IVP - Strangely Dim - February 2010 Archives

The Anxious Bench and the Mercy Seat

More Strangely Dim reflections to aid your journey through Lent.

In the early nineteenth century, American evangelist Charles Finney would direct those considering faith in Christ to sit on a bench, where they would wait for personal ministry. He called it the "anxious seat." The practice became a focal point for the despisers of Finney's demonstrative revivalism, with Reformed theologian John Williamson Nevin delivering a scathing critique of the movement in his tract The Anxious Bench.

Because I'm not much of a historian, I came across this term only by reading Peter Heltzel's great Jesus and Justice and surfing quickly to Wikipedia. And because I'm a shameless hawker of Likewise Books, the mention of "bench" sent me shortly thereafter to Tamara Park's delightful travel memoir Sacred Encounters from Rome to Jerusalem, in which the benches of Italy, Bosnia, Syria and elsewhere serve as icons of encounter. It's an apt image, really: on benches we meet people who are vastly different from us and discover that the divine longing they feel, even if only unconsciously, is the same as our own. Or something like that.

Anyway, if there's any time of year that's custom-made for the anxious bench, it's probably during Lent. Not only because Lent coincides with the time we do our taxes--when we bite our nails in anticipation of how much we'll owe and whether we'll be audited--but also because Lent is dedicated to the anxiety of the pious.

During Lent we focus on our need for salvation, and we intentionally forget for a time that our salvation has already been procured. We begin the Lenten season by being reminded that we are "but dust," and we end it with shouts of "Crucify him, crucify him!" before turning off all the lights. During Lent we make ourselves uncomfortable in creative ways--going without things that bring us some delight or satisfaction, taking on practices that are unfamiliar and at times cumbersome. During Lent we engage in a kind of pious theater, setting aside whatever blessed assurance we carry with us throughout the year and considering what it would be like to not know that Sunday's coming, to live without the confidence that "Christ is risen, he is risen indeed."

In the temple of the Lord there's a relic that has always captured my imagination. The mercy seat sits atop the ark of the covenant and is occupied by God on the Day of Atonement. (Once again, my thanks to Wikipedia.) The New Testament takes up the image of the mercy seat as an icon of Christ's sacrifice; here the greater sacrifice was made, the atonement was made permanent. But the mercy seat offers its own anxiety: the atonement is a reminder that our relationship with God is uneven. He forgives, we fail; we beg for mercy, he grants us absolution. We bow, he sits. To remain in that dynamic perpetually seems to me more anxious than gracious.

Thank God, then, that the atonement is not the end of the story. The risen Christ actually appears impatient with his followers, who seem reluctant to move on from the cross: "Why are you crying? . . . Do not hold on to me . . . Stop doubting and believe . . . If I want him to remain alive until I return, what is that to you? You must follow me" (John 20--21). The gospel isn't static, Jesus is reminding his followers. The gospel has legs. As the old blues song says, "When the Lord gets ready, you gotta move."

Benches--whether of the bus or park variety, or those that are marked by anxiety or mercy--are temporary settings. We sit for a while until the time comes to take up and move again. For Jesus, the mercy seat was a three-day tenure; on Easter he rises and walks, and bids us follow him. We weren't made to sit forever, whether in anxiety or grace; we were made not to sit but to live, and to move, and to have our being in him.

A Hard Drive's Gonna Fall

A post from three years ago (on my other blog, Loud Time) to prime your Lenten pump.

Yesterday all my troubles seemed so far away. I was happily typing away on my computer keyboard in my office at work, listening to music I'd stored on iTunes, when all of a sudden a grinding noise interrupted my enjoyment of Half-Handed Cloud or Andrew Bird or somesuch. My hard drive crashed, and all of my music crashed with it.

I'm smart, so they tell me: I store all my working documents on the network server, so a hard-drive crash is a professional inconvenience moreso than a total calamity. When asked whether I lost anything important, I quickly responded no. Then I thought about it, and realized that I lost all the music that I've downloaded or uploaded to my computer. That doesn't affect my work, but it sure did affect my mood.

I use iTunes, but I don't have an iPod. I didn't think I needed one, since I could play songs on my PDA, which incidentally exploded on me a few weeks ago. So while I've bought my share of music from iTunes, and downloaded my share of music from artist websites, and ripped my share of CDs from my collection onto my hard-drive for convenience's sake, and organized my share of playlists for the listening convenience of my networked-in coworkers, today I find myself sitting in silence, with nothing but the memory of much of my music.

Now, then, comes the task of rebuilding, which involves revisiting the relative significance of what I've stored in the past. What attracted me to these songs in the first place? Do I repurchase songs like "Freeze-Frame" by J. Geils Band or "Common People" by William Shatner (with Ben Folds and Joe Jackson), or were they simply indulgences that I ought to now forgo? Do I track down Ben Kweller's website again so I can get his songs for free, or do I bite the bullet and pay the money to support the artist? Is the studio version of Ray LaMontagne's "Trouble" adequate, or should I go looking again for the live version? And do I really like Bright Eyes and Dashboard Confessional enough to pay for their music, or should I be grateful for the time I had with their free downloads and leave it at that?

The genius of iTunes is that 99 cents seems like a pittance, a song purchase the sort of impulse that's not worth resisting. Why should I not buy "The Connection" by Phish or "I Wanna Be Sedated" by the Ramones? They take up so little space and they bring me such pleasure! Not to mention what they do for my reputation: I am legitimately regarded as eclectic by virtue of the diversity of artists included in my playlists. But do I have to have them: there's the question. If I do, then my music--and all I've allowed it to say about me--has taken possession of my person, and I have become an idolator.

I'm reminded of the rebuilding of Jerusalem's temple, recorded in Ezra 3:

All the people gave a great shout of praise to the LORD, because the foundation of the house of the LORD was laid. But many of the older priests and Levites and family heads, who had seen the former temple, wept aloud when they saw the foundation of this temple being laid, while many others shouted for joy. No one could distinguish the sound of the shouts of joy from the sound of weeping, because the people made so much noise. And the sound was heard far away.

The new temple would be as nothing compared to the original, a fact that caused legitimate lament for Jerusalem's elders. But for those who were young, the wreckage of the old temple--not the temple itself--was all they had known, and so this new temple was a fresh start, bringing with it a new sense of possibility for each and everyone gathered. They cheered, and rightly so: the laying of the foundation of the second temple marked the beginning of a new era of the people of God, one into which eventually the Son of God would come.

What purpose, then, would the old temple now serve? It holds a legitimate place in the cultural memory of the Jewish people, and a significant place in the canon of Jewish and Christian scriptures. But the temple itself was dead, and the elders of Ezra's day--to have any future hope--needed to let it die.

There was a point, in fact, in Israel's history when the temple began to hinder the faith of the people of God. Jeremiah spoke bitterly on God's behalf:

Do not trust in deceptive words and say, "This is the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD!" If you really change your ways and your actions and deal with each other justly, if you do not oppress the alien, the fatherless or the widow and do not shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not follow other gods to your own harm, then I will let you live in this place, in the land I gave your forefathers for ever and ever. But look, you are trusting in deceptive words that are worthless. (Jeremiah 7:4-8)

Jesus challenged the cult of the temple as well in his own day: "Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days!" (John 3:19). He was speaking of his body rather than the building, but that was the point: God is bigger than a building, and when we think otherwise, we've allowed the building--or our reputation, or our possessions, or whatever--to take possession of us. We've made these things into gods, and so we've become idolators.

Maybe that's overstating the case. But while we're inclined to legitimately mourn the end of something, there's a way of understanding that same moment as the beginning of something new, and to dwell on the end is to subvert the new beginning. Our posture toward the world ought to be creative rather than reactive.

I still "don't like Mondays," but for now at least I'll live without the Boomtown Rats singing about it. In the meantime I'll look forward to cobbling together new playlists and exploring music afresh. In the process, maybe I'll catch some hints about what new things God might be creating in me.

Hidden to Death

A post from five years ago, to encourage your movement through Lent.

You hear some stories and you feel compelled to comment. Forgive me . . .

Arkansas attorney Ben Lipscomb decided recently, as he is given to do, to spend the day duck hunting with his friends and his beloved dog. Eventually he separated from his friends to find more ducks to shoot. He hit the gold mine--ducks to his left, ducks to his right, ducks above and all around him. He just kept turning in circles, shooting and reshooting, while his dog retrieved his bounty for him. By the time he hit the legal limit of dead ducks, however, he had turned so many times that he couldn't tell where he had come from.

He couldn't find his friends, and they couldn't find him. All he had was his dog, some dead ducks, a rifle and the clothes he was wearing--camouflage hunting gear over bright white unmentionables. He ate a duck raw to stave off his hunger, he sloshed through the ice-cold waters to find some indicator of the way he should go, his dog barked intermittently to draw someone's attention to his plight. But no luck--they had been left behind.

The hunter's friends, realizing the problem, had returned to their car and called emergency services for help. So began the manhunt. Helicopters flew overhead in crisscross patterns trying to find this solitary hunter somewhere in the expansive hunting grounds. They actually flew directly over him a number of times during the search, but they couldn't see him, despite his jumping, waving and shouting, for, you see, <em>he was wearing camouflage.</em>

The purpose of camouflage is to conceal its wearer so that no one can see him (or her, I suppose, although I don't recall ever seeing a woman decked out in cammies from head to toe). In this case, the camouflage did its job too well: Ben Lipscomb was in danger of being hidden to death.

What would you do? Our hero came up with an idea that sounds as insane as it was pure genius: He took off his clothes.

Underneath the camouflage, as I mentioned, was a pair of bleach-white underwear. Lipscomb dropped his hip waders, ripped the underwear from his waist, tied the undies to the barrel of his rifle, and waved his makeshift flag as the helicopter was making another pass. Presumably he paused to pull his hip waders back up.

His trick worked. The Arkansas State Police spotted his flag and made a beeline for his briefs. Shortly thereafter, he was out of the woods.

Fortunately for Lipscomb, he was smart enough to wear white at night; camouflage underwear, while undeniably stylish, serves no real purpose and, as we learn from this story, could very well kill you.

If that moral to the story doesn't do it for you, try following one of these two paths:

1. At a certain point, concealing your true self becomes counterproductive.
2. When you're wading through the muck, and you've had your fill of duck, stick close to your friends or you'll be out of luck. (That's about as far as I've yet been able to take this soon-to-be-famous country song. If you have an idea for another verse or moral, post a comment; note that I have yet to use the phrase "pick-up truck.")

Making an Ash of Myself

When I was a little girl I spent quite a bit of time in our school library. One day--a Wednesday, in fact--one of the ladies who volunteered there showed up with a mysterious smudge on her forehead. Ha, I thought. She had gotten some black stuff on her face and had gone the whole day without anyone telling her. How embarrassing! Later I found out that the black stuff was there on purpose, and that I was a silly girl for laughing at her. But I still didn't get the meaning of the mark.

Growing up Baptist, I didn't really have Lent on my radar screen. It wasn't until fifteen years later, after switching to a Presbyterian church, that I attended an Ash Wednesday service for the first time. Unsuspecting, I went forward to receive the ashes. I stepped up to the elder, who looked me in the eye and gently whispered, "Becky, remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return."

WHAM. I felt like someone had hit me over the head with a two-by-four of my own mortality. My eyes filled with tears. My knees got weak. I was crushed. And yet I also felt a beautiful freedom--freedom to let go of all of my grandiose ambitions to make myself into something in this world. Here was the truth: I am dust.

Last week NPR did a story about the twentieth anniversary of the "pale blue dot" photo taken from the Voyager spaceship in 1990. The photo doesn't look like much: a black field with some streaks of light across it and one tiny, two-pixel-wide dot. That dot, which could easily be confused for a bit of dirt on the lens, is Earth from nearly four billion miles away.

The article continues by quoting Carl Sagan, who eloquently tried to express how he felt about this photo in his book Pale Blue Dot:

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

This past Wednesday night I was again reminded of my status as dust. And my mind was cast back to that photo. Not only am I dust, but I'm a speck of dust living on a speck of dust floating through a vast universe.

All this smallness can lead us to despair unless we remember the true meaning of Lent. Compared to God I am nothing. And yet I am not nothing. Because of his steadfast love and compassion, not only am I something of value, but someone. A life. A person. A daughter. During Lent we see clearly who we are: infinitely valuable specks of dust. Our smallness is completely outweighed by the unspeakable greatness of God and his love for us.

As I presented myself in dusty repentance and took the symbol of soot on my forehead, I savored these words of the psalmist, and worshiped:

As for humans, their days are like grass;
   they flourish like a flower of the field;
for the wind passes over it, and it is gone,
   and its place knows it no more.
But the steadfast love of the LORD is from everlasting to everlasting
               on those who fear him,
   and his righteousness to children's children,
to those who keep his covenant
   and remember to do his commandments.
The LORD has established his throne in the heavens,
   and his kingdom rules over all.

Bless the LORD, O you his angels,
   you mighty ones who do his word,
   obeying the voice of his word!
Bless the LORD, all his hosts,
   his ministers, who do his will!
Bless the LORD, all his works,
   in all places of his dominion.
Bless the LORD, O my soul!
--Psalm 103:15-22

Forgoing and Letting Go

A post from five years ago. Something to think about on Ash Wednesday.

For three years I dutifully woke up early every Monday, Wednesday and Friday (unless I could come up with a decent excuse) to drive to a local gym. For that same three years, whenever I was asked by machine or muscle-bound consultant what my goals are for working out, I replied "Losing weight" or "Burning fat." And for that same three years I lost no weight and, so far as anyone can tell, burned no fat.

Then, for two weeks, I reluctantly cut carbohydrates and sugars out of my diet. No Oreos, no Nutter Butters. No ice cream, no cream cheese. No instant oatmeal, no sugary cereal. I lost sixteen pounds and found three more holes in my belt.

I share this story reluctantly, in part because I don't want to be taken as poo-pooing exercise or endorsing a particular diet. But I find it interesting that I so willingly embraced a major lifestyle change--joining a gym and working out regularly--that yielded none of my desired results, while for three years fighting hard against a discipline that ultimately delivered beyond my best hopes.

My best guess is that for me, and I suspect for most Americans and perhaps most humans, it's easier to take something on than to let something go.

I think it's fair to say that I live in a scavenger culture. In fact, I scavenge for a living. I do a fair bit of editorial acquisitions, which means I go out looking for books for IVP to publish. In that respect I'm the poster boy for scavenging. My business card shouldn't say "Editor," it should say "Book Scavenger."

We start scavenging for fun when we're little kids: "Here's a list of worthless junk; whoever is able to come up with the most junk from the list wins even more junk!" Suggest to me that I should go get something--an iPod, for example, or an iPod Touch, or an iPhone--and odds are I'll rearrange my life to fit it in. It works in other ways too: I know of a magazine that markets the simple life through page after page of high-end purchasing opportunities--spend $500 to be more simple, the logic goes. I've bought books and videos on working out, step aerobic equipment, dumbells and gym bags, and even a stairmaster in my drive to drop a few pounds. If there's something we want to happen, chances are there's something we can acquire to make it happen.

But ask us to forgo something--dessert, perhaps, or political power or 10 percent of our income--and we're distressed. Saying no is infinitely more challenging than saying yes.

Something supremely self-evident evades the understanding of a scavenger culture: Sometimes scavenging is the enemy of desire. Sometimes what we need is found not in groping after but in letting go.

Jesus saw that in a rich young ruler who had everything but wanted more--assurances that he was on the right track, that when he died he'd go to heaven, that he could have everything and still be a good person. Jesus confronted his consumerism head on: "One thing you still lack," he said, in language that sets any scavenger to drooling. "Go, sell all your possessions and give the money to the poor. Then come, follow me."

No stuff. No money. No home. Just Jesus. Yikes. I need some comfort food--fast. If anybody needs me, I'll be hiding out at the gym, eating Nutter Butters and "burning fat."

O Lord, in Thy Wrath, Rebuke Me Not

Today, Ash Wednesday, begins the Lenten season of the church. This song, based on Psalm 38, aptly captures the solemnity of this season of confession, repentance and longing for Christ.

------------------------

O Lord, in Thy Wrath, Rebuke Me Not
--Orlando Gibbons (1583-1625)

O Lord, in thy wrath, rebuke me not,
Neither chasten me in thy displeasure.
Have mercy upon me, O Lord, for I am weak.
O Lord, heal me, for my bones are vexed.
My soul is also sore troubled.
But, Lord, how long wilt thou punish me?
O save me, O save me, for thy mercy's sake.

------------------------

Amen. Lord, have mercy.

The Worst Benediction Ever

I wrote this about five years ago. We're on the eve of the period in the Christian year where despair orbits the church most closely. So before we launch ourselves into Lent, one last reminder that despair is never our final word.

I've never thought of myself as pollyanic or even optimistic. I think it's fair to say that I'm more like Eeyore than Tigger. As my sainted daddy always says, "An optimist can never be pleasantly surprised."

Nevertheless, I don't think I'm alone in wanting a happy ending. You invest your time in a book or a film or a conversation, and you expect that you'll walk away from such an encounter with a positive feeling toward it. The hero will ride off into the sunset with newfound love riding alongside. The city will be at rest, now safe from its most recent and all future threats. Your friend will wrap things up with a "Nice talking with you. See you real soon."

Even confessional conversations and all-too-real documentaries and nonfiction treatises end best when ended on a hopeful note: "Americans are too fat . . . Here are some suggestions for how we can all lose some weight." "Bless me father for I have sinned . . . Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit."

So imagine my disappointment when I turned today to the last page of a four-hundred page tome about the role of myth in culture and read eagerly to the final word: "despair."

Despair?!? Are you kidding me?!? What kind of ending is that?!? There's not even nobility tucked into the word despair. You can read A Tale of Two Cities, get to the last page to witness an execution and still walk away hopeful, even inspired:

"It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known."
The End

But walk away with the sound of "despair" still ringing in your ears, and whatever you hear next will carry its taint.

Giving despair the final word doesn't just say something about a book or a movie or a relationship, it says something about our world. You've summed up existence in seven letters; you've given the worst benediction ever. The end of one thing is of course the beginning of the next, so to end so hopelessly is to infect your future with hopelessness.

Some assign that kind of hopelessness to death: the ultimate last word. In death we rot, we fade away; all that we've spent ourselves on over the course of our life comes to nothing. Death as the last word is a terribly unhappy ending, particularly because it wasn't intended from the beginning of the story. Death entered the world as a plot point with the rebellion of humanity against its creator, and now death comes to all as we reap what we have sown.

But death has ceased to be the final word in Christian theology. Resurrection serves as an epilogue to death; in rising from death Jesus defeats it and removes its sting. Death is no longer an end but a beginning. Our heroes live happily ever after.

There. I feel better. Despair shouldn't be allowed to get the final word, and we are good editors who steer the storytellers among us toward a more hopeful finish.

If we can't bring ourselves to end on a hopeful note, maybe it's enough to leave our story unfinished, and wait for the climax to be revealed to us. The Bible, of all things, ends on such a note of anticipation, after a thousand pages of staring despair square in the face and daring to hope:

Amen. Come Lord Jesus.
The grace of the Lord Jesus be with God's people. Amen.

Now that's a good book. I know, cheesy. But I feel better.

Toujours Gras?

Every year on or before February 14, here at ground zero of the bibliocopia that is InterVarsity Press, the business department expresses its love for the rest of the company with an extravagant spread of food. Cakes and cookies and candies and chips and sundry other offerings are laid out atop folding tables covered with red vinyl tablecloths. This year, that day is today. I went for a peek and came back with a handful (and, I freely confess, a mouthful) of cheese. I went back later for some dessert and came back with some nachos. I went back later for some dessert and came back with, finally, dessert. That, and a feeling of mild discomfort and lethargy.

This year Valentine's Day, which inspires the annual business offering, comes just a few days before Ash Wednesday, which every year offers an occasion for excess known as Fat Tuesday, or the less guilt-inducing Mardi Gras. On Fat Tuesday, the logic goes, you indulge in enough vice (covering the spectrum of social acceptability from food to flashing) to tide you over through Lent till the day after Easter. That's a lot of vice, people. This year Fat Tuesday should be especially extravagant, since New Orleans--ground zero of the carnalcopia that is Mardi Gras--is still high off the Saints' victory at Super Bowl Sunday.

The tradition of overindulgence the day before Lent extends beyond Creole culture, of course. The Polish call Fat Tuesday "Paczki (pronounced "ponchki") Day," in honor of the enormous filled donuts they prepare in bulk. This time last year I stood in line at a local bakery for half an hour to pick up my paczkis; it felt like I was at a U2 concert and Larry Mullin Jr. had just ticked off the marching beat that announces "Sunday Bloody Sunday." The air was thick with energy and powdered sugar.

A friend of mine, author of one of my favorite books of 2008, mentioned in an e-mail the other day that she had gotten her calendar off by a week, so she wound up celebrating Fat Tuesday a week early. (I leave how she celebrated to your imagination.) It struck me that self-indulgence is no longer something easily isolated to one day a year. One could look at my caloric intake today, for example, and legitimately label the day "Jeudi Gras," or "Fat Thursday." Every day I hop on my Wii Fit board for my body check, and a sing-songy computer voice tells me, with wicked delight, "That's overweight." The trend in soft drinks right now is to release special editions featuring "real sugar" instead of the temporarily unpopular corn syrup. Want more sales? Just add sugar. And beyond U.S. borders, Italy's minister of agriculture is currently boasting of a deal with McDonald's for a special line of "McItaly" burgers. The country that brought you the slow food movement is now in the pocket of the behemoth that brought you the obesity crisis. (Allegedly.)

We don't need a Fat Tuesday or Thursday to celebrate, folks. We need a "Skinny Sunday"--and by that I don't mean a pile of lite ice cream topped with lo-fat chocolate syrup.

We may think we deserve a break today, but I think what Mardi Gras reminds us anymore is that the break we need is the one that Lent affords us: a break from the habits and patterns that make us feel so good in the moment but that compromise our health for years afterward. We need an Ash Wednesday. Good thing one's coming.

Drinking from the Social Justice Fire Hose

If you're like me, you are sometimes overwhelmed by the sheer number of tasks you must accomplish and responsibilities you dare not ignore. Between work, friends, family, hobbies, grocery shopping and budgeting, there seems to be little time (or energy) left to worry about things like global hunger, evil, modern-day slavery, justice or such like. These are big concepts, big issues. How in the world do people find the time, with all this other stuff in their lives, to worry about "causes"?

With everything going on around us, it's easy to be passive--maybe because we're busy, or because we know our church's tithes and other donations already support missions or social justice ministries, or because we feel helpless or hopeless, like we have nothing valuable or significant to contribute to the issues and causes that surround us. Let's face it: social justice issues are overwhelming. We're inundated with information about how much people are suffering, locally and globally. We're challenged to buy wisely--for our own household budgets, out of concern for the environment, for the sake of wise use of resources, sustainable agriculture, encouraging fair trade, and other related concerns.

Coupling these issues with legal terminology like fair and just can make it seem that, if we're not concerned with these very grave issues, or if we don't apply our personal resources to their alleviation, we are unfair, or unjust. Or guilty. And there's just too much! Why bother?

If you feel like this--like issues of global, social and biblical justice hit you like a drink from a fire hose--please allow me to encourage you: You are not alone. If you've previously ignored or felt disconnected from issues like these, let me challenge you: You can become involved very simply and easily, and efforts that you may feel are insignificant are in fact very important--like the accumulation of snowflakes in winter. Here are three ways you can begin.

Prayer. Perhaps the first and most important way you can become involved or more aware of justice issues is through prayer. One place you could start is to begin praying about the things that you notice day-to-day that trouble you, but which you may previously have just brushed off. I have found that my daily commute often allows time for me to reflect and pray about things that might not be present in my mind at other times. This could be as easy as praying for people begging along your commute route, reflecting on a news article or news issue from the morning or previous evening, or praying for someone you know who is currently serving in ministry or other justice work.

Research. This one may seem imposing and time-consuming. Who has hours to spend in the library? But it doesn't have to be complicated. Research, as with any journey, begins with but a single, small effort. Pick up literature from your church that describes its ministries; visit a website for a particular organization like Emmaus Ministries, International Justice Mission, World Relief, or World Vision. Read a book like Julie Clawson's Everyday Justice or Mae Elise Cannon's Social Justice Handbook. Have coffee with a friend involved in justice work or with someone who is involved in ministry at your church or in the community, and ask them why they're involved, what kind of work they do, why they're passionate about it, and even how you might help out sometime. Helping with children's ministries might lead you to learn more about orphan ministries in Africa or China. You just never know!

Activism and volunteer work. Take a deep breath, say a prayer and dive in! If you've been interested in a particular ministry, cause or organization, but just haven't taken that decisive step to become involved, do it now. If you don't think your schedule or budget will make deep involvement possible, start small and slow, and see what happens. Begin with an email or a phone conversation. Your skills, interests, talents, time and prayers can find a practical application and outlet, but only if you take the step to find out how.

The fact is, fire hoses are not drinking fountains. They're not meant to be drunk from, but pointed outward, toward places where they can do the most good. If the social justice fire hose has left you bewildered and dripping wet, take a step back, grab hold if it, and point it in the direction of injustice.