Not-Real and Real

Lately I've been listening to a lot of music by Sandra McCracken. At first listen, her music does not always have the most polished sound. Or something. I'm sort of an atrocious music critic, because what sells me is the same thing that sells me on a movie: the story.

And her songs have story.

I've especially been appreciating her song Lock and Key.

You can hold your world inside
You can scream out loud
Or you can fight these enemies
And kid fears tonight if you want to

You can drive your car out to L.A.
You can lose yourself just to make your way
You can change your mind
Or change your name if you want to

But you're under lock and key
All by yourself
And sometimes you just need somebody else

I cannot read your complex mind
I can't understand
All the reasons why
But if you let me in, I can try if you want me to

And I can say I'm sorry if you wanna hear it
It might be too little too late, my dear
I can't take back the pain of all those years, but I want to

But you're under lock and key
All by yourself
And sometimes you just need somebody else

If you want someone by your side
I could build a bridge
Across the river where we can
Wash these broken pieces downstream...
Do you trust me?

But you're under lock and key
All by yourself
And sometimes you just need somebody else

Sometimes you just need --- somebody else.

I feel like that's the song of my semester. Please note that it really has been a great semester so far. My classes are great, or at least easy; Dag is going well; I love all three of the girls I live with, and C1 is around. My college world is pretty great.

But I've also been smacked in the face (very lovingly, of course) over the past year or so with the fact that I have trust issues. Maybe we all do, but I don't have to deal with everyone's, do I? It can be pretty well boiled down to a few things, namely, hubris and fear of vulnerability. Oh, I love people, and I love getting to know people... but only to a point.

When that becomes me asking for help, I'll shut down a lot. Which usually works fine for my purposes, because I think a lot of people are content to not be asked for help.

Yet sometimes I do need someone else.

So my friend Elaine and I talked a lot recently about this sort of stuff. We both have a lot of miserable memories of things that we failed on, decisions that we second guess and break with sadness at the consequences and wish that we could have done differently, could have known more, could have...
something.

Some days it seems like both of us breathe in rhythm with the pain of the Newsboys' song Elle G: "Every old demon/ playing back a crime// If they'd needed blood/ I'd have gladly given mine." But there are costs that you cannot pay, however much you're willing to. You can't change the past, the decisions that you made, or that other people made.

It's a variant of what I term the "what-if game". And it is deadly and destructive, poisonous and addictive, so easy to see someone else doing and tell them to snap out of, so hard to snap myself out of. It seems so innocent. But it strikes at the very root of who He made us to be. It whispers, You did badly. You are bad. You can say, "I just want to consider what I could do differently if the situation comes up again." Yeah right. It is a self-bashing that is a denial of the sovereignty of God, and a time when I need to preach to myself, as John Piper calls it.

A time when I need to hear the words of John...

By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers. But if anyone has the world's goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God's love abide in him? Little children, let us not love in word or talk but in deed and in truth.

By this we shall know that we are of the truth and reassure our heart before him; for whenever our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart, and he knows everything. Beloved, if our heart does not condemn us, we have confidence before God; and whatever we ask we receive from him, because we keep his commandments and do what pleases him. And this is his commandment, that we believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he has commanded us. 24 Whoever keeps his commandments abides in God, and God in him. And by this we know that he abides in us, by the Spirit whom he has given us. [I John 3:16-24]

Whenever our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart...

That is easy to say, hard to believe.

It's hard to believe the truth, to reject the lies.

Suzanne Collins concretized it nicely in her book Mockingjay:

Peeta's sitting in a circle with the soldiers from 13, who are armed but talking openly with him. Jackson has devised a game called "Real or Not Real" to help Peeta. He mentions something he thinks happened, and they tell him if it's true or imagined, usually followed by a brief explanation.

"Most of the people from Twelve were killed in the fire."

"Real. Less than nine hundred of you made it to Thirteen alive."

"The fire was my fault."

"Not real. President Snow destroyed Twelve the way he did Thirteen, to send a message to the rebels."

Sometimes you just need somebody else.

Somebody to say Real or Not Real.

"I wasn't ready," I cried out to Elaine.

"You were," she said.

We're both right. In the specific situation that was under discussion, there was a lot that would have been beneficial for me to know. But there was no way for me to have known it, to have known that I needed to know that... no matter how many layers I take it back, there wasn't another way. And she is right, because for me to say that I was not ready is for me to challenge God's timing. Don't I believe that He is sovereign? That He knows best? That He put me where I was, with all my ignorance and naivete, for His own purposes? Maybe His purposes were not what I thought they were.

Ouch.

And she added, "You only remember when the stakes are high and you failed. You don’t ever remember the ones where the stakes were low, or when the stakes were high and you succeeded. You only remember when you failed and the stakes were too high to do that."

Because I am naturally contentious (which she may have been taking slight advantage of), I pretty immediately started coming up with situations where the stakes were high and things worked out without all the collapsing brokenness.

Know what? There were a lot of them. And some of them were huge. And my guess is that we tend to know way more of the situations where everything went wrong and we fell short than the ones where it was enough. The It's a Wonderful Life phenomenon.

And it's something to wrestle with, because I don't want to pass off my mistakes as fated. I want to give all that I am to being faithful, to living faithful.

But I am also called to heal and be healed, to make things right and to be made right. To trust Him and to trust the people He has put around me.

To be content to be human, finite and fragile.

So I work on learning to sing another song by Sandra McCracken, Now and Then

Stay with me now and then
From all sides hem me in
Sing me a song
So I can close my eyes

and in church today, we sing Zephaniah 3:17.

And I remember.

And rejoice.

And trust.

And it is good.

Yahweh your God is in your midst,
a mighty one who will save;
He will rejoice over you with gladness;
He will quiet you by his love;
He will exult over you with loud singing.

Seeing Him

So, there's this video on youtube that I can't find right now. It was really cool. It was about how the world would look if we had special glasses that let us see what people were really thinking when they say things like, "I'm fine". The point being, of course, that we miss a lot of the needs around us because we don't look carefully enough to see.

Today I've been thinking about what life would be like with a different kind of glasses.

Ones that let us see God's grace.

What would it be like if we could really see how good He is all the time? If we really grasped the depth and extent of His unmerited favor that He saturates us in?

It makes getting to know people worth it. Because you generally have no idea of how they manifest God's glory until you know an awful lot about them, about where they have been, about what they have grown out of.

I was thinking about it today during chapel as I was trying to figure out why I enjoy being with one of my friends so much. And it finally dawned on me: Because every single thing she does shouts to me that God is faithful. Her entire life is a testimony of God bringing beauty out of cosmic brokenness.

How different is that for any of us?

But I don't normally focus on that. Not even in myself. I don't go around thinking, Wow, the fact that I just took a breath is a proclamation of where God has brought me from. (Which it is, especially after I failed at breathing for ten minutes.) I don't remember, This is amazing, and I have no inherent right to be able to worship my Creator freely.

So here's the challenge: Get to know people. Look for the glory. And rejoice in it. Find ways to tell them, I delight at seeing God in you.

The Dangerous Idea of Academic Faithfulness

As background to this post, my college is very fond of a book called The Outrageous Idea of Academic Faithfulness. I haven't read it yet, and maybe I should, but I keep seeing the title since my one roommate has it laying around.

Today in Sunday School we were discussing prayer (also a staff focus at camp this summer) and how it works with being a college student and especially how it interfaces with being busy. And in the midst of this discussion, I began wondering if Christian schools shoot themselves in the foot at this point. You see, I understand that classwork is important. And academic integrity, yes, is important. And academic faithfulness also.

But maybe, maybe, for some of us, the idea of academic faithfulness is no longer outrageous and sometimes it dances too close to idolatry and that is not faithfulness, not when it crams our minds and hearts and souls so that we feel that we do not have time for devotions and do not have time to truly rest because

honestly

something else always needs to be done.

I don't know how this change comes about. I am sure that there are still people who need to be reminded that we are students and that is important and we have a responsibility to be faithful stewards of the gifts (mental, physical, financial) that God has graced us with.

But...

I wonder...

What about the outrageous idea of truly seeking first His kingdom... and His righteousness?

Because our calling isn't to be faithful to academics. And we are small and finite and forget that and would rather pretend that it is.

Instead, my heart needs to remain in the focus of the ring-engravement...

Faithless to None, Yet Faithful to One.

And all else will come in its proper place, and all shall be most well.

How to Not Hate (by way of Dallas Willard)

I'm reading The Divine Conspiracy again. (Yes, Griffin, you may laugh now.) I read it in high school and I don't think I was terribly fond of it at that point, but I must have been impressed more than I realized, as I've been thinking about it a lot over the past year.

Anyway.

Here's a section that I read today and I really, really liked it.

When I go to New York City, I do not have to think about

not going to London or Atlanta. People do not meet me at the airport or station and exclaim over what a great thing I did in not going somewhere else. I took the steps to go to New York City, and that took care of everything.

Likewise, when I treasure those around me and see them as God's creatures designed for his eternal purposes, I do not make an additional point of not hating them or calling them twerps or fools. Not doing those things is simply part of the package. "He that loves has fulfilled the law," Paul said (Rom. 13:8). Really.

On the other hand, not going to London or Atlanta is a poor plan for going to New York. And not being wrongly angry and so on is a poor plan for treating people with love. It will not work. And, of course, Jesus never intended it to be such a plan. For all their necessity, goodness, and beauty, laws that deal only with actions, such as the Ten Commandments, simply cannot reach the human heart, the source of actions. "If a law had been given capable of bringing people to life," Paul said, "then righteousness would have come from that law" (Gal. 3:21). But law, for all its magnificence, cannot do that. Grateful relationship sustained with the masterful Christ certainly can.

We learn this in our discipleship to Christ.

Seek first the kingdom, and His righteousness...

Postmodernism (now there is an aspiring title!)

I started college with a major in philosophy and dropped it to being a minor pretty quickly, because I learned that philosophy in college wasn't the same thing at all that my friends and I called philosophy.

Which was a bit surprising, but okay. I still get to do what I love to do, even when I find the process a frustrating. (I was going to say "a bit frustrating", but I already said "a bit" in the sentence before, and it wouldn't be true, as my roommate can attest. I get very frustrated with philosophy classes at times.)

Anyway.

My particular area of interest in philosophy is postmodernism. I could talk about it all day, but I'm prone to writing long posts anyway.

But just to give fair warning on what I think postmodernism is -- and yes, I do think that I have qualifications to offer an opinion, because I am someone who has grown up in a postmodern culture and been taught to think a lot -- here's what I wrote this spring in my "personal engagement" paper for my class on Postmodern Philosophers. It's a good three or four pages, sorry about that.

Abortion, the Berlin Wall, and Postmodernism

There is a small red notebook that ends up in various places in my room. The first page of it is the beginning of a list, a list words to describe what postmodernism is about. The list says simply, “Postmodernism is about: honesty, brokenness, openness, survival, trust, connectedness, truth, beauty, fun, freedom, words, power, games, tradition, exploration, invention, creativity, utility...” There is space for the list to continue as I continue to learn about what postmodernism means and how to best describe it.

Defining postmodernism is a tricky business, for a number of reasons. There are always a lot of differences between the written philosophy and how it is lived, and all the more so when it is a current philosophy, still splintered into a thousand fragments, and without the benefit of time and space to figure out what the core of it is.

“Postmodernism” as commonly used means many things, and it depends from what viewpoint one is looking at it. There are the more scholarly philosophical viewpoints: postmodernism is incredulity towards metanarrative, as Lyotard defined it. There is the popular current Christian viewpoint: postmodernism means that everything is relative, avoid at all costs. Or there is the way that I have been learning to see postmodernism, a complicated patchwork of many things, tied together with searching. Postmodernism is a search for wholeness, for genuineness, for answers. At the same time, it is undercut by its reluctance to accept answers and its deep suspicion of commitment. We may ask what the cause of postmodernism is, and why it caught on to become a widespread philosophy, overtaking multiple generations. How was there such a radical shift from the assurance of the enlightenment that man was the ultimate answer, that we could do anything we chose, to the relentless questioning of young people shaped by the postmodern culture which they grew up in? To understand the importance of postmodernism in my life, there has to be an understanding of the forces strong enough to lead it into being a popularly accepted attitude.

One suggestion for a date to mark the beginning of the postmodern age in the Western world is 1973, when abortion was legalized in the USA. In his book Postmodern Times, Gene Edward Veith explores another date, with the claims of Thomas Oden that the modern age ended with the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989.

Either one of these embodies pieces of what postmodernism is, although in very different and, in fact, opposite ways. 1973 probably serves better as the single reason why postmodernism became such a trend, as it prepared the mentality of the Western culture for the worldview to be expressed six years later in Lyotard’s book The Postmodern Condition.
To the generation growing up after 1973, legalized abortion has been nothing short of a genocide -- a genocide which those who are now college aged have survived, but are nevertheless drastically impacted by. Over 20% of the population conceived since 1973 has been aborted. From current available statistics, somewhere over 45 million -- closer to 50 million -- abortions have been performed in the United States since then. To grow up knowing that you live in a culture where this goes on openly, in a manner protected by the government of one of the world’s superpowers is profoundly disturbing. Regardless of what other messages are being received by generations of children who are becoming adults, there are those of diametrically opposed forces. These forces are not merely intellectual niceties, but, quite literally, life and death. To grow up in a culture which encourages children by saying, “You can do anything when you grow up,” a culture which thinks so much of children’s self esteem that it is a major issue what color of ink is used to grade papers is one thing, and perhaps not necessarily a bad one. Children ought to be valued, though not idolized, and Scripture itself maintains a careful tension of portraying the blessing and the challenge which children are. But how can this sort of attitude be reconciled with the sudden sickening knowledge that a kind of silent, government-sanctioned genocide of your peers has been going on all of your life? It can effectively be argued that a culture wide form of something similar to schizophrenia is the result of the abortion practices which have now spanned over a generation. This, in turn, creates fertile ground for the postmodern worldview to flourish and exposes the shortcomings of postmodernism as a comprehensive system of understanding reality.

It doesn’t take much thought in such a culture to realize that there is major hypocrisy going on in the world around you, and from that point of knowledge on, there is a dramatic loss of some blend of naivete and innocence. This whole-sale, violent sundering of what ought to be trustable leads to deep skepticism about what else may be trusted. If your own country will do this, if mothers will kill their own children, what is a sure foundation? And why is this barely mentioned? Why is this not listed along with other genocides throughout history, ones which, horrible as they were, killed millions less?

The seeds of postmodernism, of incredulity towards metanarratives, find a place to grow beyond what could have been imagined by the early postmodern philosophers in these and other coming-of-age questions.

If the legalization of abortion in America highlights the environment in which postmodernism caught on, what exemplifies the good in this philosophy? As mentioned earlier, Veith reports that Oden believes that modernism ended when the Berlin Wall began to be dismantled. In terms of positive events of postmodernism, the Berlin Wall is an attractive option. It grew out of what was essentially a metanarrative, that of the Soviet Union’s bid for world power, forcibly imposed on a country. It separated a country from itself, breaking what should have been whole, offering death and struggle instead of dynamic exchange of life, as belongs in a city. Yet, in good postmodern fashion, its “necessity” was rebelled against, as people sought ways to circumvent it, and it eventually was taken down. It is especially telling that it was communities, regular people with sledgehammers and chisels, who came to knock apart the actual physical wall. At the same time, it is sobering to realize that there were many countries who did not want the wall to fall, fearing what would happen if Germany was united again. With all of these factors, the struggle for freedom and the accompanying tensions of responsibilities, the physical concrete wall bringing to life political ideology, the images of regular people and communities coming together to peacefully protest and bring the downfall of Communism, the fall of the Berlin Wall is a powerful poster child for the good traits of postmodernism.

Into this context I came, born in the year abortions in the US peaked, the year that Germany officially reunified. For anyone born in those years, there is no question about if we will engage postmodernism, only how we will do it. James Smith addresses this issue in his book Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism?, attempting to take on the questions of how Christianity relates, and how it ought to relate, to various early influential postmodern philosophers. This was a fascinating topic for me, because I see a huge need for this sort of work. I became interested in philosophy largely through the work of Francis Schaeffer and similar wrestling with Christianity and culture that was modeled throughout my life. As I near the end of my sophomore year in college, I have been finding an increasingly strong call on my heart for missions in the Western world, in the near Appalachian, “Stillers’ Country” towns where I grew up. I am contexted as a person in many different cultures and many sorts of language games: that of a transracially, special-needs adoptive family, a college student, a lover of languages, a Reformed covenant child. Trying to mesh all of these pieces can be an interesting challenge at best and an utter mess at times! Thus, any thoughtful book on how Christians are to live faithfully in such a complex context grabs my interest from many angles.

When talking about Derrida and Lyotard, Smith focuses on the storied-ness of the world, and that is something that I have no problem with. Maybe it is my own inherent skepticism, but I do automatically believe that everyone has an angle. There are always stories to listen to in order to understand people, and stories between the lines of what they are saying to understand who they really are. The church is called to a delicate and difficult position of proclaiming that we do have truth -- and not just a truth, but Truth itself. This truth isn’t the hard verifiable scientific facts that modernism so adored, and which Christianity has at time sought to make it. Too often, with the best of intentions, Christians have focused only on I Peter 3:15 and being ready to make a defense and forgotten that this defense is to be so woven into the fabric of what we do and how we live with those around us that it cannot be refuted. The reason comes after and because of the relationship, that Jesus came into a specific geographical place and historical time and saved us. It is not the power of our logic which convinces people, but the reality that the story which we bear witness of reflects. Christians need to be unashamed of presenting the whole story of the Bible, with its struggles and ugliness, despair and pain, overwhelmed with the joy of the glory of the end greater than any other story out there.

In his chapter on Foucault, he suggests that the church recover classical disciplines to counteract the negatives influences from our culture. Too often we are shaped, he points out, by forces and powers that are not what we as Christians want to be defined by. We are not to be like the worldly culture that surrounds us, obsessed with fitting in through the fashion of clothes which we wear; rather, we are to be marked by being different, a people set apart to service and self-sacrifice. While I don’t agree with all of the specific applications of his ideas which Smith makes in this book, I think that there is much to be said for his principle. Postmodernism makes no move to deny this, either. According to postmodernism, you never escape all of the constraints on you. The most for which you can hope is to be aware of what is influencing you and perhaps have a choice in what you are influenced by. On this point, not only are Smith and postmodernism in agreement, but Jesus affirmed this truth long before postmodernism was sweeping the globe. In Matthew 6:24, Jesus expressly told his followers that they could not serve more than one master. The actions that we do, no matter how small and innocent they may seem, bind us irrevocably. Postmodernism blows the whistle on hypocrisy that professes otherwise. And while the church could complain that it is too often the target of such criticism from a postmodern culture, we need to first address the problem of hypocrisy which we do have and repent. We are supposed to be different from the world, and it is sad when secular culture has to point out to the church where it has gone wrong.
How exactly do all of these varied pieces impact my life? First of all, understanding various facets of what postmodernism means is essential to living wisely in and influencing a postmodern culture. What I am studying in college to do is not a professional field detached from my personal life, but is, in large part, studying how people think and learning to better understand what the Bible says so that I will be better equipped to communicate truth into the broken world that I live in. I am not outside of this world with its brokenness, either, and postmodernism does not pretend to be an ethereal escape from this. Instead, postmodernism provides a straight look at the problems surrounding us and asks bold questions about why things are this way and if they have to stay how they are. As a Christian, I have a responsibility, even in the midst of all my own shortcomings, to live answers to those questions and be prepared to verbalize what I live.

~~~~~~

That is not exactly how I'd write on the same things if I was writing a post, but I don't think that I have enough readers at this point to merit rewriting.

But here's my basic premise: Yes, there are a lot of people in postmodernism, who have grown up in it, etc, who are apathetic and use the cultural mindset as an excuse to not care. When haven't there been? Postmodernism at its best is an eager search for truth, for something better than the hypocrisy that runs rampant in the world.

...questions? comments? If you read this far, I'm mightily impressed, and definitely interested in hearing your thoughts.

Following II (and Leading)

One of my favorite activities at camp is the Challenge Course, where we facilitate the groups of campers going through different challenges... point being, that they have to stretch themselves and work together. Afterwards we have a "debrief" where we discuss what went well, what could have gone better, what they should take on to the next challenge. Some of the challenges are on the ground, some are thirty feet in the air, and there is a progression in height (and physical trust!) thoughout the day. Hopefully. When things go well.

Sometimes things do not go well and they argue and they are silent and they don't seem to learn anything and counselors go back to main campus at the end of the time and lay on the porch and moan. And we sympathize a bit with each other... and try it again the next week.

One of my favorite elements is called The Wall. It's pretty simple. It's a wooden wall that is about ten or eleven feet high and the point is also simple, to get the entire team over it. There is a platform on the back side where a few people, once they've been gotten up, can stand and help others get up.

Debriefing for The Wall one morning led to a discussion on mentoring.

The challenge was so much easier to overcome when you were not doing it on your own. It was so much easier when there were people at the top to pull you up and over and it wasn't your own strength. (I'm a girl. I can attest to the truth of that fact!)

However, you couldn't just get to the top and abandon those who were after you. Everyone in the group had a responsibility to take their turn at the top of the wall, helping yank, tug, jerk the others behind them up over the edge of the wall. And some of them ended up with good bruises to show for it, sore muscles.

But they did it. All of them got over, and all of them were safe, and no one was left out, and no one was left behind.

So we talked about how life is like that, how there are huge challenges. And sometimes, sometimes, someone is extremely strong and athletic and can haul themselves over it. But everyone can really use people around them to help them get a firm place to stand on and people who have already gone through something similar to wait for them a bit and pull them up.

And how, once you've gotten over, or through, or past whatever the challenge is, the point is not always to run as far away from it as you can and go on your own merry way.

Sometimes it means waiting patiently for someone else who is coming the same way and giving them everything you've got so that they can keep going, too.

Another way we talked about mentoring a lot, a picture that was used in training both staff and campers, was that of Paul, Barnabas, and Timothy. That we need to, like Paul, have a Barnabas -- someone who is on our same level, going through the same things, who we can relate to and share with. We need a Timothy, someone younger than us (and that may be in age, it may be in maturity, whatever) who we are faithfully training up and showing them how they ought to live. And we need a Paul, someone who is challenging us, who we play Timothy to, someone who is teaching us the next step. (If you want to read more on this metaphor and how it should play out, here is an article.)

Mentoring ought to happen naturally in families. It has for me. I learn from my parents, I get to teach my siblings. As I've grown older, I have also gotten the opportunity to see it happening more places. It happened short term all over the place at camp; duh, I was a counselor. But for the most part, those were not long-lasting relationships. We lived together for a week and then said goodbye and that was that. The ones that I really consider mentoring are the ones which have been built over the course of years. Some of those have been in real life, and some of them have been online.

Real life is preferable.

Online can be beneficial. I'm not denying that deep relationships can be built that way. But it is so, so much easier to hide. If you don't want to talk to someone, you just don't log on. They can't see your face and hear the tone of your voice.

That being said, God can still use them for incredible things, especially with time and honesty. There are times when there are not a lot of people around to run to and someone can be found online and you can say, Hey, I need you to pray for me. Hey, can you talk for a while?

And I know that you have just read a decent-length post, but really, if you've stuck with it so far -- read this too. It's worth your time.

Imitate Me

That is what I want to be to those who I mentor, and that is what I want when I find good mentors -- to follow them around, literally, and learn what makes them tick, and how they react under pressure, and what makes them laugh, and what they get angry about. One of my college profs is like that. (We'll joke that we are getting a major in Biblical _______ and a minor in Dr. _______.) Imagine the opportunity when he gave a "Last Lecture" this spring, of the things he'd want to tell us if it was his last lecture...

I've had friends like that. They probably get tired of me following them and reading the back entries of their blogs and listening to them when they are half-coherent. But I want to know: How do they act when they are exhausted? How about when people tell off-color jokes? Or when they see people who they were friends with years ago? How about with their families?

This summer one of the counselors was very good at loving discipline of campers. And I wanted to record how she responded to tough campers, and copy her techniques.

So how about you? Thoughts? What questions do you ask when deciding to follow someone? How do you feel about mentoring?

Final thought: Is mentoring a duty for Christians? ...how about if we call it discipling?

Following

It was the same thing that He had said at the very beginning.

Follow me.

And things had changed, He had changed the man's name early on, nicknaming him, calling him Rock instead of He Has Heard.

And Peter had followed Him for three years, everywhere He went, seeing Him do miracles and shine in glory and he confessed Him Christ, the anointed one.

Peter was always fast to talk, and it makes me wonder if his mother despaired at his name having to do with listening. Really.

He was fast to speak up till that last night, when he said, all offended? seriously? that he would never deny. Maybe everyone else would, and would run away, but he would not.

And then he did.

Three times.

And saw Jesus and knew his sin and wept.

How do you recover from that?

Even if Jesus said you were forgiven, would you believe?



How about in the years to come, when He would no longer be there to run to, for Peter to look into His eyes again and reassure himself that the forgiveness was real?

So I read John 21, curious to see how He would restore and recover and redeem and reconcile. Because He is wiser than I am and I struggle with these things, so I want to learn from Him.

He asks for Peter's love, three times, and Peter is grieved. Once for each denial.

And He warns Peter of the future to come, the hardness in it, that it will not be any easier than the past. That the past was only training for what will come.

And then He says --

and this is what I noticed for the first time --

Follow me.

The same thing He said at the beginning, when they were still fishermen catching fish.

That has not changed.

Peter's world has changed entirely, turned upside down and inside out, and he will fail again in the future and be rebuked by Paul, and he will ask again in the next two minutes about John, wanting to know what will happen to him, but Jesus and His call are not changed by any of this, and never have been.

You follow me.




We did, as a group, as staff at a Christian camp, reading through all this in John. Talking about what it means and what it means for us.



And His call doesn't change for me now, now that I am back at home or when I go back to school or when I am graduated or wherever I go. Or when I deny Him by what I do and what I don't do, what I say and what I don't say. When I am stupid and argue over things that should not be argued over, when I hurt others and when I break myself beyond what I can repair.

His claim on me stays the same.

And it is good.



Follow me.