only shadows inhabit the depths now.

I walk about the campus. The wind is my only companion, whispering among the skeletons of the trees which covered the place once with their leaves. Now, their dry fingers stretch for something, anything of mercy. Not even the sun seems to care.

The world, it seems, is quiet,

I wander the place for some time before waking up, back in my room. I make a tally on the whiteboard. I pace. I go back to bed.

Rinse, wash, repeat.

But why?

Honestly, I’m going to leave an exact answer to the psychoanalysts and the mystics among us, But, after pacing the length of the living room for a few nights now, I believe part of the answer lies in some curriculum we’ve been covering.

In several of the classes I’ve found myself in, we’ve been hammering away at the notion of hospitality and the stranger, or ger (גֵּר). In the Old Testament, the stranger was to be considered a neighbor, since the Israelites had been in the same situation once in their own story as well. In that circumstance, God loved them and brought them into their own land, their own promise. As Christians, these stories, these principles, are also passed down to us as our story and our principles as well.

In other words, we love, because we were first loved.[2]

Even still, as these principles come passed down to us, we also find that we experience themes and motifs like those which brought about the Israelites’ stories and principles in the first place. In this way, I think, we come to identify and own those stories as our own, too.

At one point within the Exodus story, we find that Moses named his firstborn son Gershom, for “‘I [Moses] have become a foreigner in a foreign land.’”[3]

I’ve started to wonder, especially as I walk the ruins in my dreams, where we find ourselves foreigners in foreign lands ourselves. It’s easy to buy into a false sense of comfort quickly once a rhythm is established. A quick change of scenery may reveal how unfamiliar a seemingly familiar place is.

For me, a coast-hopping Yankee who spent the last four years in Los Angeles and must figure out whether Atlanta is that strange at first glance; for everyone settling into the pace of the semester and yet still looking to be known; for those of us who move about so frenetically that we have become a foreign land in and of ourselves to ourselves, remind us of our wandering state so that we might comfort those who wander among us.

Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayers.

—

[1] Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Way. Revised Edition (New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1995), 7.

[2] 1 Jn 4:19, NIV.

[3] Exod. 18:3.

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Blind

T. M. Loewen-ElofsonLeave a comment

 

Recently, I found myself sitting down to breakfast burritos with my mentor. It was earlier than to what I was conditioned, and I found myself squinting as the sun peaked over the mountains in the distance. I chuckled and my mentor raised an eyebrow.

“What?”

I laughed again. “Don’t you find it funny that light waves travelled millions of miles from the surface of the sun through the vacuum of space for the sake of hitting the surface of the Earth, and in the last few feet before reaching its goal, it is stopped by a human who happens to be walking by?”

He paused, put down his burrito, and laughed. “No, I’ve never thought of that. Come to think of it, that’s actually pretty funny. It’s the ultimate denial of a shot.” Picking up his burrito again, “What made you think of that?”

My eyes watering, I blinked. “Because I’m staring right into the sun itself.”

It’s a fascinating thing to think of the anticlimax of light being denied its end-goal by a random passerby. It seems to fit into the same category of humor as a bird hitting a glass window or a dud of a model rocket. Something that complex shouldn’t be able to be stopped by something so simple. So when it does, it strikes us as funny.

In a similar manner, sometimes I feel as though God looks at us with the same sense of humor when we claim to want to know him more yet we allow our time with him to slip away for the sake of one thing or another. God reaches out from beyond the universe, through time and space itself, and gets flat out denied by a person choosing to watch TV or sleep in instead of spending time with him.

I say that because I’ve been guilty of that very same thing for the past few weeks. In the flurry of deadlines and papers, I have actively chosen to sacrifice time with God for extra hours of sleep. I wonder if God crosses time and space every morning just to come face to face with the mattress I’ve thrust between us. Eventually, I would wonder whether he would care to show up after a while.

It’s funny to think that a ministry major sacrifices time with God to study more about God. But admittedly, it’s oftentimes easier to commune with an impending deadline than it is to sense the Holy Spirit moving. In addition, I’m a doer by nature. I have a deep-seated conviction that if I don’t get any measurable result or feeling of spiritual enlightenment, I ought to cut my losses and find some other manner of achieving something else.

But that would be buying into an assumption that God is a commodity just like any other thing that can be managed and cut into consumable portions. There is a reason why God tells Moses that his name is I AM THAT I AM (or better translated I WILL BE WHAT I WILL BE).

God, in other words, doesn’t play nice with people who try to control him. And yet, he also requires that we spend time with him, meditating and studying his Word. Martin Luther once said, “I have so much to do that I shall spend the first three hours in prayer.” If the father of the Reformation could manage to get three hours in, we can afford at least one.

I affirm that God meets us in our own contexts, but he also requires us to be willing to show up, willing to listen and be content with not having anything to take away. That’s usually how functional relationships work. Why would we expect our faith to be different?

“So,” I said after shifting my seat, “What do you do to spend time with God? What do you do to receive spiritual nourishing?”

“Well,” my mentor began, “I usually start with a podcast or Tim Keller sermon. That and I listen to Scripture read to me on audiobook. It might sound dumb or unscholarly, but it works.”

“And if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

He nodded.

Turning to look at where I was facing before, he gasped. He shielded his eyes. “And, on that note – for the love of God, man, know when to stop doing something that you’ll regret later. Because sometimes, you might just go blind if you don’t.”

Modeling Discipleship

T. M. Loewen-Elofson1 Comment

When I was younger, my older brother and I shared a room. On some nights, when the two of us were too restless to sleep, he and I would stare up at the glow-in-the-dark star-covered ceiling, listening to the spring peepers chirp from the nearby pond, and talk about things which struck either of us as mysterious. Sometimes, I wonder whether nights like that was what launched me into studying theology and the humanities: My brother was always so interested in how the world worked, I must have figured it would be nice to speculate why it worked the way it did, too.

My brother is a true-blooded member of my family; the mathematical and scientific approach to life appealed to him as the most straight-shooting, efficient way of viewing the world. Within what he considered the pure sciences, the complexities of how the universe works can be boiled down and accounted for in models. As he lay there in his bed in the darkened room, complex systems unfolded elegantly within the mind’s eye. Clockwork. Anything could be understood given time.

But understood fully? I doubt it.

Models do hold a special place in my heart. But, while I do have an appreciation for models, they always seemed to frustrate and fascinate me at the same time. When I was in grade school it felt as though as soon as I had one model down, it would be dismissed as inadequate and I would be given a newer, more complicated model to assimilate into my memory.

One evening after returning home from high school, I staggered up the stairs into my room. My brother was in his bunk, his eyes peering over the edge of his pillow at his phone as his thumbs tapped out a message to one of his friends. I said nothing, but climbed the ladder on the side of our bunks and collapsed. I lay there, unblinking.

After a few seconds, I heard my brother remark, “Interesting day?”

“You could say that,” I replied. “I just found out that the Rutherford model of the atom is inadequate to expressing what it actually is. It wore me out.”

“But why?”

“Because I’d like to know that I’m basing what I know off of something accurate.”

He laughed. “Like that’s going to happen anytime soon. Models don’t ever capture its object’s true essence. Like an electron, for instance. It’s best conveyed as a mathematical function. But that’s too hard for the average person to grasp.”

I buried my face in my pillow. “Life ain’t that simple, I suppose.”

“No, I don’t suppose it is.”

Grasping models fully can falsely lure us into thinking that we have mastered the knowledge about its object completely. While the model can help us grasp one or more elements of the object, it cannot replace the thing in itself.  Understanding Rutherford’s take on the atom gave me a false sense of security in terms of knowing about one of the basic building blocks of reality. Instead, the subject matter (pun intended) was more sophisticated than I realized.

As a guy studying to be a pastor, or something related to it, I have to admit that my brother’s right. He’s right most of the time, actually. Most recently, I realized how right he was as a senior in high school through an ongoing conversation I’ve been having with some of my peers on what discipleship looks like.

In high school, I often found myself spending my Fridays with a group of guys who decided to dedicate their evenings to studying the Word and fellowship. Admittedly, I began going Friday nights because a senior by the name of Kyle had invited me to attend. After going a few times, I became hooked. I couldn’t wait to start my own.

But somewhere along the line, in my own attempts to recreate the space I experienced in high school, I think I lost the core of discipleship. It wasn’t until I read some of Donald Miller’s work that I realized that there were words for what was wrong. He states:

I’m the kind of person who wants to present my most honest, authentic self to the world–so I hide backstage and rehearse honest and authentic lines until the curtain opens […] The same personality trait that made me a […] writer also made me terrible at relationships. You can only hide backstage for so long. To have an intimate relationship, you have to show people who you really are. I’d gotten good in reeling in a [person] and then bowing to say, “Thanks, you’ve been a great audience,” right around the time I had to let [him or her] know who I really was.[1]

Experience has led me to believe it’s due to my being prone to always feel as though I must always prove myself to my own unattainable standard. I always have to get to the material. I always have to have my act together. I always have to be a mere step below God.

And so I tried. I tried to do everything that Kyle did. I tried to make Bible Study something of a come-and-see event. I tried to incorporate what John Wesley described as “the means of grace” – that is, “channels of conveying [God’s] grace to the souls of men.”[2] Things like prayer and searching the Scriptures in a variety of ways. But nothing seemed to replicate the same space that Kyle was able to make.

I felt tired, worn out, and frustrated about what discipleship was before I stepped out of high school.

My boss, a self-professed recovering Calvinist, mentioned to me that within churches which lean towards a Reformed lens of interpreting Scripture, the stress is always on truth at the expense of everything else. Arminians, on the other hand, tend to err on the side of love, which caused the Calvinists to regard them as what the youth would describe as “weak sauce.”

I once thought that Calvin was pretty solid. I still do on some accounts. I just think his followers need to move their lens of truth in the direction of love.

I think it is for a similar reason why Saint Francis of Assisi is attributed with saying, “Preach the Gospel always and, when necessary, use words.” The church should pause for a moment from trying to answer the questions that few are asking and instead try to express the love and compassion of Christ toward all who do thirst for something more. G.K. Chesterton argued in one of his more famous pieces that he was not trying to prove that Christianity was the Truth, but rather that “the central Christian theology (sufficiently summarized in the Apostles’ Creed) is the best root of energy and sound ethics.”[3] In other words, it was the best way of living regardless. And oftentimes when something is ultimately beneficial, it points to the fact that it was true to begin with. What truth is can be validated by the lives we lead.

If all discipleship is is defined by the process of getting closer to the right doctrine and living in light of it, then we have to realize that under this microscope lens of objectivism, there’s no room for error.* If there’s no room for error, there is no room left for me. Like anyone, I come from a certain place through which I have learned to see the world. While there may be (and I hope to God that there is) an objective truth, my own perspective hinders me from seeing all of it fully. My own lens is warped and I have my own beliefs, doubts, questions, struggles, and experiences which either impede or aid how I see through that lens to what is truth.

When I look back upon the model that Kyle set for the rest of us who participated in his Bible Study on Friday nights all those years ago, I realize now that the reason why it was so special was because Kyle was never one to perform in front of others. He understood that his identity rested in Christ alone. It was ok to not be ok. Being flawed was a place to begin, not just a status we had to own and manage for the rest of our lives.

I think the thing that Kyle did that I still have yet to learn is to actually begin to “swim in the baptismal waters” through allowing grace to catch up to me for once.[4] Andrew C. Thompson observes “If justification is really about how we are viewed in God’s eyes, then the new birth is how we come to be viewed in our own eyes.”[5] We become content with who we are for once, our identity secured with Christ through baptism.

Kyle’s model, while it might have not always prioritized the exact truths as worded in Scripture, instead lived out discipleship by prioritizing people, meeting them where they were. My own attempts since then, focusing more on the product than the process, never really got close.

When I was younger, models were the bane of my existence. Now I realize that they’re necessary even in spite of their shortcomings because they illustrated some truth about the world. Likewise, we Christians have our shortcomings in modeling the one we claim to follow, but all that means is that there’s always room for improvement.

Life ain’t that simple, you know.

Never really was.

—

[1] Donald Miller, Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Finding True Intimacy (Nashville: Nelson Books, 2014), 1-2.

[2] Andrew C. Thompson, The Means of Grace: Traditioned Practice in Today’s World (Franklin: Seedbed Publishing, 2015), 16.

[3] G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1995), 14.

[4] Thompson, 31.

[5] Ibid., 12.