The Control Room Blew Up

Have you ever felt totally incapable of making something happen? Like you're stuck in some small pit, penned in a closet-like space by circumstances beyond your control. Sure, you can still do things. But the things you do really don't seem like they'll ever result in you breaking out of the pit. Your efforts feel like they amount to running in circles around the bottom of your little pit. No real hope of anything useful -- like, oh you know, actually getting out -- but at least it beats sitting on the floor doing nothing. I guess.

I've had three such experiences this week. That's big. Especially for a control freak like me. And yes, I am a control freak. A classic, bona-fide, getter-done achiever type. If there were a 12-step program to cure people from control freakishness I'd be a fantastic candidate for attending. Except that I'd ruin the process by trying to take control of it. I can just see it now: as soon as I stood in front of my circle of fellow high-strung neurotics and said "My name is Matt Guerino and I'm a control freak", I'd immediately turn around and begin researching everything about how to stop being a control freak, so that I could grab this control-freak thing by the horns and whip it into shape.

Yeeeeah. Feel free to re-read that last sentence and savor the irony.

This is what made my three "impossible pit" scenes last week so hard. First up: last weekend was Sanctity of Human Life weekend. And truthfully, I had no plan for Sunday's services. I knew it was coming back in November, but the Christmas holidays were so packed with things at the church that I had zero time to think about this significant weekend. Zilch. Nada. And by the way, whomever picked January for such an annual emphasis sure didn't consult with me. You can talk about the anniversary date of Roe v. Wade all you want, but coming on the heels of Christmas makes for a brutal time for pastors to get anything planned! Remember, I like my control here people.

But the weekend approached, and as it did so did the conviction in my mind and heart that we needed to focus on abortion. I prayed. The conviction grew stronger. I had no plan. The conviction grew stronger. I had no time to pull a big shin-dig together - to control what the weekend was going to look like. How do you broach so emotional a topic with the right balance of grace and truth, especially if you don't have 3 months of planning (control) behind it? And I told God all this. Really, I did. But he didn't listen. The conviction grew stronger. Then all in a flash (well, over a couple hours anyway) I came across several things that made the weekend message quickly fall into place, including my friend Diane's testimony which I hadn't read in several years. The service was done, the message was given, and I believe grace and truth carried the day. Without my control. Hmmmmm...

Next up: a friend with a large family and modest income got hit with a big surgery bill, and a mere 4 days later was also told by his tax preparer that instead of getting a couple thousand dollars back from Uncle Sam, he owed a couple thousand. Over $5,000 in new debt slammed him almost at once. I felt horrible. We talked. We brainstormed. We sought control! None could be found. So, trapped in that familiar pit I simply prayed. I actually asked God to drop $5,000 out of the sky in one form or other, because I didn't see how anything would change otherwise.

The next day he discovered an error the tax preparer had made, and it turns out that a small refund is coming as he'd originally thought. That was a $3,100 swing, just like that. There's another possible mistake which could result in a larger refund, and some hope on the medical bill front also came through unexpectedly that day. Wham. Without my control. Hmmmm...

Finally, Amy's had a rough week. She was fighting a flu which inflamed her chronic pain and also resulted in a bizarre new back muscle pain problem, all of which finally culminated in a searing headache. She hadn't slept well, and I was powerless to fix any of this. Stuck at the bottom of a very familiar pit. I can tell you, it stinks. On second thought, I really can't tell you how badly that stinks.

I put Tommy to bed that night and we prayed that God would give mommy a good night's sleep - just that - although I figured that was virtually certain not to happen. She slept for almost 8 hours straight and over the next couple days made remarkable progress on all fronts. All without my control. Hmmmm...

What is the point? He is the breakthrough. Not me. The common factors in each situation were that I had zero ability to make anything happen (though I had a role to play). I prayed - as did others - and things happened.

By the way, there's a wrong lesson that can be drawn from this. The point is NOT that God will do what I want if I just ask him. If you read this and think I'm saying "just ask God to take your problems away and he will," then I'm not communicating. That's not it at all. He might, he might not. He is God. He does what he does, not what I want him to.

No, the right lesson is this: God is the one who both determines a path and enables progress along it. Not me.

I sit here writing this at 5am. I've been up since 3:15. Couldn't sleep. Like a lot of pastors, I suspect, I awoke in the middle of the night with concern for my church and the spiritual growth of its people flooding my mind. Couldn't get back to sleep. I'm encouraged by the example of the Apostle Paul (another control freak, by the way) who said that concern for the churches he planted was one of his heaviest burdens. So it goes, I suppose, in this church leadership thing.

So I prayed for a while, realizing that I'm doing everything I can and should be doing that I'm aware of, but that in the end I cannot make people grow in faith. That is not my role, it is God's. He is the breakthrough.

Maybe this energetic go-getter needs to learn that so that I don't contend for his glory, even unintentionally. Maybe the worst possible scenario for a church isn't that it goes nowhere, but that it goes somewhere in our eyes and people get the credit for that instead of God. He is the one who makes life change happen, and he gets the credit (glory) for it. It's his church after all.

Only a control freak would want it otherwise.

Imago Dei

This post is a bit long-ish, but the topic warrants some thought I think, so I hope you'll bear with me. Thanks to Kimberly, Jerry, and Ann who all left excellent comments on my recent post regarding evangelical fatigue and angst with respect to the pro-life movement. You guys brought up some important points, actually stealing some of my thunder in some cases, which is great! I particularly appreciated the recognition that the movement early on focused perhaps too much on the overturn of Roe v Wade, and that some of the current fatigue comes from seeing the Roe decision still standing.

Francis Shaeffer and many others have correctly pointed out that politics is downstream from culture, meaning that the collective view of the population shapes the law much more than the law shapes the collective view. An important implication is that attempting to change the law first is a really tough proposition -- swimming upstream, as it were -- as pro-lifers discovered in the 70's and 80's. This is true despite the fact that changing the law at first appears to be the less daunting task. After all, a law change is a concrete goal, whereas shaping the hearts and minds of fellow citizens is a much larger and more amorphous task. But law change turns out to not be so easy at it might first appear, and is of more limited value than heart change even when achieved.

History speaks volumes...
In preparing for this weekend's message I've spent some time refreshing my memory on one of the world's greatest subjects: history. I combed back through many of Western civilization's greatest human rights advances and saw again how Christians were almost always at the heart of these efforts. I will briefly share 4 examples in the service tomorrow: infanticide in ancient Rome, slavery throughout Europe's history, poverty in 20th century India, and segregation in the American south (seems appropriate just after MLK day, eh?).

But there are dozens more I could share if time permitted. Consider that the 19th century's suffragettes, and actually the whole roots of the feminist movement, were Christian. Or consider how Christian missionaries and nationals were the impetus behind stopping the burning of widows on their husband's funeral pyres in India. Or how, beginning with the efforts of Jim Elliot and Nate Saint, Christians helped transform native Waodani culture in Ecuador from a genocidal violence that nearly wiped the entire tribe out. Or how Christians opened weekend schools (the original Sunday School) to educate slave children in colonial America (I wrote my undergraduate thesis in college on such efforts). The list goes on and on.

What do all these examples have in common? One phrase: Imago Dei. That's Latin for Image of God, one of the core tenets of Christian theology. These Christian efforts were all driven by a passionate belief in the inherent value of all human life regardless of age, gender, health, socioeconomic class, ethnicity, or any other distinction people tend to draw in order to justify treating others inhumanely.

But these efforts all teach us something else too. They were hugely successful - indeed they shaped western civilization itself - because they were multi-faceted efforts. Government forces were almost always complicit in the injustice in question, so each effort had a political component which pursued just laws. But the verve - the real fire - of these movements in each case came from a virtual army of unknown "soldiers" of compassion, who labored in obscurity and sacrificed personally to meet the needs of the downtrodden; comforting them and helping materially while drawing the unwilling attention of reluctant societies to their plight. It was this action and attention - this faith lived out (hmmm... sounds like James 2:26 doesn't it?) - that gradually transformed the hearts and minds of people, and often enabled just political solutions to follow.

Where do we go from here?
Which brings me back to Roe v. Wade and the current struggle we have with rampant, no-cause abortion in our beloved country. I greatly appreciate Ann's comment on my previous post, which I thought very honest and accurate. We often have a zeal for the truth, which is outstanding! Never let anyone tell you that's bad, because not one worthwhile thing in this world has ever been accomplished (including our redemption) apart from zeal for truth. But this sometimes leaves us fighting feelings of frustration, fear, even hate (hopefully directed toward the current state of affairs, not toward people, which is never justified). We have much better uses for our energy than fear and angst! I think the pro-life movement going forward needs (and will in fact pursue) two major things:

1. More action Because a thousand mundane acts of genuine compassion are far more potent than a big flashy campaign of any kind, I see an even more energized pro-life movement at the grassroots level engaging in a myriad of mom-supporting and baby-protecting activities that will save thousands of lives even before the law changes. From supporting unmarried single moms and Pregnancy Resource Centers, to adoption and working to make adoption more affordable, to starting and/or supporting ministries like The House of Ruth or 5 Rock Ranch, to talking openly and honestly about the sanctity and seriousness of sex, marriage, and fathering. Think about it: if we conservatively assume that only 5% of Americans are evangelicals, that's 15 million people (and more than that are pro-life). How would our culture be impacted by 15+ million Jesus-lives in our midst?

2. Better reporting of the action that's already taken place
And while much more can be done if we put our hearts and minds to it, the truth is a lot of this action already takes place. For example, I know many people in my personal circle of relationships who have adopted children (even though they had their own biological kids already), taken in pregnant teen girls who feel they have nowhere to turn and given them a place to live, volunteered countless hours counseling and emotionally & financially supporting them and their babies, and in hundreds of ways made a huge difference in the lives of women. But how often do you hear their stories? Honestly, this is the question that has haunted me this week because the answer is "not enough." And those of us who have communicative abilities and who don't mind rattling a few cages and swimming against the cultural current as graciously as possible had better get more busy trumpeting what the heroes of compassion are really doing. Sorry, that last line is directed at myself more than anyone else, but hey: this is my blog, right? :)

None of this is to say that legal/political efforts should be abandoned. Quite the contrary, there is already widespread public support for laws that limit the availability of abortion, which is why full disclosure and parental notification laws get passed successfully (I'll comment on FOCA under another heading - this post is already long enough). But as we petition our political leaders, let's also ask God how he would have us use our talents and abilities to make a difference in the lives of moms, dads, and babies in our own community to the end that not only are innocent babies' lives spared, but the hearts and minds of our fellow citizens can be moved by seeing a Jesus-life in action.

After all, when we put faith into action in this way we're carrying a torch that has been passed from one generation of Jesus-followers to the next for over two thousand years. That's some cloud of witnesses.

Flagging?

I'm back in the "blogging saddle" after a Christmas season break! And there's something on my mind for which I'd like your input.

In a couple weeks Harvest, like many churches around the nation, will spend a Sunday emphasizing the sanctity of human life.

Now here's my question: what was your first reaction to that sentence?

I ask because I'm sensing that there's a wide variety of reactions today to Christianity's historically pro-life worldview, particularly within evangelical circles. First off the phrase "sanctity of human life" seems to have become a euphemism for fighting abortion (even though it refers to something much broader) since that's been the main focus for the past few decades in our country. And I see evidence of mixed feelings about the fight against abortion amongst evangelicals.

Some seem to be experiencing "abortion fatigue," for lack of a better term -- becoming emotionally worn out from a long fight that seems to have produced few gains. Others appear to have become frustrated at such fatigue amongst fellow evangelicals, pounding proverbial tables and becoming shrill in their efforts to "rally the troops" and keep up the fight against this heinous evil. And then there's a palpable anxiety some evangelicals are experiencing, stoked in no small part by the fact that we're about to inaugurate a president with 100% approval ratings from some of the most pro-abortion organizations in the land.

Fatigue. Frustration. Anxiety. Not a real great mix of emotions.

Interestingly enough every evangelical Christian I hear or read still says they're 100% convinced of the evil of abortion, even those in the "fatigue" camp. This intrigues me: evidently evangelical Christians are not re-thinking their theology (despite what some in the "frustration" camp might believe) as much as they're re-thinking its application.

Of course the question is, where do we go from here? I have some thoughts (no surprise, I know!) and I'll share them soon both on this blog and with the church. But first I want to hear from you.

When it comes to the sanctity of human life, what is your sense of where evangelical Christians are at? Why do you think this is so?