Year: 2013

Alan
Copyright 2013 by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

I am departing from my usual format and subject matter for “Meditations for the Contemplative Christian” this week in order to write about a friend of mine named Alan. I have known Alan for about ten years, having met him at the evening service of a church I no longer attend. It was immediately apparent to me that this was a human being who had been through some terrible experiences in his life. He was, in this world’s eyes, what might be described as “scary looking.” By both his appearance and manner it was apparent that Alan was mentally ill.

This fact did not alarm me, as I had worked with people with severe emotional and psychological problems in the past, so I made a point to talk with Alan. Within a short period of time we became friends and after every service Alan and I would sit in my car and talk for a while. During this time he shared with me a story of childhood abuse that remains the worst story of this kind I have ever personally heard. He had grown up in a family in which both parents were mentally ill. He had been sexually abused by strangers they allowed into their home. Presumably this was true for some of his siblings as well because, with one exception, his dispersed brothers and sisters were all troubled to the point of barely being able to function in the world. As for Alan his abuse at home had been followed by merciless bullying throughout his school years, mostly because of the haunted appearance he displayed even then. By the time I met him he was on permanent disability and living at home struggling to take proper care of his invalid father by himself.

As I said his was one of the saddest stories I’ve heard.

I wish I could say that Alan found the love he was starving for in the Church, but this was not the case. If there was one thing he made crystal clear to me it was that people in the many churches he attended had not reached out to help him. I saw this in my own church of the time. Most people avoided contact with Alan altogether. The few who spoke with him at our services did so for a few minutes at most and then politely, but firmly excused themselves. This pattern had basically repeated itself with every congregation he encountered…and that included the leaders of those congregations.

After I left the church where I met Alan I continued to call him every few weeks to continue our relationship. As the years went by I witnessed him become more and more isolated, and more and more difficult to talk with about spiritual things. Alan simply could not understand why the people who bore the name of the Son of God he had read about in the Bible did not reach out to someone as obviously lost and lonely as he was. During these long conversations basically all I could do was listen. He did most of the talking because he had almost no one in his life to talk to. When I did find moments to speak it was very difficult to communicate the grace of God to a person who had found the church to be not much different from the rest of a world that “kept its distance.”

By this time Alan’s father had died and he was living alone. He had also begun to drink heavily.

Last month my calls went unanswered. Finally I received a disconnected phone message when I dialed his number. The next day I drove to Alan’s home and found it dark and empty. I left a message in his mailbox asking him to please call me and put the flag up. It ended up being the mail man who found it and contacted me. My friend Alan, he told me, had been found dead in his house by the police in mid-January. By the condition of his body it was apparent that he had died around Christmas. The mailman did not know the cause of death, but I could guess. Alan had recently had the flu and never sounded completely recovered from it. I suspect he died of pneumonia aggravated by alcoholism (It apparently had not been considered a suicide because there was no mention of his death in the local media. Had he clearly ended his own life there probably would have been.) I could find no obituary, no notice about a funeral, no mention of his death whatsoever.

Alan was 52 when he died. I’m not sure he ever really progressed emotionally beyond the age of the young boy who had known only abuse. He died alone. I can only hope that, when no one else was there in that empty house, the God Alan had once asked to save him was there with him as he left this world behind.

The very sad truth is that if Alan still retained any faith in God at that point it was mostly in spite of Christians, not because of them. That is why I’m writing this article in his memory. I write in the hope that those who read it might make a point to reach out to the “Alan’s” in their own congregations, even if that means resisting fears about the emotionally disturbed that often are not justified. But when I remember what my friend encountered in too many 21st Century American churches I cannot help but question if I write in vain.

Also, as I ponder what the Bible says about judgment starting among the people of God I sincerely wonder if part of that judgment will not be for our neglect of lost souls like Alan…in the one place where those souls might have reasonably expected to find the radical love of Jesus Christ displayed.

May God have mercy on us all…

Best Friends
Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

What would happen if we really knew God wanted to be with us?

It is one thing to believe that the Lord loves us in some remote, impersonal way and quite another to believe He likes us. Author Brennan Manning once said that if he sensed someone truly liked him he would lower all his defenses and expose himself emotionally to that person. He used this as an analogy to our relationship with Jesus.

When a believer is grappling with his or her sin, and the fear and shame that accompany it, it is tempting to see God as only a stern judge, maybe even an angry being who demands a perfection from us that we do not have the strength to attain. We project on to Him the disgust and self-hatred we feel towards ourselves and assume that He feels the same way about us as we do.

But what if we Christians were to dare to believe, even during such terrible moments, that Jesus Christ is our friend? We know He is to be our Lord, our King, and our Master. Unfortunately we sometimes, to our own loss, focus only on the aspects of God that set Him apart from and far above us while forgetting this same God also became one of us. For the people who bear His name it is absolutely true that Jesus is Lord, King and Master. What we so easily forget is that he is also our Friend.

Friends, real friends, want to be with us. If they are believers these people love us in the name of God but, as friends, they also like us and when we really come to know this is true we respond by removing all the walls our insecurity has built around us. We feel the joy that comes from knowing that at least one other person in the world likes us as we are, where we are, and desires to be with us. Even the ugly side of us, our struggle with sin, does not change that affection.

For some reason it is hard to imagine Jesus sitting with His disciples and just enjoying their company. We have a tendency to look at the three years they were together and imagine the time was always spent in the “serious business” of the Kingdom of God. Yet surely during those years there was also time for Jesus and the disciples to bond in the kind of friendships like-minded people living and traveling together naturally create. Over time they must have come to know one another well, to laugh as well as cry together. Think of the best church small groups of today and you might begin to get some idea of how intimate a group this must have been. Yes, there was some friction between the disciples; but that too is part of any friendship that goes beyond the surface level.

In the middle of all this was Jesus who, at the Last Supper, simply declared what the disciples must have already known to be true. He called them friends for that was truly what they had become to Him…and He was there’s as well.

Right now you, Christian, are also His friend and He is even more than that to you, whether you know it yet or not. Our Lord is also the One who both loves and likes you perfectly. Think for a time on that reality and its ramifications and let your heart be joyful. Jesus Christ is not just your friend. He is your best friend.

Healing is a Journey
by Shea Oakley
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As the Church has appropriated some of the therapeutic stress of the culture we live in, the term “healing” has become somewhat of a buzzword among Evangelicals. Of course the Bible speaks often of healing; the Gospel promising us that, with repentance, our wounds will be bound up by the merciful hands of the Great Physician.

However Scripture also implies that the final healing of our emotional ills will not be complete until God wipes away our every tear at the Resurrection. Here on earth, in the meanwhile, we will always carry some degree of pain from wounds not wholly healed. So, for now, our recovery is a journey towards a final destination we have not yet reached. The reason Christians need to know that this is so is because bitterness often finds it place in the still unhealed hearts of people who have come to believe that perfect emotional health is possible right now.

It is true that a few of the “ancient saints” in our midst, men and woman in our churches who have known the Lord for many years, seem to have reached such a deep level of peace that it would be tempting to believe they have already “arrived”. But I suspect that if they were asked most would admit that they are not yet without pain and heartache. These believers may be much closer to the end of their pilgrimage home then we are, but they are still on the road. They have powerfully known the Balm of Gilead but they still are in need of it.

Christian Psychologists have sometimes been heard to complain about clients who expect that a lifetime of damage from emotional, physical or sexual abuse will be “fixed” in a few weeks of counseling. Such unreasonable expectations are sometimes defended by pointing to a Deity who Himself says that He can do the humanly impossible and indeed it is true, He can. However our Lord also has told us that his ways and ours are not always synchronized. God often, perhaps most often, heals over time. He is not the God of the “crash diet” or the “get rich quick” scheme. He is the God of the tree that comes to maturity only after growing for two centuries. He is the God of the tortoise as well as the Cheetah.

The process of losing our emotional imperfections will begin as we surrender our profoundly broken lives to Jesus Christ. But this will happen over a lifetime and not be completed until we leave this fallen world behind some day to be with Him. For now our healing is about getting better, not about getting there.

The Balanced Life
Copyright by Shea Oakley
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The word “balance” is not always associated with the Christian walk. It does not appear in Scripture. Jesus and the apostles never used the word itself. But balance is implied throughout the Bible whenever it speaks to living the life God desires us to live.

First, though, the word has to be defined. The most important part of this definition is to state what it is not and that is “moderation”. Moderation, as we normally use it, refers to never doing too much or too little of some activity. Moderation is implicitly amoral. For instance it is a good word for a Christian to use when speaking of doing too much or too little exercise because exercise, in and of itself, is not immoral. The problem comes when you try to apply the term to something like sexual liaisons out of wedlock. We are not to indulge in a moderate amount of such activity; we are to avoid it altogether. In the context of living the life of a disciple the best understanding of balance is the avoidance of extremes in areas that are not innately sinful for the purpose of properly enjoying the gifts of God.

An example might be dealing with legalism or licentiousness in regards to our freedom in Christ. The Apostle Paul dealt with these extremes in many of his letters to the churches. Some persons in these churches expected “true” believers to hold to Jewish practices and restrictions like circumcision or not eating meat sacrificed to idols. In other churches the opposite extreme held sway. For instance all kinds of sexual sin was being committed in the 1st Century Gentile churches. This happened because some of the early non-Jewish Christians believed they were free to let their physical bodies be engaged in such activities because their spirit was separate from those bodies and would remain unsullied (this belief was a forerunner to the later heresy of Gnosticism). It was also often the result of simple ignorance of the sexual standards Jesus Himself upheld as normative for a holy people. Whether to one extreme or the other these wrong teachings and cases of ignorance in the churches were corrected by Paul and the other apostles.

The need for such correction is an old story and today we face similar extremes in living out our faith. Some fundamentalists, for instance, tell us that anything that is not specifically mentioned in the Bible should be anathema to the true believer. Some would go so far as to say that all art, music and film without a specifically Christian message are forbidden. In fact more radical fundamentalists even take that a step further telling us that the mediums themselves are evil; usually using some Old Testament verses taken out of context for justification. On the other extreme we see what might be called “Loose Evangelicals”, people who feel that they can watch or listen to almost anything without it negatively affecting their souls and their relationship with God. Here, too, is the need for Godly balance. Asceticism for the sake of asceticism is unprofitable. Undiscerning consumption of everything the World says is good is unprofitable as well.

Perhaps we should seek to be as balanced as our Lord who fasted in the wilderness but, shortly thereafter, turned the water into wine at a wedding party. His Holy Spirit can keep us from going to unhealthy extremes if we ask Him to help us lead balanced lives. In Jesus we see a life lived in perfect balance yet with great passion. With the Spirit’s help we can model ourselves after the One who truly knows the best way and come to experience the abundant life He has promised us.

False Comfort and Unnecessary Misery
Copyright 2013 by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

Save us, oh Lord, from false comfort, but also from unnecessary misery for neither is of You.

These are two experiences in the Christian life that are opposite states of feeling and yet have perhaps equally deleterious effects on us if they persist for very long in our lives.

False comfort might be defined as anything that gives us a sense of peace and wellbeing while simultaneously glossing over a serious deficiency in our relationship with God. The source of this comfort might be sinful in and of itself or it may be morally neutral, but become sinful to us because it keeps us from dealing with that deficiency. Writing about innately sinful false comfort C.S. Lewis once stated it this way:

“Perfect love, we know, casteth out fear. But so do several other things — ignorance, alcohol, passion, presumption, and stupidity. It is very desirable that we should all advance to that perfection of love in which we shall fear no longer; but it is very undesirable, until we have reached that stage, that we should allow any inferior agent to cast out our fear.”

Lewis understood that human beings have a natural tendency to want to remove pain using any means necessary. Rather than go through a potentially painful period of growth, possibly involving some repentance on our part, we often look for worldly panaceas of one kind or another. If they make us feel better we may wrongly assume that the Spirit of God is granting us comfort when it is more accurately a rationalized avoidance of reality taking the form of something that simply makes us feel good.

The other side of the coin is accepting misery in our lives that God in no way ordains.

Many sincere Christians assume that whatever pain they face in life is automatically from the hand of God, most likely because of the perception they have of some personal sin, real or imagined. Certainly unrepented sin can cause us misery, but it is dangerous to automatically assume this is the cause. Sometimes an unbiblical kind of spiritual Masochism also masquerades as being of the Spirit when actually it is not of our Lord at all.

Some believers who have not matured in their understanding of the Bible may think that the more pain they endure the more spiritual they are. This was the mistake of some of the extreme ascetics of the early Christian centuries who believed all misery was cleansing and who courted discomfort wherever they could possibly find it. In fact God does not only use pain to mature us, but blessing as well. The blessing may involve some pain (such as in childbirth for instance) but it is not permanent or pervasive and it is not an end in itself.

Both of these errors, seeking false comfort and seeking unnecessary misery, are good subjects for prayer for those who fall into either mistake. They are both diversions from the path of true balance in the Christian life and God stands ready to lovingly correct his children in either case once they recognize the problem and submit it, and themselves, to Him for maturing.

Why Community Matters
Copyright by Shea Oakley
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Probably during no other period in human history has a society unknowingly promoted alienation as much as our own. Modern or, perhaps more accurately, Post-Modern Western civilization is becoming increasingly barren as we move deeper into the 21st Century. Technology and affluence have been developed to the point that we can avoid the healthy interdependence people had for one another even a century ago. What has taken its place is a cult of individualism that promotes the dissolution of the ties that formerly bound us together.

This is the antithesis of the Christian message but the Church has too often reflected the trend in the larger culture around it. In days gone-by local congregations of believers provided the social glue that held believers together in a faith community. Today there is a disturbing trend which sees believers meeting in church buildings for a couple of hours on Sunday and then going their separate ways.

God never intended this for His people. The body of Christ needs to be an example of deep community to the world around it. God is relational and we are made in His image. Human beings wither away when not properly related to God and others of their kind. In our deepest hearts we yearn to be connected to one another. Only in healthy relationships can we find the security we so desperately need and fulfill God’s perfect plan for us.

The Church has to be counter-cultural in the area of human relationships if it is to accomplish its mission at this time in history. Community matters because Christ called us to it. Salvation brings a man or woman into blessed communion with God. It also should bring us into blessed communion with each other.

Seeking Heaven on Earth
Copyright 2013 by Shea Oakley
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A friend of mine had an interesting hobby. He enjoyed taking photographs of old churches in his area. As a sort of adjunct to this hobby he also did etchings of grave markers from the 18th and 19th Centuries in the cemeteries that so often are adjacent to these churches. My friend found that the epitaphs on those stones many times spoke of how the deceased havd finally left this “veil of tears” to go on to a much better place. Whether explicitly or implicitly these stones usually acknowledged that existence in this fallen world is full of burden and grief.

The Puritans of the 17th century were well aware of this truth and, contrary to the popular image of cold, judgmental religious fanatics; they authored many books on how to help those who suffered from “melancholia”, as depression was then known. To the Puritans such suffering was an inevitable part of coming to grips with the fact that those who have tasted Heaven, but continue to live on Earth cannot help but sometimes struggle with pain and sorrow. Such struggle, to them, was an unavoidable part of living with the results of humanity’s disobedience. Would that we had such a sensible perspective today.

It sometimes seems as if some contemporary evangelicals have completely forgotten that Heaven cannot be attained here. In fact it cannot be “attained” at all, only entered, and that is contingent on death. We do not want to come to grips with the fact that trials and tribulations are part and parcel of the present human condition. The New Testament teaches us to “bear each others burdens” and to “mourn with those who mourn”. It never tells us to inform a suffering child of God that he or she is somehow automatically at fault for feeling sorrow. Nowhere in Scripture are we dismissively told to “just get over it”.

Yet the struggling believer sometimes hears just that from the very brethren who they go to for help in sharing the burdens of life. Instead they are scolded for their lack of faith. This is usually justified by a supposedly biblical, but badly exegeted, conceit that joy should and must always be the state of any true believer.

This is not to say that unrepented sin is never the cause of a Christian’s troubles or even that it usually isn’t. We have to some degree embraced the “victim mentality” of our culture with its emphasis on blame and the shirking of personal responsibility. What is at issue here is not the proper rebuke of someone who indulges in that mentality but rather the laying on of an additional burden of guilt to a believer experiencing the human reaction to the results of evil in the world.

It might be instructive to look at the life of Christ, described in the word of God as a “Man of sorrows”. He weeps over Jerusalem, in love, for those in the city who are literally hell-bent on their own destruction. For His friend Lazarus He grieves in the presence of the terrible reality of physical death and in the Garden of Gethsemane experiences the emotional agony that comes from the prospect of His own. Never once, however, does Jesus tell a human being that they should be ashamed for knowing pain and being deeply affected by it. Why would He when He’d been through the experience Himself?

Christians have been rightly accused of sometimes shooting their own wounded. , However those who have known their own dark night of the soul are rarely the ones doing the shooting. Such Christians know just how hard our earthly pilgrimage can be and their reaction to seeing a person in such pain is compassion and a willingness to help them understand and bear it until the trial is over. They know that the “power of positive thinking”, even that which uses Scripture verses as a mantra, may work for a time but it cannot ultimately keep a believer free from experiencing the pain of living in this “veil of tears”. Yes, our Lord tells us that we should not ultimately lose heart and give in to total despair, but at the same time He also does not expect us to be unaffected by the reality of living in what author Frank Peretti so aptly called “This Present Darkness”.

The Problem of Perfection
Copyright by Shea Oakley
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The world is full of frustrated perfectionists. Of course, if we are honest with ourselves, we must realize that frustration and perfectionism go hand in hand because human beings cannot reach perfection by their own effort. This fact might seem self-evident but it does not keep billions of people from trying and experiencing all the misery that comes from repeated failure. One might ask why they continue to try. What is it that compels us to desire to be perfect to begin with?

The theological answer is that all human beings are made in the image of a perfect God and so we are “hardwired” to be perfect beings ourselves. The very sense we have that things are imperfect points towards the existence of something which imperfection must be compared to. We know there is a sun behind the shadows cast by that which is flawed. The one who believes in the God of the Bible knows what or, more accurately, Who this sun is.

There is also an explanation for why imperfection is so inextricably bound up in the human condition. The scripture tells us that the perfect Creator of the universe originally gave the crown of His creation the gift of free-will. It goes on to explain that somewhere in antiquity, at the beginning of our race’s existence, the “proto-humans” used this free-will to turn from the God of perfection in favor of self-sovereignty. Since a perfect God is worthy of, among other things, perfect obedience a race that rejects such obedience immediately becomes imperfect by definition.

But just because we have fallen into imperfection does not mean we do not have a dim corporate memory of what we once were. We are, in fact, acutely aware of what we were, if often only subconsciously. This is at the core of the pain and bewilderment of human existence. We can use any number of things to dull the ache of our imperfection, but we cannot make it go away, at least not on our own.

The message of specifically Christianity is that we can be individually restored to the flawlessness our God had in mind when he made us and this as a gift, not something imperfectly, and thus impossibly, earned. Since only the divine is perfect, the way back to perfection must pass through the divine; specifically through a particular Man who entered human history 2000 years ago and proceeded to live a perfect life from start to finish. It is identification with that perfect Man, through faith, which is the only path God has given us to regain what we have lost.

The Christian proposition is that the true cure for perfectionism is not obtained by effort, but only by and through the perfect gift embodied in Jesus Christ. For the long-suffering perfectionist this is perhaps the essence of the Gospel.

Why New Years Resolutions Never Resolve
Copyright by Shea Oakley
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Many believers tend to follow the larger culture’s custom of making “New Year’s Resolutions.” We are not exempt from the tendency to see January 1st as a time to make an attempt to start fresh in areas of our lives with which we are dissatisfied. In the case of Christians the attempt is often related to stubbornly habitual sin.

I gave up on such resolutions several years ago. It is not that I do not have sin in my life, quite the contrary. It is just that I tend to share the view of a rock band that had a hit song in the 1980’s entitled Nothing Changes on New Year’s Day. When you think about it the sense of “freshness” that hangs about this time on the calendar is really an illusion. It is one that appeals to the accurate sense all human beings have that they are in regular need of new starts. The ushering in of another four numbers on the calendar resonates with this need in all of us and seems to be the obvious time to try something new that will hopefully better our lives, but it is an artificial delineation with no real meaning.

The word try is significant here. Our resolutions tend to be centered, more often than not, on self-effort and this is why they almost inevitably end up frustratingly unfulfilled. When the hope for change in life revolves around just a change of mind about something, coupled with trying to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, the inevitable result is failure. There is a reason why new gym memberships spike around the beginning of any given year. There is equally a reason why the surging number of unfamiliar faces glimpsed at any gym in January and February predictably disappears in March and April. Willpower-driven pledges are almost always a dead-end, and it does not typically take long to get there.

We live in the age of “self-help”, a term that has to be one of the most oxymoronic in recent history. As biblical Christians we should know this, but the truth of the matter is that many of us do not (witness the rise of the “Christian self-help” sections of religious bookstores, a doubly oxy-moronic label when you think about it.) Believers are by no means free of the futile tendency to continue to try to fight the flesh with the flesh. We often give lip-service to relying on the power of God to effect real and needed change in our lives. Unfortunately our continuing failures, both individually and corporately, to live differently than the rest of the world belie such claims.

Please don’t get me wrong, a change of mind about something in our lives that is offensive to God and destructive to us is a good thing. The problem comes when we have difficulty truly surrendering to Christ the effort to eliminate whatever the sin happens to be. We certainly need to come to the place of decision that a certain habitual transgression truly has to go. What we do not need is to then believe on either a conscious or subconscious level that we somehow have any real strength to make it go. It is one thing to change our minds, but it is quite another to allow our Lord to change our hearts in such a way that genuine deliverance from sin occurs.

A works-oriented mentality regarding sanctification is just as faulty as one regarding salvation. We have no incipient power to achieve either pardon for our sin or victory over the sin that remains in our lives once that pardon is obtained. In both cases the power has to come from God through the shed blood of Jesus, received as a gift. It was His resolution to die on a cross for us that really matters when it comes to attaining any real and lasting victory over sin…and New Years is no better or worse time than any other to remember that fact.