Money-Back Guaranteed Recipe for Humility

made_at_www-1.txt2pic.com A friend used to joke about having been given a button to wear on his shirt that said "HUMBLE". He said that it even came with blinking lights on it. That friend, who–despite his "humble button" joke–is one of the most humble people I know, remains one of the people I have continued to go to through more than a decade when I'm seeking God's guidance on something. When I need others to help me discern God's leading, we intuitively don't go to ego-driven people. Our instincts tell us that there may be nothing that squelches someone's ability to hear from God more than pride.

In a section of Hearing God, Dallas Willard wrote about this, and then–as wasn't uncommon when I read his writings or listened to him speak–he threw in this paragraph as something of a side-note even though it alone was worth the price of the book:

"In seeking and receiving God's word to us, therefore, we must at the same time seek and receive the grace of humility. God will gladly give it to us if, trusting and waiting on him to act, we refrain from pretending we are what we know we are not, from presuming a favorable position for ourselves in any respect and from from pushing or trying to override the will of others in our context. (This is a fail-safe recipe for humility. Try it for one month. Money-back guarantee if it doesn't work!)"(1)

In case you didn't catch it, there's plenty for us to chew on for...at least a couple of decades. The first thing that catches my attention is that humility is a grace. That probably doesn't sound counter-intuitive to many of us, but yet we certainly aren't trained to live as if it's true. Grace is God's undeserved action in our lives to bring about what we can't accomplish on our own, and if we apply that to humility, it means that God's work is furthered more when we become humble. (So, pastor friends, where are our seminary courses in "The Necessity Of and Path Toward Humility"?)

Then, Dallas' three-point recipe for humility is brilliant (and even though I'm sitting here writing about how great it is, I'm not particularly looking forward to going and putting it into practice). First, he says, "refrain from pretending we are what we know we are not." How many of our ways that we interact with one another would fall apart if our ability to pretend suddenly disappeared? Think of going to your next professional convention and presenting yourself as being as unsuccessful as you really are.

Then, "refrain...from presuming a favorable position for ourselves in any respect." What if, instead of being urged to stand out and get noticed as part of what it means to be a competent adult, we took it as our goal to get no credit for as much good work as possible?

And finally, perhaps the most radical part of the recipe, "refrain...from pushing or trying to override the will of others in our context." But he can't seriously mean...think of all of the kinds of things that might happen to us if we actually did that!?! What if we refused to fight for our own agendas? People around us will certainly continue to do it, so wouldn't we be conceding victory on everything that matters to...everyone but us?

While listening to a podcast from Dallas today, I heard him say, "The biggest threat to the kingdom of God in my life is the kingdom of Dallas Willard. I have to lay that aside. That means that I don't expect things to be done by my power. I expect things to be done by God's power."(2)

In that light, it becomes apparent that a humility-blocking issue for me is that I simply don't trust God and his kingdom that much. I think things are way too much up to me, and honestly–it raises fear in me to think about what things would be like if I abandoned the outcomes of things I care about in that complete of a way to God's hands.

But, based on the course my life has taken to this point, that fear should appropriately go in the opposite direction. Virtually everything genuinely good about my life has come about as a result of things I could not have orchestrated on my own, while everything I have tried to seize control of has gone crashing down. Rather than fearing what might happen if I lived Dallas' humility recipe, perhaps I should spend some time thinking about what might happen if I don't.

(1) Dallas Willard, Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship With God, p. 38 (1999 InterVarsity Press edition) (2) From August 14, 2011 Tree of Life Community Podcast, "Being Church (10): Dallas Willard" https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/being-church-10-dallas-willard/id453093989?i=124909144&mt=2

James Bryan Smith: The Encouraging Community

"While it may be true that treating churchgoers as consumers by trying to meet their stated needs may make them feel more comfortable, by lowering our expectations of them as active participants we are decreasing the possibility of genuine transformation."... "I want a community who will take an interest in my well-being, a community who is not afraid to ask me to make a commitment to my own spiritual growth and service to others, a community who dares to offer me a reliable pattern of transformation and then backs it up by challenging me to enter into some form of accountability in order to help me meet our commitments." ... "I know three things from experience. First, people rise to the level of expectation. We fail because we do not ask for accountability and commitment. Second, people intuitively know that when things are made easy there is little chance that any good will come from it. We lower our expectations because we think people will respond in greater numbers, but in reality we do them no service, and most people sense this. Third, while not everyone in every church is ready to make a commitment to transformation, there are many who are ready and are not being challenged. Far too much attention is being paid to getting people to come to church, and far too little is paid to those who are hungering for a deeper life with God."

(James Bryan Smith, The Good and Beautiful Community, Ch. 6: "The Encouraging Community")

Beginning My Tribute to Dallas Willard

photo-4 copy I never met Dallas Willard, though I came embarrassingly close in 2009. (My wife arranged through a friend to have the book pictured above signed and sent to us.) He was my hero, and though I had been reading and re-reading his stuff for a decade at that point, plus listening to any recording of him that I could get my hands on, I had never heard him speak in person. Then, it happened that I had moved back to Texas and Renovaré was going to have its international conference in San Antonio that year, so I was eager to go and sign up for anything that had Dallas' name on it.

One way I did that was that I signed up to be a participant in a breakfast where he was going to speak, and to my joy I ended up in the buffet line right behind him. It wasn't to my joy that the person in front of him in the line was apparently just as happy as I was to have an opportunity to talk to him, and that person was apparently much more extroverted than me, and therefore had plenty to say. Even though I was standing right next to Dallas at that moment, I wasn't having a very Dallas-ish attitude toward that person and even invented a term for them in my mind: conversation hog. (If you're as introverted as I am, you'll know what I'm talking about. If you're as extroverted as I am introverted, you probably are one without even knowing it, but my attitude is better toward you now.)

After we waited through the line and got to the point of putting food on our plates, the–um–extravert apparently either ran out of things to say or became more focused on food selection. So, it was my chance. Among all of the people on the planet with whom I had never spoken, I was standing next to the human being with whom I most wanted to have a conversation, and I said absolutely nothing. In my mind, I wanted to give him a conversation break from the previous fifteen minutes. But actually, I guess it had to do more with my introversion taking over and I couldn't come up with anything appropriate to say while standing there next to the scrambled eggs and muffins.

Dallas died of cancer this week, and I've spent more time than ever before thinking about my time standing behind him in the breakfast buffet line in San Antonio. I haven't thought about it with regret about not saying anything; I still don't know what words I would have used. I certainly could not have conveyed my gratitude to him very well while also trying to allow him to choose between blueberry or banana nut. More than anything, I've just been grateful for the opportunity to have heard him in person which only added to his influence on me.

But the news of his death has been harder for me than I expected. I knew that he had been sick, and I knew that it would be a sad day for me when the day of his passing would come. Even though I expected it to be sad, because I never met him and didn't know him personally, I didn't expect it to have as much of a sense of real grief for me as it has.

I haven't really even wanted to talk to anyone about it, because it seems like it would sound silly to admit that I'm in mourning for someone with whom the closest I ever came to personal contact was that he might have handed me the muffin tongs. Thankfully though, my wife gets it–she knows how much Dallas influenced me, and she was able to help me see the issue for what it was the night that he died, while I was surprised at how hard of a time I was having with it.

She said, "You've lost both of your heroes." She was right. There are a group of people whom I sometimes describe as being "among my heroes," but only two men that I have referred to with words like, "he is my hero": Dallas and my Dad.

So I've given myself permission to grieve over Dallas, while also–alongside so many others–experiencing deep gratitude for his life and teaching. The day that he died, I had a sense of, "I have to write something about him," but I tried to start a couple of times and nothing good was coming out. I just couldn't figure out where to start, where to try to end up, or what to do in between to try to point at the extent to which Dallas' teaching has been helpful in shaping my life with God.

Then, again, my wife was very helpful and suggested that I write a series of posts communicating things I learned from him. Writing stories of my dad's life has been incredibly helpful to me since his death, and though my third-person experiences with Dallas are obviously of very different nature than my life with my Dad, I think I can tell some good stories about things Dallas has taught me through the years.

So, much more to come about life with God and how Dallas helped me into it.

A Brief Break

Just a heads up: In order to save a little money each month, I'm going to be reworking some details of the site–like how it's hosted and some other details of how it works. All of my past experience with stuff like this has taught me to expect that my first attempt at it probably won't go precisely as expected, but hopefully it won't take too long. I mention that to offer an explanation for why I don't expect to post anything new for at least the next week. I'll give the time that's usually given to writing to the process of moving the blog. Hopefully, in about a week, things will pick back up as normal here. (If you subscribe by email, you won't have to change anything. If you subscribe by RSS....I'm not so sure.)

In the meantime, I'll continue to send articles from the archives to those on the "I want to receive something every day" email list, and these also get posted on Facebook and Twitter.

 

Why the Bible Should be Translated by Texans

The writers of the Bible used a word that's common in Texas vocabulary, but which I've unfortunately never seen in any of our current English translations of the Bible. This is a costly mistake, because failing to use this word completely changes how we see the respective passages of scripture. Therefore, I'm proposing that a group of native Texan-speaking Bible scholars get together and produce a new translation to correct this mistake and finally–because of our love of God and humanity–make appropriate use the all-important word: y'all. (Yes, I'm well aware that Texans aren't the only ones to use y'all. I lived in Georgia for six years, and it was every bit as central in the vocabulary there as it is here. But, like nearly everything good in the world, Texans probably invented it. And I've also previously speculated about the goodness of a Texas Translation of the Bible.)

Like many of us, for the majority of my life, I have tended to read the Bible as if every time that it uses the word "you," it means that the passage in question was intended to be a message from God directly to me. Our preference for individualizing the message of the scriptures is evidence of how we tend to individualize everything in our way of thinking and how difficult it is for us to read the Bible through the lenses of its original audience, who lived with a much more community-centered orientation than we do. (Texans may also be responsible for the invention of individualism, which doesn't play into our favor in the context of this post, but we would be able to correct that by producing this Bible translation.)

This issue first came to my attention several years ago. While living in Guatemala, as part of the process of learning Spanish, I had a Bible which had the Spanish and English translations next to each other on each page. I remember reading through the Sermon on the Mount and noticing that the Spanish used its equivalent of "y'all" throughout the sermon, but the English (apparently translated by a non-Texan) used the less accurate "you." In some passages, perhaps it doesn't make much practical difference, but in general it's a big shift in our thinking to look at a passage as being addressed to a community of people rather than to an individual.

I had been thinking about this for a while, and then it was confirmed in a fantastic book I read last year by Jack Levison called Fresh Air: The Holy Spirit for an Inspired Life. Jack is far from being a Texan (he was raised in New York of all places!), but he still understands the need for "y'all" thoroughly, and he describes it masterfully in one of the chapters in that book. In reference to the passage from 1 Corinthians 3 which says, "Do you not know that you are God's temple and that God's spirit dwells in you?", Levison comments:

The “you” in this question is plural and could better be translated by the southern expression “y’all.” The metaphor of the spirit-filled temple occurs in a question posed, not to individuals, but to an entire community: y’all. Growing up, I heard time and again that my body was a temple of the holy spirit. That’s why, I was told, I shouldn’t smoke cigarettes. This was good advice; I am better off for never having smoked cigarettes. Still, this advice shows how easily people can apply a biblical text about communities to individuals. Renowned Pentecostal author Kenneth Hagin does this in The Holy Spirit and His Gifts. “Relatively few Christians,” he writes, “are really conscious of God in them— dwelling in their hearts and bodies as His temple” (26). Oddly, Hagin writes this despite quoting from the Amplified Version of 1 Corinthians 3: 16, which explicitly identifies the temple as the whole community: “Do you not discern and understand that you [the whole church at Corinth] are God’s temple (His sanctuary), and that God’s Spirit has His permanent dwelling in you— to be at home in you [collectively as a church and also individually]?”

He goes on in the rest of that chapter to set the passage from 1 Corinthians in its context, showing how opposed Paul was to those who would cause schisms within God's people. So, consider the difference between interpreting these emphases of 1 Corinthians 3:16-17 as being written to individuals (you) or to a community (y'all):

  • Do you not know that you are God's temple and that God's spirit dwells in you?
  • If anyone destroys God's temple, God will destroy that person.
  • For God's temple is holy, and you are that temple.

Or:

  • Do y'all not know that y'all are God's temple and that God's spirit dwells in y'all?
  • If anyone destroys God's temple, God will destroy that person.
  • For God's temple is holy, and y'all are that temple.

With my experiment this year, I've also been thinking of the difference this makes in the ways the Bible talks about prayer. Consider, for example, the difference between Jesus saying,

  • "When you pray...[you] pray like this: Our Father in heaven..."

Or

  • "When y'all pray...[y'all] pray like this: Our Father in heaven..."

A really interesting case is with Paul's instruction in 1 Thessalonians 5:17 to "Pray without ceasing." Although "you" isn't in the verse in English or any other language, other languages specify whether commands are to an individual or to a group. So, again, there's quite a difference here, and what the scripture actually says is the second of these:

  • "[You] pray without ceasing."

Or

  • "[Y'all] pray without ceasing."

Honestly, if "pray without ceasing" is a command to me as an individual, I don't know how to do that. I know the ways we usually talk about doing that as individuals, like being mindful of God all throughout the day or praying about whatever has our attention throughout the day. Like Levison's example of not smoking cigarettes, these are good advice, but I'm convinced they weren't what Paul had in mind.

Paul was thoroughly an ancient Jew, and therefore his habits of praying would have mostly been shaped by the community's practice of praying the psalms and other prayers at set times of the day (which I describe in Live Prayerfully as "praying with other people's words"). It was natural for the early Christians to continue the practice since it had been part of their Jewish heritage and therefore, shaped the prayer practices of Jesus, Peter, Paul, John, and all the rest.

So when Paul said, "[Y'all] pray without ceasing," I think he was saying, "[Y'all] make sure you don't give up this practice of continually praying as a community."

Then, as Christianity spread around the globe, it appears that a "y'all" interpretation of this verse became even more significant. In Live Prayerfully, I wrote:

An interesting thing about how people have viewed this throughout history is that it is a very practical way for the entire church to literally fulfill Paul’s command to “pray without ceasing.” Tomorrow morning after I wake up, the first thing I will do is to pray morning prayer. But I will do so only after Christians in Johannesburg said their morning prayers while I was fast asleep, and in the next hour another group in the next time zone will pray, and on and on through the night other Christians will wake up in their time zones, say their morning prayers, and then it will finally be our turn here in the USA’s Central time zone. Then it repeats at mid-day, evening, and night, so that constantly, all throughout the world, Christ’s people are praying, and in a very real sense, doing so together and without ceasing.

–––

Something I've prayed this week (and y'all might have too):

May God be gracious to us and bless us and make his face to shine upon us, that your way may be known upon earth, your saving power among all nations. (Psalm 67:1-2)

[This is the 29th post from A Year of Living Prayerfully]

Mocked for My Lack of Rhythm

When I played basketball at a very small college, once per year we would go and play a big, NCAA Division I school. The scores in those games usually weren't very pretty, as we were one of the small schools that those big schools would schedule as a "cupcake" game. Aside from the beatings we took, another memory stands out about when we played our DI game my first year: it was my introduction to hecklers. We were playing against Tennessee St., which isn't exactly the cream of the crop of college basketball, but whose team was still several levels above us. They had a pretty big arena, but hardly anyone was there for the game–except for a few guys who probably sat on the front row at every home game and made it their sport to heckle the visiting team. They were good, too. As our team was getting throttled (as I recall, they had nine straight trips down the floor when they hit a three-pointer on us), at least we had something to enjoy from the evening by appreciating the way their hecklers were making fun of us. They made fun of everything about us. They mocked our uniforms, called our coach "Physics Professor" the entire game, and would come up with different things to say to each of us. I wasn't an important enough player on our team to warrant many comments from them, but I still–16 years later–remember laughing at their only comment to me: "Hey #42...I can just look at you and tell you ain't got no rhythm."

I haven't thought about that night in quite a while, but it came to mind today as I thinking about something that happened a few days ago in my year-long experiment: I got a warning sign that I'm losing my rhythm. By this point in the experiment (now five months in), I've experienced how good the rhythms of praying that I've undertaken can be. They provide a method for constantly returning to God, and I'm realizing more and more how desperately I need that.

But there have also been bumps in the road of the experiment. I've had a good number of times when I've completely forgotten to pray. It's most often happened during the evening, and I usually don't realize it until I'm reading night prayers with my wife before going to bed. I avoided forgetting any times for a while in the beginning, but ever since the first time happened and my original streak ended, it's become more frequent.

So, forgetting one of the times for prayer certainly wasn't a first for me. But, for the first time, a few days ago I went to pray night prayers and realized I hadn't prayed at midday or evening that day, nor had I even thought anything about it. I've missed times here and there, but this was the first time that I'd missed two in a row. That caused me to think a bit about how I've gone, from planning my day around praying in these ways in the beginning of this experiment, to now being about halfway through the year and going from morning until night without praying and not even noticing that I hadn't done so. I think the answer has to do with what those hecklers told me: my lack of rhythm.When I began the experiment, I had a rhythm in the evenings of reading my prayers after I put my daughter to bed. But then, somewhere a few months into the experiment my wife and I made a good change and began alternating which one of us would be with our daughter at bedtime and which would be with our son. The rhythm changed, and so did my practices. I still remember to pray on the nights when I'm with my daughter, but–though I certainly enjoy the evenings when I'm with my son, I haven't adjusted my habits accordingly.

People who have practiced these things a lot longer than I have often talk about the importance of having a certain place and time for praying, so that it becomes a habit to be in that place at that time, and when we are–we don't even have to try to remember, but we'll just pray naturally out of custom. When we do something like that every day (or most days) it becomes a rhythm for us.

That's good to pay attention to, and it's also good to pay attention to the flip side of it. When there is some change to our daily routines, we shouldn't be surprised if our spiritual habits also get a bit out of rhythm. When we moved from the U.S. to Guatemala, I was seriously out of rhythm for a while, but after a while I settled into better habits than I had known previously. When we moved back to the U.S. a couple of years later, I was again out of seriously rhythm for a while, but–again–the habits came out stronger after some time. Major changes like that throw wrenches into the works of any good rhythms we may have established. The big changes in our lifestyles usually have big impact, and it may take a while for our habits to resurface in a new way after the changes have settled. I've been aware of that dynamic for a while, but this experiment is helping me to realize that it also comes into play with the smaller changes, like the adjustment in our routine of putting our kids to bed.

Whether the changes are big or small, and our resulting out-of-rhythm-ness is major or minor, I think it's safe to say we can go easy on ourselves. Yes, we want the habits to resurface, but the fact that you may feel like you've lost them in a period of change doesn't mean you no longer love Jesus very much–it probably just means you're out of rhythm for a while. Be merciful to yourself–with intention, they'll come back after some time, hopefully even in better ways than you knew them before.

The good part of this is that every time those changes to our lifestyles come, we have an opportunity to reshape our habits in new ways that are more conducive to the kind of lives we want to live and the kind of people we want to become.

–––

Something I've prayed this week:

O God, you have prepared for those who love you such good things as surpass our understanding: Pour into our hearts such love towards you, that we, loving you in all things and above all things, may obtain your promises, which exceed all that we can desire; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. (Prayer for the Sixth Sunday of Easter from The Book of Common Prayer)

[This is the 28th post from A Year of Living Prayerfully]