IVP - Strangely Dim

Merry Christmas

Jesus is our childhood's pattern;
day by day, like us he grew;
he was little, weak, and helpless,
tears and smiles like us he knew;
and he feeleth for our sadness,
and he shareth in our gladness.
--Cecil Frances Alexander “Once in Royal David’s City,” verse 3

We all live off his generous bounty,
gift after gift after gift.
We got the basics from Moses,
and then this exuberant giving and receiving,
This endless knowing and understanding—
all this came through Jesus, the Messiah.
No one has ever seen God,
not so much as a glimpse.
This one-of-a-kind God-Expression,
who exists at the very heart of the Father,
has made him plain as day.
--John 1:16-18, The Message

And our eyes at last shall see him,
through his own redeeming love;
for that chlid so dear and gentle
is our Lord in heaven above;
and he leads his children on
to the place where he is gone.
--Cecil Frances Alexander “Once in Royal David’s City,” verse 4

Surprise

I had big plans for Advent this year. Big plans to do nothing. My church gave me the idea first a few years ago by encouraging us to get our Christmas shopping done before the first Sunday of Advent. I vowed vehemently this year to finish by December 2 and seemed to almost make it, but looking back at my last few weeks, I wasn't as close as I thought.

A few months ago I was reminded in an IVP manuscript by Kimberly Conway Ireton that Advent is as much about Christ's second coming as Christmas is about his first coming. She offers practical ways to focus our hearts on the significance of the seasons of the church calendar, so since then, with her help, I've been preparing for Advent. I thought and prayed about something I could fast from. I ordered a Revised Common Lectionary with daily readings. I tried not to overschedule. I wanted Advent--one of my favorite times of the year--to be filled with longing for Christ.

The reality is, often it's hard for me to truly long for Christ and for his return. It's hard to long for what you already have, and since I've been a Christian virtually my whole life, I haven't known life without Christ. The celebration of his birth feels familiar and comfortable. And to be perfectly honest, it's hard for me to long for Christ's second coming too, because I know heaven is so far from what I can imagine that I don't even try to imagine it. That means I inevitably find myself longing mostly for what I know: moments of joy and peace and contentment on Earth.

Still, as measured on the Spiritual Gauge, the first week-and-a-half of Advent went relatively well. The Advent services at my church are always especially powerful in helping me reflect on the darkness of our world and the light Christ brought when he was born on Earth and still brings today as he continues to reveal himself in the world. I spent some time in silence. I prayed Psalm 42:1-2 and Psalm 63:1, asking God to fill me with longing for himself. I intentionally listened to a few songs that help me reflect on my own sinfulness and the gift of Christ coming as Savior. I got more sleep. My schedule was relatively clear.

But last week, my good-intentioned plans started to fall apart. A few unexpected expenses and a new budget caused money anxiety to set in. My schedule got busy--with mostly fun, life-giving activities, it's true, but you can only drink so much water--or so many holiday drinks from Starbucks, say--before you start to drown (or shake from the caffeine, as the case may be). I was running--and still trying to squeeze more things in. My daily readings from the Revised Common Lectionary became rushed. My prayers from the Psalms became a little more sporadic. I got less sleep--a lot less sleep.

So here's where I'm at, four days from Christmas: I'm tired, with a youth group event to stop in at tonight, a serious packing session after that, even less sleep than I've been getting and a 6 a.m. flight to catch tomorrow before I will truly be on vacation. I'm disappointed in myself and the nature of my Advent, cringing when I hear people say (and when I've caught myself saying) "it's that time of year" in reference to their extraordinary busyness. I'm grieving the pain I know that friends and family and others around the world are experiencing. And yet, surprising to me, I am seeing even more clearly how powerful and true the light of Christ is--Christ, the only real source of hope in our broken, hurting world. And, even more surprising to me, I am longing for Christ more, and for his return, because I can imagine friends and family free from the pain that's come from the Fall, and that glimpse of heaven is enough to make me long for it more.

I shouldn't be surprised at the ways Christ is meeting me, I know, since he's in the habit of showing up and answering prayers in unexpected times and places--after hundreds of years of waiting, even--right in the midst of our busyness and pain and failure. Mary (not to mention the rest of the Israelites) certainly didn't expect Christ to come to her the way he did. And I imagine her pregnancy--including a long donkey ride to Bethlehem--and delivery in a stable didn’t go as she might have imagined them (perhaps in a nice room with her mother at her side?). Coming in unexpected ways is Christ's way.

So however your Advent has been--stressful, busy ("Is it Advent?" some of you are asking), decorationless, peaceful--

Surprise:

"What came into existence was Life,

and the Life was Light to live by.

The Life-Light blazed out of the darkness;

the darkness couldn't put it out." (John 1:4-5 The Message)

And the Life-Light blazes still.

Merry Christmas, friends.

I Can See My Breath

You'll forgive me, I hope, for not resting merry this Christmas. Frankly, this year's Christmas season has been the most stressful one I can remember. Granted, I have a bad memory, but I also have a shockingly great number of Christmases under my burgeoning belt.

This Christmas I don't have a Christmas tree, either inside or outside the house. Last year we had both: shortly after Thanksgiving we hacked down a tree to stick in our living room, and my neighbors got the cockamamie idea that everyone should prop up and decorate a tree in their front yard. My outdoor tree fell over three or four times a day, so this year I opted out of the opt-in neighborhood tradition. The spartan decor inside our house, on the other hand, was not entirely up to us. We're in the middle of a garage rebuilding gone horribly wrong, and our contractor's offer to put the contents of our garage--complete with every weapon in our Christmas decorating arsenal--in storage seemingly morphed into a hostage crisis with no ransom demands. We had no idea where, when, in what condition or even if we'll ever see our garagestuff again. And so, in the short term, no Christmas decorations for us.

Even if we had gotten a tree, we wouldn't have had any place to put it. As a result of a wood floor installation gone horribly wrong, we've been twice displaced from our living room, along with all our living room furniture. The tree would have simply gotten in the way. We caved and bought one of those tabletop neon Lite-Brite tree things that look like (but, despite the best efforts of our cats, don't taste like) real trees suffering a radioactive blast. But apart from that synthetic surrogate, no Christmas tree for us.

In short, this year all my traditions surrounding Christmas have been turned on their head. I'm off my game, I freely confess. My back hurts from moving all my furniture not once, not twice but three times. My voice hurts from the repeated phone calls to not one but two contractors. My wallet hand hurts from all the debit card swipes and home improvement invoices. My head hurts from keeping all these projects moving forward without failing my responsibilities or alienating my relationships along the way. My heart hurts from all the resultant stress and from the aching suspicion that Christmas is a burden not worth bearing. Tis certainly not, to my mind, the season to be jolly.

I'm not a terribly sentimental person. I prefer to think of myself as revolutionary: I'm generally more inclined to complain about traditions as barriers to progress than to celebrate them as something significant. And yet this year I find that I'm missing the traditions that I've had to forgo--even those traditions that I've grumbled about in the past.

In the midst of all this tradition angst I came across a passage from Thomas Merton in his New Seeds of Contemplation. Merton has been an essential guide as I've worked on my forthcoming book Deliver Us from Me-Ville. And in this instance he's once again cut through the morass of my morosity and floated an idea I find positively illuminating:

There is only one living doctrine in Christianity. The whole truth of Christianity has been fully revealed: it has not yet been fully understood or fully lived. . . . The constant human tendency away from God and away from this living tradition can only be counteracted by a return to tradition, a renewal and a deepening of the one unchanging life that was infused into the Church at the beginning.

And yet this tradition must always be a revolution because by its very nature it denies the values and standards to which human passion is so powerfully attached. . . .This is the most complete revolution that has ever been preached; in fact, it is the only true revolution, because all the others demand the extermination of somebody else, but this one means the death of the man who, for all practical purposes, you have come to think of as your own self.

In the Christian faith, for Merton, revolution is to tradition what exhaling is to inhaling--a dynamic that is as essential to our lives as it is transforming. We are what we breathe in, but what we breathe in must also be breathed out or we will die. Tradition toxifies when it is infected with traditionalism: a sentimental fondness for sameness perhaps best characterized by the mass-market Christmas decorations available at a store near you. Merton compares it to barnacles on the hull of a ship: they're inevitable to any ship worth sailing, but you'd better have a plan for scraping them off.

Scraping off those barnacles, however, is its own burden. My tradition angst this season is perhaps better characterized as revolution fatigue--sour grapes at the effortless decorating of my friends and neighbors that's translated into a general cynicism about the holiday. Thinking of Christmas as solely an occasion for people to stores to move product and people to hoard more and more junk has left me in a perpetual state of grinchiness. Having no markers of my own to remind me of the sacredness of the holiday is wearing me down.

I'm tired of not thinking about the tradition of Christmas--not the decorations per se but their significance. Through the tradition of Christmas the Christian church remembers that God so loved the world that the Word of God became flesh and dwelt among us.

What I'm discovering in this week before the holiday is that I need to catch my breath. I'm all exhaled out. Fortunately, through the witness of people like Merton, my family, my coworkers, my friends--and ultimately by the grace of God--I can see my breath this Christmas, and I'm reminded once again that I was made to breathe in and breathe out.

Merry Christmas from Strangely Dim. May you have a breathless--and breathful--holiday season.

The Most Sexiest Time of the Year

This time of year all thoughts turn toward an annual tradition that inspires as much controversy as joy. That tradition, of course, is the naming of People magazine's "Sexiest Man Alive." This year we send our congratulations to Matt Damon, although the crown is tarnished somewhat by the reception Damon and some of his formerly sexy friends are giving it. From Ben Affleck to Tom Brady to Jimmy Kimmel to George Clooney to Matt Damon himself, this year's announcement has been acknowledged with an ironic wink and a sarcastic salutation. Ladies and gentlemen, the day may have come when sexy is finally subverted.

Four years ago I reflected on the social construction of sexy here at Strangely Dim. It remains one of my favorite posts of all time. So I reprint it here for your amusement. Merry Christmas early, everybody.

The Social Construction of Sexy
Originally posted November 21, 2003.
Brad Pitt, Richard Gere, George Clooney and Benjamin Bratt should, by all rights, be dead.

I do not draw this conclusion because my wife nearly loses consciousness when the camera settles on their faces. I’m not so petty. Nevertheless, they should be dead. After all, they were each (at least once) voted “sexiest man alive” by People magazine. And since being voted “sexiest man alive,” each has been tossed to the curb to make way for another “sexy” man’s ascendancy. And with the possible exception of Brad Pitt, these guys don’t look much different now from how they looked the day before the “sexiest ballots alive” were cast.

Maybe I don’t have an eye for that sort of thing, but I still find it alarming that the world is, apparently, swarming with superlatively sexy men—one of which I, sadly, am not. These men don’t look much like one another, nor do they look much like the sexy interlopers who have taken their place—Sean Connery, for example, or Johnny Depp. What is sexy in America is a moving target, and no sooner have you received guidance on the “sexiest haircut alive” or the “sexiest use of chest hair alive” than some sexy-come-lately turns the national head, and you have to start over again.

No, sexiness is linked to newness in America; it’s difficult to be familiar and sexy at the same time. And our ability to come to widespread agreement about what is temporarily sexy on a consistent basis is testimony to the social construction of sexiness. It’s not so much that we become aware of, say, Ben Affleck’s sexiness; it’s more so that we agree to think of Ben Affleck and not, say, Ben Franklin as sexy.

Issues can be as sexy as humans, which is to say that our infatuation with issues can be as fickle and fleeting as our infatuation with Pierce Brosnan’s rock-hard abs. This poses a problem for book publishers, even magazine publishers, even increasingly Internet publishers, since the time it takes to fully address an issue from every angle often exceeds the time it takes to get distracted by some other, more flashy topic. It’s the same kind of group decision making as the knowing glances between women when, say, Freddie Prinze Jr. walks into a room, followed shortly thereafter by, say, Denzel Washington.

But maybe it’s good that our answer to the question “What is sexy?” is so fleeting and temporary. After all, it’s hardly all that important. My relationship with George Clooney didn’t change all that much once he was voted “sexiest man alive,” nor did it change when his reign as “sexiest man alive” ended just 365 sexy days later. If once a year we can settle the “Who is the sexiest man of all?” question, I will waste less time asking it of my magic mirror and get back to work making the world a better place for everyone, sexy or not.

The Bigness of the Small

I'm still trying to process my trip to Cambodia last month, to know all that I am supposed to know and remember right now, trusting that what is supposed to become clear later--maybe in a month, or a year--will. My trip, as missions trips and other cultures are wont to do, sparked so many ideas and thoughts that I want to process with you, Strangely Dim readers, who have shown yourselves willing to wait as strangely dim thoughts become clearer, coherent, practical, applicable.

The idea looming large in my mind right now is, ironically, small. The bigness of the small, that is.

I went to Cambodia to coteach an editing seminar. That was the task, simply stated but not, of course, simply executed.

At the end of the first day of our seminar, Elaina (my coworker and coteacher) and I were

Discouraged.
Disheartened.
Disappointed.
Dismayed.
(Etc.).

Pretty much all the difficulties of teaching editing through a translator became evident. We realized we weren't going to be able to use much of what we had prepared to be translated ahead of time, and there wasn't time to have anything else translated. I felt stuck and defeated, and the week was just starting. At the beginning of the second day, I cried.

I just want to point out that I did not cry at the end of the second day, when I opened my suitcase to find very small ants crawling around in it. Small ants in a suitcase, if you didn’t know, are a big deal. But I did cry that Tuesday morning out of frustration and disappointment. I couldn't help the missionaries and Cambodians. I couldn't do the task I had been brought to do. I wouldn't be useful to God.

I can tell you that the next three days went much better, thanks to truly God-given inspiration about exercises to try. And I can tell you that Steve, the missionary we went to help, was very encouraged about the work our team did. The fact is, though, that three weeks removed from that day, I don't really know what our students took away from our editing seminar. We had no tangible way of measuring what our students learned.

And to be completely honest, in a country that has seen so much death and torture and despair, teaching a few editing principles to a handful of would-be editors seems so small. Cambodians need food and clean water and AIDS care and help getting out of the sex-trafficking industry. I was tempted at points to believe an editing seminar--particularly one taught through a translator--couldn't be useful at all.

But who am I to say what Cambodia needs? Who am I to judge what's useful to God or not? On Monday evening Steve reminded us that God's work in Cambodia is a big puzzle--say 5,000 pieces. Our work there, his family's work there for seventeen years, the work of his staff at their publishing company, are pieces of that puzzle--or maybe not even full pieces; maybe just work toward another piece of the puzzle. But all are useful and important and necessary in God's plans for Cambodia.

And who's to say teaching people to edit was my main task anyway? Maybe my job, my piece, was even smaller; maybe the role Elaina and I served in teaching our seminar was simply being foreigners. Not many Cambodians would have attended an editing class taught by a fellow Cambodian, but after a week of observing the leadership role Steve's editor Savy took in our class, the students we had may start to trust her knowledge and experience.

I read Ephesians 3:20-21 while in Cambodia. I've always been sure that God doing "more than all we ask or imagine" means that God's power and wisdom and work are more than we could ever fathom. But now I'm sure that it also means God, with his all-knowing, all-wise perspective and his limitless ability, can use efforts, words, lesson plans that to us seem so small, in bigger ways than we can ever imagine. Jesus did it often. "Here is a boy with five small barley loaves and two small fish," Andrew said to Jesus in John 6 when a large crowd needed to be fed, "but how far will they go among so many?" I can tell you that no one left hungry that day.

Three weeks ago I gave my small offerings in Cambodia. How far will they go? I don't know. I'm tempted even now, as I so frequently am when I offer something to God and others, to say "Not very far." But during and since my time in Cambodia, God has been doing some type of healing in me, growing a small, fighting piece of faith into something much bigger, so that right now I'm actually trusting his work even when I can't see it or figure it out. Because what I can see is that he is pulling together all the small things he calls each of us to do, and using them to do his big work.

Celebrate with me, reader-friends, because I sense that for me this new trust, this rest, this perspective, is a very big small step.

Ode to Editing

While in Cambodia I was teaching an editing workshop (through a translator, I might add; it's much more difficult than it sounds), and I'm feeling inspired by Dave's Ode to Homonym Substitutions and Ode to an Artfully Written Run-On Sentence (which I feel obligated to give you another example of here), and I was discussing with a friend last week a book that needs a much closer edit than it received (all I can say is: chop, chop), so as our Fortnight of Odes draws to a close (much more gracefully than this sentence), I offer you an Ode to Editing. (Just a little warning: it may move you to grateful tears. I might have shed a tear or two myself while writing it . . .)

Sum folks may claim (I wont name names)
that editing need, we don't
I; ofer you hear
ode an that makes clear
why survyving without it--we won't

Things are A miss (I promise u this)!
without a good editor's eyes
we labour for. You
to make errorrs few
so all of your books are good buys.

Idaes shine threw and words becomme new
when editing! work is done well
And what the is test
of an editors best ?
Reader, you are the one who can tell!

If we have at all inspired you during our Fortnight of Odes--or even if we haven't--why not post one of your own?

Ode to a Rabbit

Today is the first of the month, which means that once again we're participating in our friendly Rabbit competition. Today also, however, falls within our Fortnight of Odes, so that ups the ante a bit. And to top it off, today is the birthday of Don Everts, author of four-soon-to-be-nine books. So I hope you'll forgive my infelicities as I try to marry these three phenomena together in today's post.

Ode to a Rabbit Named Don Everts

He hops in beauty as the knight
Hops to duty and sits down to write
All the ideas living in his head
This knight writes nightly; he'll sleep when he's dead.

He's heard everything in his short little life--
From "I did . . ." from his students to "I do" from his wife.
His feet may be dirty, but they're covered in luck--
For example, book contracts seem to fall off the truck

Into his laptop, where he mines all his senses
For a way to convey best our cosmic offenses.
And just when you think he's said all that needs saying,
He twitches his nose and continues conveying.

So here's to Don Everts, our favorite bunny;
He's cute, warm and friendly, decidedly funny.
A preacher, a writer, who's highly regarded;
Here's hoping he's still only just getting started.

Happy birthday to you,
Happy birthday to you,
Happy birthday dear Don . . .
Happy birthday to you!