We Christians love to talk about good works, as if the sanctity of the entire universe were hinging on us making sure that everyone knows they need to be good as often as possible. We have strapped on our gun and badge and made it our sacred duty to secure the world from… well, knowing what most of us already know. 

But we’re not the moral police, we’re the love philanthropists. 

12:04:00 PM
I spent a lot of time trying to fill a void in the center of me. I was always looking to that next thing; the thing that was going to finally make me satisfied. I thought it was sex, I thought it was marriage, I thought it was fulfilling my dreams, finding a job I loved, being financially stable, but it wasn’t any of those things. Now, some of those things are awesome, but their awesomeness lessens to the degree to which you believed they were going to fulfill you completely.

One of my favorite artists, Amanda Palmer, wrote about a time when she, as a child, toppled down the stairs. Uninjured, but in a panic, she ran into the kitchen to tell her parents. The kitchen was full of family, but as she recounted her harrowing fall, no one believed her. “They thought I was making it up. Trying to get attention. Exaggerating. Dramatizing. And there I was …. realizing that everything I’d been doing in my life, artistically, could be summed up like this:

“PLEASE BELIEVE ME. I’M REAL. NO REALLY, IT HAPPENED, IT HURT (The Art of Asking, 2015).”

The realization came that the way that little girl felt, helpless, desperate to be believed—held and comforted—had colored how she lived her whole life. I can relate to that. So many things that I’ve done, the big moments—the big mistakes—have largely been an effort on my part to get meaning from recognition. If I’m loved, I tell myself,  then life will have mattered. If I succeed, I tell myself, I’ll know satisfaction. If I’m funny enough, honest enough, fit enough, good enough, give enough,  I tell myself, I’ll finally be full.

I wasn’t.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be understood, or to connect with another human being on a profound level—I think that’s what we’re made for. That’s why love is central to God; is, in fact, who God is, and what he wants us to emulate. But to think those things provide ultimate satisfaction robs them of any succor they provide. Relationships become a means to a selfish end, not a sharing of selves. And even relationship with God becomes a thing where we come to him regularly, deeds in hand, and ask, “Are we good enough now, daddy?”

Because of the willing sacrifice of God on our behalf, we never have to ask that question. He believes us. He knows we’re real. He has experienced our pain.

-Chad West
1:43:00 PM
A recent study suggested that those who were trying to reach a healthier goal of some sort tended to indulge more. Those who fill their carts with kale and cucumbers (and snap pictures to post on social media) will likely also grab a few bottles of wine or a tub of ice cream as well. Why? Because we crave balance. And the more extreme we are in one direction, we will be so in the other. However, those who simply decided to live a healthy lifestyle had more success. I think there’s a spiritual application there. As Christians, we’re often told that we need to get better and do better. We’re shown perfection as our standard, in much the same way dieters are shown airbrushed muscle-bound men, and leggy photoshopped blondes, and we struggle to reach the unreachable.

There’s only so much struggle a mind can take before it needs rest. A hard day’s work or a deep conversation will need to be balanced with a nice nap or a quiet evening alone. For the moralistic Christian, those breaks aren’t things like enjoying a good book or prayerfully meditating, they’re deep indulgence in that which we have very tediously been trying to avoid. Because our goal is impossible perfection, our failures often involve bottoming out.

A Big Difference


When you’re trying to live morally, all you tend to care about is how your actions make you feel and how they appear to others. You want to get your God-card stamped so you can feel good about your religiosity. Whereas if your faith is less of something akin to a quarterly earnings report and more of a move toward changing who you are, you’ll become more and more concerned with others and how to love them.

Because a Christian lifestyle isn’t about doing, it’s about being.

When I see someone who used to be generally unhealthy suddenly bragging about their newfound healthy ways, I’m a) very happy for them, but b) also a little worried for them. While a little pride isn’t the problem, truth doesn’t tend to have to convince everyone it’s true. It just exists truthfully. I feel the same way about morality. If you’re always trying to convince me how moral you are and passive-aggressively attempting to make me feel guilty for not being in the same place, I wonder who it is you’re trying to convince. What is it that you’re afraid of?

A Life of Quiet Love


The kindest followers of Christ, the people who have had the most impact on me, have been the quietest about their successes and the most humbly honest about their failures. Their left hand doesn’t know that their right hand gave. They are far more concerned with finding an angle to love their enemies than they are with trying to fix or shame them. They are, in short, living love, not trying to be perfect.

Jesus, in his infinite wisdom and love, gave us that perfection through his sacrifice on the cross so that we, in our infinite sinful indulgence, could be redeemed and, by his Spirit, be more like him, without fear that we won’t be enough. Because he was enough in our place.

-Chad
12:48:00 PM

Watch this great interview with Stephen Colbert about his faith.

2:30:00 PM
What makes us think that there is more? What draws us to believe at all in the existence of a perfect day when the best we’ve experienced has always died with the setting sun? We daily digest the anger, confusion and frustration the world deals us, seasoned with moments of hope, love and joy, and the result, the “inconsolable heartburn,” as Capon names it,  is “the lifelong disquietude of having been made in the image of God.”

We bow over in mental anguish at the pain of desire in wanting what is not, but once was and will be again. In the core of us is the DNA of the Cosmic Lover, pulling us toward hope. Pulling us toward love without walls.
3:39:00 PM
When I was a kid, I remember standing next to a sixty year old woman in church. She was holding the hymnal up so that her elderly mother and she could share it. At one point, as the song moved to another verse, the mother reached up and pointed at that verse on the page, as if her daughter might not know. That image stuck with me. It’s an image I often think of when I see people trying to be everyone’s mother.

One of the bad side effects of moralism (the idea that our good works earn us God’s love) is that the moralist thinks he should run everyone’s life.
10:34:00 PM
I want to be distracted. From the uncertainty of it all. From everyone’s opinions presented as the whole truth. From my own unrelenting thoughts.

Give me ten episodes to binge-watch of Hell on Wheels or giggle through hours of Adventure Time. I want music and books, movies and games, all to divert the yammering in my brain. Put all my focus onto the unreality of some fictional characters pain and triumphs.

Just.

Not.

Me.

I’ll even take lies.

9:34:00 AM
I left without saying good-bye. I had dug myself a hole, curled up into it and stayed there. I had friends, but I didn’t know how to express to them how I was feeling. I was in a healthy home church, but I couldn’t bring myself to go. Almost a decade of accumulated pain, loss and bitterness had accumulated, and one last heart-break had flattened me down to the point of numbness. I had one friend, and that was only because he kept showing up when no one else (including me) did.

I walked away from everything I knew—family, my city, my church, not to mention a mortgage.

I didn’t just move a few towns over, I ran states away. I threw away, gave away or burned everything that wouldn’t fit into my car and hit the road. In retrospect, I was cutting my ties to all that hurt and loss. I was trying to physically do what I couldn’t mentally do—stop the pain.

I can’t imagine how confused and hurt I must have left my friends. And I see, now, that digging that hole and crawling into it, not taking advantage of those who were so clearly available to me, was an invitation for the pain to worsen. I was the dog, mangled by a big rig, crawling under the house to die rather than dragging myself to someone I knew would love me enough to care for me.

Made To Need

There’s an interesting passage in the creation story where God, after saying everything he’d created up until that point was good, stops and says that something isn’t good. It’s not good, he said, for man to be alone. Now, we can safely assume that God didn’t make a mistake there. I think, before creating woman as a companion to man, God is pointing out the significance of what he’s about to do is.

We need each other. That’s what God said. Not only that. We are made to need each other. Like a lack of oxygen or water lessens, or destroys, our health, a lack of companionship eats away at our souls. And when we think—as I did—that no one else will understand or care, or that we can handle this burden alone, we lessen ourselves.


It was pride, mostly, that kept me away. It was thinking my pain was somehow a rare strain of the pain of others, unable to be deciphered by mere mortals (other than myself, of course). So… don’t be me, is the message of this post. Let go of the reins and trust God. Let go of your pride and trust those He’s given you—those who love you most.
7:25:00 PM
My wife and I were at the grocery store the other day and she commented to me on how beautiful a young girl working behind the counter was. It was true. There was something about her particular face construction and whatnot that made your brain go, “We should stare at that. It’s so symmetrical!” Not staring in an uncouth way, but in the same way one might look at a nice painting.

The moment got me thinking about the nature of beauty.

Beauty as I See it

This idea of beauty is not something we’re born with, you know? At least not one’s personal idea of beauty. If you’ve ever wondered why some nice, pretty girl thinks messy, unshaven drug-addled drop-outs are the bees knees, this will make things make a lot more sense. Because while there is something our brain enjoys about a certain type of physical symmetry, personal opinions of beauty are also a socially programmed thingamajig. The people one is exposed to most, and are accepted as the norm (there's that love of symmetry again) in your specific social group, are thought of as the most desirable. 

That may be why you find yourself always dating the same type of person, but you can talk to your counselor about that, I'm more concerned in this piece about how it also may be why we treat some people as worthless.

Beauty as Social Currency

If what is beautiful to us can be influenced by outside forces, it stands to reason that, in the world we live in, people will use that power for nefarious purposes. It’s interesting to note that beauty is a concept that has often been defined by those who have more than the rest of society and believed themselves better for that fact alone. For instance, all the fat we so desperately try to lose was seen in some eras as a positive thing. Why? Because food was scarce and being overweight was an outward sign that one had money enough to purchase enough food to be so.

That twisted definition of beauty (which defines power and influence) affects the Church as well. The bible gives an example of this kind of behavior in James 2:3. James warned against giving the best seats in the house to the rich and important, and making the poor sit on the floor. And things haven't changed. At one church I attended, which shall remain nameless, they were desperate for new members—to grow the church—but when those who began to attend were not as upper middle-class, nor as well-educated as themselves, they weren’t  all that happy with it.

White churches are white, conservative churches are conservative, rich churches are rich—etc., etc., etc. Sometimes this kind of stuff is due to language barriers, or living in particular neighborhoods, but mostly it’s not. Mostly we just see ourselves as so much more worthy of beauty--as more important--from the other that we can’t imagine worshipping with them. It’s because we want beauty, as we have come to define and worship beauty, and all that comes with that all-important social currency, more than we want God.

Marinate in that.

The good news of Jesus says that those faux barriers of beauty we’ve created have been crushed to dust. There’s no male and female, conservative or liberal, black or white in God’s economy. We’re all equal and we’re all welcome at God’s table. Beauty is revealed as the unsymmetrical gathering of the lame and well, the rich and the poor, the mayor and the high school drop-out. Beauty is the diversity of those imperfects made symmetrical, made one, as they are gathered in God’s love.


-Chad
3:49:00 PM
I’ve had the stone-on-my-heart, dry-mouthed desire to be among the cool kids and I’ve felt the electrical exhilaration of being on top of the world. Too often, I’ve paid too much for a minute of worship and  been too unkind when in a position to give mercy. There were certainly times in my life that I believed being fashionable, trendy and altogether hip was the skeleton key to unlocking this bastard life. And, surely, that’s what Jesus wants for me.

We see the popular jerk getting the girl we have pined after and prayed for and we think they must know a secret. Because the stalwart, kind and loveable loser loses once again. The obviously idiotic get the attention and money, while the level-headed pre-planners are left in the dust with naught but a pat on the back. The slacker knows the band, and you can barely see them from the back row. It’s no wonder we think there is some hush-hush path to victory that involves a heaping helping of popularity and some mystical mix of self-aggrandizement.

A Second Path

There’s no doubt that the above behavior wins hearts and minds, builds empires and inspires t-shirts. But it just as often, later, crushes souls, levels lives and quiets the crowds. But, for some, even a shot at that brief explosion in the sky, that momentary firework of faux love and periodic adulation is worth whatever silent fall might come after. And that’s a choice you can make. One is most certainly capable of selling one’s soul for a few minutes with a tight body, a Scrooge McDuck volume of cash and a front-row seat. But there is a second path.

Some will misunderstand because of its radical nature, so it’s hard to explain, but be sure that it isn’t a place where tired zeros come to die. It’s where those tired of the chase after temporal immortality come. It is where cool may or may not be achieved in the eyes of the world, but it certainly isn’t the point, and is kept up long after its fashionable. It’s the place Jesus wanted us all along—a simple life, marked by love and peace with others.

It’s a world where the stalwart, kind and loveable loser is lauded.

It’s where those reckless at handing out their love aren’t seen as weak, but people to emulate.

It’s where the guy who knows the band gives up his front row seat so that light can shine one someone else who needs it.

The Key to Life

The key to life isn’t yet another orgasm that leaves you empty an hour later. It’s not the roar of the crowd that causes the deafening silence to be unbearable when you lie in bed that night. It just isn’t a band-aid, a quick fix or an unending series of fillers for that deep, dank hole in our chest. It’s Jesus. If you define yourself by your success; get your self-worth from others, you’re going to crash face-first into defeat.

There’s nothing wrong with being on top, but the world is a heartless turning wheel with no conscience. Life is a bastard, and, sometimes, so am I. I can’t trust the universe to guide me, or you to always care. I can’t trust my cool to stay all that cool for very long. But God offers his second way to those weary of the work of achieving cool. So, when I trust in Him, letting His perfect love define me and my self-worth, I don’t have to get those things from you, and I can finally have a balanced, real relationship with you. When I see that life is a gift to live in thankfulness, not a mystery to frustrate me, I don’t need your applause.
12:47:00 PM
Copyright © 2016 Mister Preacher | By Designscrazed