IVP - Strangely Dim - February 2009 Archives

The Dimmer the Better

In the beginning, Strangely Dim was a solo venture. I worked alone, and I liked it. Truth be told, I was a bit of a diva about the whole thing, contriving ways of punctuating my conversations with phrases like "I wrote about that ON MY BLOG," or, if I wanted a bit more gravitas, "I'll be addressing that very issue soon IN MY ONLINE COLUMN."

But like many things, over time blogs can get a little stale, and ideas conceived in isolation can forestall in arcane incoherence. It was, eventually, no longer good for the solo blogger to be alone, so Lisa Rieck very graciously joined the Strangely Dim party. The result has been a nice counterbalance between our voices with the occasional silliness framed in a whole fortnight given over to something or other.

So nice, in fact, that Lisa and I recently shouted out to our colleagues at InterVarsity Press the sober-minded, professional equivalent of "Red Rover! Red Rover! Send Christa right over!" And like a bolt of lightning Christa Countryman shot across the field, broke through our tightly locked arms and joined our little blogging entourage. You'll start seeing posts to Strangely Dim from Christa in the next couple of weeks.

Christa came to InterVarsity Press originally to help coordinate our participation in the 2006 Urbana Student Missions Convention, but people here know a good opportunity when they see one, so Christa's temporary position in the business department morphed into a permanent one in the editorial department. She now proofreads books and marketing materials, and keeps everybody up to speed on the Cylon menace chronicled on the TV show Battlestar Galactica--for which I, for one, am especially grateful. She likes to bake and, as you'll see, she likes to write really well. Either way, you're in for a treat.

So there you have it: Strangely Dim is now a troika of strangeness and dimness. Consider yourself warned.

For the Love of Lent

Last night I gathered with others from my church for our annual Solemn Assembly to confess my sin individually and corporately; to have ashes placed on my forehead as a reminder that the cost of sin is death, and that I am finite and dependent on the Creator who formed us from the dust of the earth; to hear words of truth spoken from the Bible about who I am, about sins I'm guilty of; to pray the Jesus prayer as so many saints before have:


It's a service that called us to name our sin, to sit for a little while in the raw, ugly fact that we are sinners who have turned from God, doing what we want to do instead of what we know he wants us to do. It felt awkward, uncomfortable, unfamiliar, sitting with others I know, pondering my own sin, identifying with each other for a while not as the friends and ministry partners and small group members we are, the roles that usually define our interactions with each other--but as fellow sinners.

This, however, was not a wallowing service. It was solemn, yes, because it was serious, because sin is serious. But after we sat with our sin, after we asked Jesus Christ, the Son of God, for mercy--then we received that mercy anew. We shared in Communion, celebrating Christ's painful death and victorious resurrection on our behalf, taking it in as the free gift of God that it is. And we recommitted ourselves to living as the people of God--as sinners redeemed, as new creations in whom Christ dwells--in a hurting, broken, sinful world.

Lent, which begins on Wednesday, has become a significant time of year for me. Yet it can often feel unfamiliar or mysterious, depending on the tradition you've grown up in or depending on where you're at in your faith. Indeed, it is unfamiliar because it's so countercultural; it goes against our efforts to appear good, our perfectionistic tendencies, our desires to keep our minds on happy, uplifting topics. Lament and sin are not on any "conversation-starter lists" for first dates or parties. We don't discuss them in the hallways at work or on the train during our morning commute. We don't like to feel bad about ourselves and recognize our sinfulness, both of which usually occur during Lenten services like the one I attended last night.

But Lent as I am coming to see it is not about judging ourselves, grinding ourselves down into the dirt until we can't even get off the floor for the shame of the sins we've committed. It is, rather, a time set aside to give us perspective, to correct our vision of ourselves and the world that may have tilted to the "we can't help it that we sin" side through the year, to remind us that the world is not as it was meant to be and not as it will always be, and, above all, to help us better celebrate and understand what Christ has done. We can't really feel grateful for Christ's suffering until we understand that we are the ones who deserved to suffer. We can't understand the significance of his sacrifice until we accept the seriousness of our own sin.

In this context, then, Lent becomes not just about sin, but about the juxtaposition of sin and mercy: a confession of lust is forgiven with love; an acknowledgment of anger is answered with grace; a group of deserters has their feet washed by the One who knows they'll desert him.

So, whether you've been observing Lent for years or haven't heard of it till today, I invite you to do something to observe it, beginning on Wednesday. You might consider simply giving up something that keeps you from spending time with God, or that keeps you from seeing the truth of who he is.

You could also observe Lent with us at Likewise books. Tamara Park, author of Sacred Encounters from Rome to Jerusalem and relatively new to observing Lent herself, will send out a short email each week with a reflection and questions as well as a song, Scripture and image to keep in mind as you go through your days. These emails can help you take stock of your spiritual state and give you space for sacred encounters of your own. If you want to receive Tamara's emails during Lent, simply email us at likewise@ivpress.com and put "Lenten Sacred Encounter" on the subject line.

Kimberlee Conway Ireton, author of The Circle of Seasons, can serve as a Lent guide for you too. She explains the background and practices of Lent for you in chapter five of her book, as well as gives simple suggestions for Lenten observances that can make it a significant period of discovery for you. In addition, she's written and posted family devotions for each day of Lent at her website. Just click on "Resources" to find the guide.

Yet another option (aren't we helpful??) is to join Dave on his personal blog where, starting Wednesday, he'll be posting daily readings from his latest book, Deliver Us from Me-Ville--a particularly apt topic for the season.

Lent, admittedly, takes work. But it's work that is so necessary for our growth in Christ. As I walked from the parking lot to my office building this morning, the sidewalk gave me a clear--though unglamorous--picture of the essence of this season of the church year. There, alongside the white, unmarred snow that fell this weekend, lay a pile of geese poop. The juxtaposition of Lent is that stark as well: we see our ugly, unglamorous sin next to Christ's saving grace, our embarrassing messiness beside God's deep mercy. Starting Wednesday, let's name and sit in and walk through our sin together--that we might know in even deeper ways the gift of having that dirty sin become clean like untouched snow.

Schmoozing, Stalking & Social Compacts

There are two ways to violate a social compact: (1) fail to live up to your end of the deal, or (2) fail to end the relationship where it is supposed to end. I experienced both over the past week at a national conference I attended. Gathered together were some two thousand people, each of whom came to the conference for their own complex network of reasons. Among those reasons were invariably the chance to stalk someone famous, the chance to schmooze someone influential, the chance to convalesce after a significant time of uninterrupted hurriedness, the chance to grow personally and professionally, and--let's be frank--the chance to eat more than perhaps one ought.

These were, at least, some of the reasons I attended. The problem with schmoozing and stalking, however, is that your prey does not necessarily approach your social compact in the same way as you. They have, it's fair to say, their own prey to pursue, and so while they might offer one eye and ear to you, they keep the other on alert for either an out or a better offer. Consequently, I was occasionally given the cold shoulder, even in the same moment that I was schmoozing and stalking with all my might.

I'm not bitter; I get the game, and I get the rules of the game. Every once in a while, however, the game is thrown a curve, and the players are left wondering where the playbook went. This happened to me when I inadvertently bumped into one of the most influential people in the whole place. I covered my ignorance with a cheeky grin and admittedly slick eye contact, and I put out my hand for the conventional Western greeting.

This venerated elder took my hand and shook it, and shook it, and shook it. He shook it like a Polaroid picture, if I might borrow an analogy. I tried to let go, and then tried to regain my dignity by reengaging his handshake--again and again and again. It may not have been the longest handshake in recorded history, but it was strikingly long and seemingly impossible to break. I felt like the Millennium Falcon, caught in the tractor beam of the Death Star. Might as well kill the engines and go where you're led.

Almost immediately prior to this encounter I had been reading the first half of Miroslav Volf's Exclusion & Embrace, which offers ethical parameters to individuals and even whole cultures for our interactions with one another. In contrast to exclusion, the way of the world that disempowers others by dehumanizing and marginalizing them, Volf characterizes authentic encounter as an embrace in four acts:

Act one: You open yourself to the Other, perhaps by spreading your arms or, in my case, extending your hand.

Act two: You wait for the Other to reciprocate your advance by willingly entering into your embrace.

Act three: You close the gap between one another to establish the embrace.

Act four: You release your embrace and allow the Other to continue being Other.

To leave out any of these four creates a breach:

• By not opening yourself, you refuse to let down your guard and can't fully enter into relationship.
• By not waiting for the Other to reciprocate, you trespass on the person of the Other and trample on their dignity.
• By not closing the gap, you reject the opportunity to be vulnerable to the Other, and the authenticity that accompanies that vulnerability.
• By not releasing the embrace, you colonize the Other, disregarding their uniqueness and again trampling on their dignity.

I had these ethics of embrace in mind as I endured the eternal handshake of this venerated elder, but to be honest, I found his colonization of my uniqueness endearingly gracious: by keeping the embrace going longer than social convention would expect, he was effectively transferring some of his own dignity onto me. We later even shared a delightful meal together, completely stripped of the agendas that tainted so many other meals throughout the week. I must confess that I saw him in a different light from other subjects of my schmoozing and stalking; here was a whole person, whose significance extended beyond his utility to me.

I'm reminded of Jesus' encouragement to his followers to always take the lower seat at a feast table. It's not so much an ethical command as a nugget of advice: you can't know in advance whether your host wants you to take the seat of honor or "the least important place," so it's infinitely better to be invited up than to be cast down, to be embraced rather than excluded. The advice works in reverse as well, I suppose: be attentive to all your guests--from the powerful to the powerless, from the naive dreamers to the disillusioned schemers--because you never know which one you'll wind up embracing as a friend.

Contact Papers

One of the things about becoming an author is that your intersection with the world expands. No longer are you known only by people you've met, you're now known by people you've not met. And every so often those unmet readers introduce themselves to you.

I've met a variety of people through the Internet, some of whom introduce themselves to me as being fans of my writing. Go figure. I'm occasionally interrupted, for example, by an instant message from an undergraduate student in Wisconsin who tells me I remind her of Donald Miller. She's always writing funny stuff like that. And while in Miami one week I met a guy, quite serendipitously, who's read "everything [I've] ever written." We talked together and prayed together, and we've since continued our conversation through the World Wide Web.

I'm starting to think that books are, more than anything, springboards to a more particular, more meaningful conversation. For someone who makes his living in the publishing industry, I actually hold a relatively low view of books--not low in the sense that I think they're silly or meaningless but in the sense that they, like a "low church," are at their best when they close the gap between the inherent mystique of the thing and the lived worldview of its constituency.

Books, regardless of their particular depth or shallowness, can function as icebreakers that give people entry into one another's lives. From there we can move to weightier, more existential conversations--the newly discovered past abuse of a loved one and its impact on an adult relationship; the suspicion that God is calling someone to a dramatic shift in their life's trajectory; the nagging perplexity of a God who seems appealing and a religious system that seems oppressive. The best books carry content that's worth reading, but they go further by inviting the reader to go further--into an idea and into community. The best books, then, allow that there is a universe beyond them, and they seek to make meaningful contact.

Groundhogs, Cardinals, Steelers, Rabbit

The game that's sweeping the nation came up against stiff competition this week, with our attention diverted from Rabbits toward today's conflict between the Cardinals and the Steelers, and tomorrow's conflict between groundhogs and the weather. Consequently, Dan Webster waited till late morning and still managed to be first to archive his "Rabbit!" at the Rabbit Uber Alles page on Facebook.

Maybe next month will be your month!