I am petrified of stray dogs. I’ve even been hospitalized by “friendly” dogs. It’s like they pick me out of a humans line up as the quickest distance between two points: dinner and no dinner. I’m not particularly fond of spiders, either. I have a scar on the back of one hand from a small, but vicious spider attack (well, I was only 10, it felt like that). Those are the easy ones. The rest get pretty complicated.

I am an adoptee. I am told that fear is the one characteristic most endemic of adoptees; specifically fear of rejection. I enjoy both the status of adult adoptee and the distinction of being one who could be voted “most likely to love you to death to avoid being unloved.” Fear is something in which I am well trained; fear of rejection, of change, of failure, of success, of loneliness, of______. Decision-making, my single greatest fear, has been a nightmare for me whose primary default button has two questions written above it: “Is this safe?” and “Is this easy?”

To add insult to injury, this is not exactly promoted as an approach for the average male with the expected fearless jungle grunts that are to accompany our thrashing foray into the wild, blue yonder. Also, we live in a culture that, on the one hand supports it’s well-oiled machinery on the ethic of “fear of the other” while preaching the gospel of courage in overcoming all obstacles to become the successful, corporate citizens God meant for us to be. It’s confusing to say the least.

Three of the best words in the Bible are “do not fear.” Right around the corner from these are another four of the best, “fear of the Lord.” Huh? How exactly does that work? How is it that I am encouraged to live life without fear on one hand while on the other to seek it out? To further add to this conundrum, we are told in John’s first epistle, “perfect love casts out fear.” So, which fear is that now? Even to the untrained eye, a cursory reading seems to suggest that perfect love doesn’t belong with fear but does belong with Fear; that is, the fear of the Lord. Therefore, if I seek to be trained in the art of divine love, fear gets squeezed out. They cannot dwell together in a soul designed for one but not the other.

This has worked well for me. At those painful crossroads moments where I’m asked to take a deep breath and, with less than adequate light, jump out of God’s moving train into a dark, forbidding…something, I’ve come to trust the architecture of faith. That is, to lean into the idea that, no matter what, something, Someone, will be there to catch me. To fear God is, in a sense, to believe without the aid of 20/20 vision, that God is whom God says in the scriptures and through the lives of God’s people. Over the years I have developed an healthy awe for the ways in which the all-wise God is able to construct my life almost entirely out of crummy decisions, bad alliances, short attention spans, shorter spiritual memory and lack of community discernment.

Like guilt, fear can be self-perpetuating and the gift that keeps on giving. It chases its own tail in an effort to catch itself and propagate. We live amid an epidemic of phobiastica; a world so rife with fear (no extra charge for the bad pun) that when we meet someone truly fearless we think them unsophisticated or naïve, even delusional. That person, I believe, is one who has learned two things: Fear of the Lord and divine love. They are two sides of a highly valuable coin not to be lost. So, if I am not to fear, seek perfect love and the result will be a better fear – a trembling awe of God – that, in itself, is the way to perfect love. I like that equation.

It scares me to death, but I like it.

Horrifying pictures found here and here

It has been a great joy of mine the past few months to be part of a wonderful team of bloggers at Conversations Journal. It has helped to hone my thinking on any number of topics in Christian spirituality. I’ve made some new friends and learned a great deal. I’ve posted previous pieces to Innerwoven. I’d like to catch us up on a few before heading into a new Lenten series. This one was from September, 2013. I hope you enjoy.

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I have walked and sought to articulate the Jesus Way (thanks Mr. Peterson) for over thirty years. Time has a way of being deceitfully generous with the actuality of our personhood. If you don’t believe me, go back and read old journals and then ask yourself the following questions. Is real change actually possible or am I merely an older, more sophisticated version of my broken self? Can one truly change or are we always forced to concede to God’s ever-expanding grace? Is that the point of “real change?” Is that deeper theological concession our most necessary change? If so, isn’t that merely a change of perspective more than a change of habits? If real change is never possible, what provides adequate impetus toward righteousness and beauty of character? Are these all the wrong questions?

I have large skeletons in my closet, a veritable killing field of front-page newsworthy issues of note, all nicely buried in my past. In May 2011 I graduated with a Masters degree in Spiritual Formation and Leadership from Spring Arbor University, Michigan. If the reader hasn’t already noted the glaring irony in such a statement, stop here. However, if you can see, as do I, the comedy of the words ‘master’ and ‘spiritual’ in the same sentence you are welcome to chuckle right along with me and see why I am stuck with these questions. As one eager for personal transformation I joined MSFL to determine if there were answers to my former questions.

I’m a little skeptical of the spiritual formation movement, specifically in evangelicalism, a theological trajectory that prides itself on being the conduit – a portal as it were – through which an ever-relevant gospel is communicated to an ever-needy world. The deepest need is always union with God, a multivalent and complex process under any rubric. But it is one that denies easy categorization or codification. And yet that is what we so often seek to do, for good reasons, but in some ways ill advised. Evangelicalism, for all its strengths, can be its own worst enemy, pursuing ardently whatever hints there may be of change on the wind in a frantic effort to stay ahead of the cultural relevance game even in matters spiritual formation.

I am convinced that no transformation is possible before one comes to that impossible crossroads where the utter frustration of “immovability” crashes into the immensity of holy desire for wholeness and union. Only here are we ripe for grace. Only here is grace poised to do its deepest work. Only here can our death lead to new life and transformed reality beyond the reaches of commoditization.

Given the stakes of remaining stuck and our propensity toward packaging the means of change, I am doubtful that the challenges inherent in actual transformation are just so high that packaging and promotion are still easier than acquiescence and brokenness. Be that as it may, by whatever means necessary, the Church has been reintroducing the cold, dark, clear waters of the great Christian spiritual tradition back into a world more thirsty than ever. I’m hopeful that any short term glitz, jingoism and book table mongering will lead to long term spiritual gains, long after any perceived spiritual formation “movement” has lost its traction and sex appeal.

Moreover, spiritual formation happens most often when we’re busy doing stuff one might not normally associate with the host of heaven. Or, as Mr. Lennon says, “life is what happens when we’re busy making other plans.” Chasing change, specifically humility, is like chasing a greased pig. We rarely catch it and just look like idiots in the process. Sit in the muck with the pigs and they’ll come to you. Then, it’s bacon for dinner. Or, at least the satisfaction of knowing that we’re all in it together.

Pictures found here and here

Dear friends, I’m feeling a little weepy today. This blog, which grew out of an inner compulsion to share my, well…inner compulsions with the world, is three years old today! It also came about through the encouragement of a number of close friends and colleagues, many whom are bloggers themselves (and I dare say considerably more accomplished than I), to “put it out there.” That is to say, if a writer I would be, then life with pants down is how I must live. 

I’d be remiss if I didn’t say to all of you, those who have signed on to follow this little venture, a heartfelt thank you. Thank you for your willing deliberations with my own willing deliberations. Thank you for receiving what I choose to give, some good, some not so much. Thank you for letting me into your computers, your living rooms, your hearts. Just…thank you. 

Since this blog was always intended as a “one stop spiritual shop” for all things inner-Rob and hopefully, by extension, inner-you, I thought it fitting to celebrate this anniversary in a simple way; a way I so often find clarity in the chaos that is me: my journal entry from today, Friday, January 31st, 2014.

Once again, thank you.

From my journal: Friday, January 31, 2014

There is something at once alarming, even disconcerting, about the increasing awareness of God’s movements in the soul. Like becoming suddenly aware of the fact that one is treading water in a vast, shark-infested sea, we realize that we are in way over our heads. And the only hope of survival is that someone comes to save us before we are either drowned or ingested.

As we creep ever deeper into a new year, I am drawn to consider the fortuitous goodness of God. I look back over the past few years and see a number of explosions, all of which have led to a slow conversion attained through the gathering up and careful consideration of the resulting shrapnel. I’ve studied in detail my own wounds. They’re not pretty. But they yield fascinating evidence of God’s messing around.

Like fortune-teller tea leaves at the bottom of the cup, I begin to see patterns of grace previously unnoticed and so arranged as to point me to bigger ideas at play in the mind of God. “How weighty to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them!” I try to count them – they are more than the sand; I come to the end – I am still with you.” There’s the clincher I suppose. The community of God-as-God continues to invite me into that holy poker party even though I have little to offer the game.

Only now, in dusting off the rubble from numerous cage-fights between God and my ego, am I given clarity in some semblance of understanding. The movements of the human soul run so deep below the surface of things that, to unearth their seismic significance is to uncover the shining face of God, covered in coal dust, brow aglow in perspiration, from a tireless mining operation that had been taking place all along.

Prayer alerts me to the fact that God cares enough to dig at all. It merely points my head downward, ever downward, where God – like some Middle Earth dwarf – digs away, layer by painful layer. It creates a hunger in me to join God in the whole dirty enterprise. After all, sometimes diamonds come from that coal and gold is found when digging for something else.

But, only suffering and travail are strong enough to complete the journey from the center of the soul back to the surface. There, my mouth, my hands and feet, my life among the living, may be fueled by the ore of pain burning in the well-stoked furnace of love.

So be it.

Have I said thank you?

Pix here, here and someone’s cell phone, whom I cannot recall presently

One of the greatest of all psychic cruelties is the discovery of being duped. We uncover something we thought to be true only to be shocked into the raw discovery of major fault lines. We unravel vexing relational narratives we thought were something other than what they really are. We realize our best relationships have had little or no foundation, or at least flawed ones. It’s that feeling we get upon realizing our entire speech was completed with our fly wide open and broccoli pasted conspicuously to our broad, spacious smile. Although rare, in some cases, our fondest Jekylls are in fact fearsome Hydes.

Relationships of any kind – familial, friendships, lovers – are always built best on the twin foundations of trust and honesty. Honesty ensures the building goes upward with plumb lines. Trust helps solidify foundations while buttressing against disappointments and occasional shoddy workmanship. It also offers courage against inevitable strong winds.

So, what do we make of buildings erected sideways, askew, leaning precariously over great, urban chasms out of neglect or deception?

Assumptions are made (generally dangerous in most settings) regarding process and building materials only to discover that, instead of pouring concrete we were pasting feathers to toilet paper. One bad shit and it all tears asunder.

Anyone unlucky enough to suffer the shock and indignity of such a discovery finds him/herself pulling feathers and wafer-thin realities from their bruised and bleeding soul. But, if that isn’t painful enough, the hardest work is yet to begin; extracting oneself from the wreckage and getting high enough above it to allow a deep sigh of painful regret and begin the clean-up process. 

Therein lies the worst indignity of all. Having worked in the construction industry for years as a painter-decorator I can confidently claim that renovations are considerably more costly and fraught with unseen peril than new builds.

However, people do it all the time. They will insist that “we can do most of it on our own, we just want you to redo the kitchen and bathroom.” Drive by two years later and a half finished disaster of a house that used to be a home sits sullen and dark with a For Sale sign that might just as easily read “we should have listened.”

Still others take the advice of friends and professionals alike and simply tear down to build back up. Throwing self-pity and fear to the wind, the same wind that took down the original structure, they dig in deep once more. Rubble gets cleared. Faulty blueprints are tossed in favor of fresh, new ones. The process begins and hope is rekindled and a strong, stable future is nurtured.

The greatest losers in these things are those who prefer the blindness of remaining face down in the rubble muttering words of safety. Only as such wounded ones call out to rescuers above can they be identified and, in turn, ignite any hope of being pulled out to heal and begin again; of freedom. More often than not, such ones, upon shaking themselves off, come to see that rebuilding is a far better option than slowly smothering to death in dust and darkness. Despite the dangers, the clear, mostly dust free air up above is still so much better than below where one labors under the misapprehension that all is well.

For anyone choosing to remain hidden in the rubble for which they are partly responsible is to choose the ripple effect of ghetto thinking. We all suffer the indignity of that one redneck neighbor whose unwillingness to park his vehicles elsewhere than his front lawn reflects on everyone. The other neighbor whose over-budget renovations have promised a constant parade of contractor vehicles, construction materials, noise, and parking issues, lives just down our street.

Broken relationships are not isolated incidences. The six degrees of separation principle guarantees that, somewhere down the line, our issues become someone else’s. To leave a mess is, ultimately, to force other well-meaning souls to build around us, forever forced to see our unsightly debris from their kitchen window. We’ll face the lawsuits that come from our rusty nails through their feet.

In all our relationships, even as bloody and dirty as they can be, let us strive to fix our messes. We are never insulated against the storms that tear down and destroy. Nor do our messes remain hidden from view for long. Let us not be fooled into thinking we’re less obvious than we truly are.

Hence, to courageously rebuild is not only to reconstruct a simple structure.

It rebuilds entire communities within which our buildings rise or fall.

“…a man [built] a house,…dug deeply and laid the foundation on rock; when a flood arose, the river burst against that house but could not shake it, because it had been well built” (Luke 6:48-49)

Pictures found here, here and here respectively