Let Me Sum Up

 Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.

It might surprise some of you that a blog so overtly Christian would use a quote from Karl Marx. Marx was not a big fan of Jesus. Or any other religion for that matter. Even though he technically grew up in a Christian family (his father, a non-practicing Jew, had joined an evangelical church for political reasons) and he did get married in a church. He openly felt that philosophy would one day replace theology. Which is kind of funny as they both wrestle with the same questions, just from different angles. But it isn't terribly important whether Marx believed in God or not. The point is that I believe in God but my belief doesn't blind me to the truth. There are a lot of areas that Karl and I do not see eye to eye on, but I absolutely agree that change is where it's at.

I don't think it takes much paying attention to our current state of affairs to know that things have gone a bit off the rails. You'll also notice there is no shortage of pundits, philosophers, preachers and politicians who are willing to literally talk your ears off about how and why we got here (and certainly don't forget who and what helped along the way). But let's face it. People have been talking for centuries. Obviously, I have done and am going to do some talking myself. But the point of the Chaotic Good Party is that talking must end and doing must begin. Only by actually doing can we change the world.

Which brings us to the five foundational words: love, grace, joy, peace and hope. And my attempts to turn what are essentially emotions and concepts into easily repeatable actions. To recap, here are the genius acronyms that have been previously revealed:

Choose Love

Join Others to Yourself

Give Radical Attention to Connect with Everyone

Perform Every Act in Christian Empathy

Help Other People Endlessly

These are what I will forevermore refer to as the Basics. The basic hows and whys behind what we do. It is still my intention to spend a good chunk of time coming up with all kinds of whats to do. Whats like knitting scarves, random acts of yard work, giving gardens and who knows what else. I will always be on the lookout for new ideas. This doesn't mean I don't also have more topics I want to talk about. I'm passionate about modern myths that need to go and the seven social sins of Gandhi, among other things (our church is just finishing up a fascinating sermon series on that second one). Lots of great stuff to anticipate.

And if I've rambled on too much or those acronyms are more than you'll ever remember, here's the wall art version:

Let's Choose Love, Join in Joy, Give Grace, Perform Peace and Help Spread Hope

Are we going to face opposition every step of the way? Count on it. But realize that if a certain kind of people are horribly upset by what we do, we are on the right track. It is now time to be radical, my friends. To fly in the face of systemic evil. To strive towards making on earth as it is in heaven a reality. To be together, to be chaotic and to be good.

Hope Floats

We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was an extraordinary person. In the face of race riots, government scrutiny, continuing oppression from Jim Crow, systemic persecution from a system that already showed signs of failing and setbacks to his mission, he was still able to offer hope to the world. In spite of church bombings, the calculated murders of people connected with his cause and vicious smear campaigns against his character, he continued to dream. Even having a sure premonition of his own impending assassination did not keep him from the fight. One of the questions we have to ask ourselves is how? How did he manage to do that? Unfortunately, we can't ask him in person but I do have some ideas (please try to act shocked).

Hope is a pretty loose concept in our world. Don't believe me? Google quotes about hope. Notice something about most of the results? The word hope isn't actually in many of them. Even the definition is kind of vague: the feeling that events will turn out for the best. The best for whom? And what if I'm hoping that things will turn out terribly for you (which may or may not be the best for me)? Does hope spring eternal? Does it actually float (and if so, does it float more like a cloud or a red balloon)?

The word hope occurs 163 times in the NIV bible, 20% of those times in the Psalms alone. There is hope for a wide variety of things: deliverance from one's enemy's, that the cries of the poor and afflicted will be heard, that your children will turn out all right, for strength, for wisdom and for the righteous to prevail. Hope is almost exclusively found in the Lord and His promises for a brighter future.  We are told to guard against letting our hope wither and encouraged to hold on to our hope no matter the circumstances. God is the hope of Israel and Jesus is the hope of the world.

But how do we generate hope, even if we've slipped up and lost it? Like so many other things, I think feeling hopeful relies on relationships. Not with things but with people. I give you the last of my foundational acronyms (at least for now; I can't make any promises for the future, no matter how much you might hope I'll stop):

Help Other People Endlessly

I have developed an unshakeable conviction that the more we help others, the more we will lean into love, the less we will be invested in the ways of the world and the more we will believe that everything will turn indeed turn out all right. The very act of helping someone else not only lifts them up, it is going to give you a boost as well. Provided, of course, that you aren't expecting anything in return. The moment that helping others becomes transactional, you can kiss hope goodbye.

What do I mean by transactional? That is how seemingly every relationship has become here in late stage capitalism. It has, in fact, been the basic modus operandi of capitalism from the beginning. I give the cashier at McDonald's (an average of) $9.29 and they hand me a tray with a Big Mac, some fries and a cup for a beverage. A merchant offers a good or service for a certain amount of a commodity. If I agree to said amount, we exchange the appropriate commodity for said good or service and the relationship is over. It can be more complex than that. The merchant could strive to make you happy enough to engage in future transactions or you could become dissatisfied with your purchase and reopen the transaction for some kind of compensation, but that is essentially the scenario.

Other relationships can easily become transactional as well. If you've ever said to someone "you owe me one," you've been in a transactional relationship. The old adage "never lend a friend money" exists because it implies that the relationship with your friend will become transactional and the friendship will be ruined (spoiler alert: it probably will). If you feel like you need to do a certain number of chores around the house before your spouse will grant you relations in the bedroom, guess what, your marriage has become transactional (and is likely in trouble). Needless to say (but I will anyways), it is really hard to hold on to hope and continue to help others when all your interactions become quid pro quo.

This was actually the first acronym I came up with when I started to think about the philosophy of the Chaotic Good Party. It sprang into my mind wholly formed but with one exception. Originally I had the letter E represented by the word Epically. Because who doesn't want to be epic on a regular basis. The more I thought about that though, the less it rang true to me. Opportunities to perform epic feats of goodwill are actually kind of rare. Most acts of kindness and help are small gestures. And they are infinitely repeatable. And helping, like all of the other actions in this series of TED Talks I've been giving, becomes easier to do as you move along and the goal here is to make it a natural part of your daily life. Will we occasionally make big, bold, epic, attention grabbing acts of helping others? Yes. Will most of our help be small (but no less radically chaotic), possibly go completely unheralded or even fall short of our intentions and veer into the realm of disappointment? I infinitely hope so. 

Peace like a River

When I say it's you I like, I'm talking about that part of you that knows that life is far more than anything you can ever see or hear or touch. That deep part of you that allows you to stand for those things without which humankind cannot survive. Love that conquers hate, peace that rises triumphant over war, and justice that proves more powerful than greed.

As a card carrying member of Gen X, I had the privilege to spend a good chunk of my formative years watching Fred Rogers, the voice behind the above quote, potter about in his neighborhood. Week in and week out, I would help Mr. Rogers feed his fish, learn how crayons were made from Picture Picture, ride Trolley to the Land of Make Believe and hope that Mr. McFeely would stop by with one of his speedy deliveries. The show's slow pace and genteel demeanor aren't for everyone (my mother admits to finding it somewhat creepy), but millions of us found it a warm and comfy place to regularly visit. It wasn't until well into adulthood that I began to realize why I felt that way and just how much the whole thing centered around the concept of peace.

Peace is actually a funny thing to think about. It's frequently paired with the word quiet, even though it's possible to find peace in the middle of chaos. It sometimes gets defined as the absence of war, which reduces it the to something you don't do rather than an activity you do. That's a mental trap I've fallen into myself. When I was younger, there was a period around 1990, during the Gulf War, when churches around us were putting signs in their yards that said "Wage Peace." I thought they were silly. My logic went something like if I'm not waging war than I must automatically be waging peace, so I did the thing without even trying. Yay! 

Ah, youth. Obviously, I've changed my position quite a bit since then. Turns out that peace is so much more than the absence of aggression or noise or conflict. Peace is a mindset that, when actively practiced, becomes a lifestyle.

Peace is mentioned over 230 times in the Bible. Frequently in the Old Testament, it's mentioned in connection with conflict. Forces trying to negotiate peace before fighting. The vanquished trying to end a conflict peacefully. A prophet warning Israel that an invader is coming to end what peace they are currently enjoying. In the latter parts of Isaiah and the New Testament, peace is something that comes from God. Something that is bestowed on those who let go of the ways of this world and follow the teachings of Jesus. A way to stand against the forces of war and evil, not just the absence of those forces.

Peace, you see, is something that you can do, over and over again until it is the way you are. But how? The act of peace is only vaguely alluded to in the Bible. Jesus tells us to turn the other cheek when we are struck. To give someone who steals our cloak our coat as well. To be meek and merciful and to mourn and be literal peacemakers. None of which seems intuitive or even likely to cut down on conflict. There are even some people who claim to be disciples of Christ who read all of those admonitions and come to the conclusion that Jesus was weak. A recent poll of pastors actually revealed that their congregations have the most issues with sermons based on the Beatitudes, one of the major cornerstones of Jesus' whole philosophy. I know you can't be Christian AND think Christ was wrong, so what are those people not getting?

I think it's a matter of getting mired in worldly thought processes and losing focus on what is actually strength in motion. Think about it. Someone who is stealing your cloak is doing so because it makes them feel powerful or at least less helpless in an unfeeling society (it's rarely actually about the cloak). If you look them in the eye and say not only do I let you have my cloak but I willingly give you my coat as well, two things happen. One, you erase a good deal of the power imbalance. Suddenly, they are no longer taking, you are giving. It's a subtle difference but enough to unnerve a whole lot of bullies. Second, by looking them in the eye (and yes this is a crucial component no matter how much it makes you want to pee your pants), you also change the dynamic of your interaction. Some, like Gandhi perhaps, would say it forces your opponent to give you at least a modicum of respect. I don't know that I would go that far, but I do think it takes a good deal of the fun out of it for them. Obviously, this isn't going to work on everyone. Some people are assholes no matter what you do. But I believe it will tilt a surprising number of situations in your favor. I, for instance, have never actually been punched in the face no matter how much my mouth runs.

But what about all the times you aren't in imminent danger? How do you spread (and enjoy) peace on a regular basis? If you've been reading along the last few posts, it should come as no surprise that I have an acronym to contemplate.

Perform Every Act in Christian Empathy

 

If the word Christian makes you squeamish, feel free to substitute caring. And, yes, Peace goes hand in hand with both Love and Grace but is subtly different. Love is choosing to act. Grace is giving someone the benefit of the doubt before acting. Peace is the mode you use to act. And empathy is the key word.

Empathy is not, as I think many people assume, the same thing as sympathy. Sympathy is the ability to recognize that someone else is in pain. It's pretty easy to sympathize with someone and let your involvement end there. I'm sorry you're hurting; I hope you feel better. Empathy is the ability to share in someone else's pain. To actually take on some of their burden and do something about it. This is an unpleasant situation; what can I do to make it better? In other words, empathy is putting yourself in someone else's shoes and trying to figure out how to act from their perspective, not your own. Recognizing that what you need in any given moment might not be the same thing that someone else needs in that moment. 

Empathy requires listening skills, processing skills and, often, a little bit of imagination. The end result of empathy, however, is a much bigger impact on both the recipient and the giver than mere sympathy, which will bring more peace to both of you. If you strive to make a deeper connection to people every time you interact with them, just imagine how much more peaceful your corner of the world could be. Will this be somewhat exhausting at first? Sure. Waging peace is like anything else in this world, practice makes it easier and easier to do.

Which brings us back to Fred Rogers. The more I learn about him, the more I'm sorry I never got to meet him. The peaceful nature of his show, which seems to be too good to be real for a lot of people, carried over into everything he did. He was a kind, caring, empathetic human being who strove to find the good in everyone he met. Movies have been made about skeptical people who came gunning for what was surely his false personality only to be won over by the genuine deal. He has become a personal hero of mine. I think he would be absolutely dismayed over what our country has become. I also think that he would not change how he interacted with the world. I like to think he would be encouraging about what the Chaotic Good Party is all about. Jesus is the original Prince of Peace. Fred was a good and faithful servant. Let's all be radical and do our best to follow in their footsteps.

Amazing Grace

 Grace? She died thirty years ago.

One of my favorite bits from the holiday classic National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation is when hard-of-hearing Great Aunt Bethany is asked to say grace for the family meal. She misunderstands what people are saying to her and responds with the above quote, thinking they're asking after an old friend. When it's finally conveyed to her that she should say the blessing, she stands up and recites the Pledge of Allegiance. The rest of the family throws in the proverbial napkin and joins in. The word play, coupled with the back and forth between Aunt Bethany and her cantankerous husband, never fails to bring a smile to my face. I recently noticed, though, that the same quote could be used to describe modern society.

Grace is not a word that comes up in conversation much anymore. Occasionally we'll use it to describe someone who moves elegantly. A little more often, we might talk about a grace period, usually in connection to how many days we can go past a loan payment due date without paying a penalty. Even asking Great Aunt Bethany to pray before eating seems to be a thing of the past. Someone bringing up the Biblical kind of grace? For me at least, unheard of outside of sermons at the aptly named Grace United Methodist Church.

But what exactly is the Biblical kind of grace? It's something that comes up pretty often throughout scripture. Grace shows up in the Psalms, the Proverbs and the Prophets. It gets mentioned over 100 times throughout the New Testament. Sometimes lips are anointed with grace. Sometimes we stand in grace. Usually grace is given to us by God, but we are also told to give grace to others. Biblical grace is a state of being where we have found favor with God. My interpretation of that is this: God loves us, he wants to be in a relationship with us and is willing to give us the benefit of the doubt and put up with our flaws in order to maintain that relationship. He gives us grace so that we have a safe place to make mistakes, learn from them and grow into better people. Without grace, the moment we said or did something stupid or selfish (or in many cases, both), the relationship could be broken and we would be lost.

 

Grace is a tough concept for some of us to accept. We don't feel worthy of receiving it. Maybe because, in our own minds, our flaws are too big. Or we've done something that just can't be forgiven. Or our bad habits are too ingrained to be changed. Or (insert the toxic thought you think about yourself most often). The good news about about the grace we receive from God, is that there isn't anything we have to do (or not do) in order to get it. He gives us another helping every morning to help us get through the day. Whether we think we deserve it or not. Whether we want it or not. Whether we think we even need it or not. (Spoiler alert: every single one of us does.)

 

So, if God gives us daily doses of His grace how are we supposed to respond to each other in the same way? Since I can sense some of you wanting to raise your hand with a question or two, now would be a good time to mention some things that grace is not. Grace is not a tolerance of evil. Grace does not mean putting up with abuse. Grace can go hand in hand with forgiveness but is not the same thing, even though both contain an element of accountability. Grace is not necessarily about kindness but can be the pathway to being more kind. 

Extending grace to others is also not something that comes easily to me. Luckily for all of us, I've come up with another acronym to make it easier to do:

Give Radical Attention to Connect with Everyone

What does radical attention mean? All it really means is that we need to take a few seconds and actually pay attention to the people around us. Which, in today's stare-at-our-phones-for-17-hours-a-day culture is a pretty radical concept. Before flying off the handle in any given situation (a condition I am constantly working on), pause for a moment, consider that you know literally nothing useful about the cashier/server/driver/toll taker/stranger in an elevator/roller skate wearing teenager/whoever standing in front of you, realize that you are not the first interaction that they have had today and (wait for it): BE NICE! 

The simple fact is that most people just want to be recognized as existing without being dumped on for, well, existing. Anyone who has ever been in a customer service position can tell you that a huge chunk of the people who are complaining to you don't even really want a refund or a new product or anything other than for you to listen to their complaint. The key to those interactions though, is that you have to sincerely give them your undivided, radical attention. And I get it. Paying attention to the world around you can be exhausting. But, frankly, so can being a crab all the time (and I am really good at being a crab). I even have an example of how giving radical attention to connect with everyone made a night out better recently.

Several nights ago, my wife and I decided that neither of us were in the mood to cook dinner. We (finally) agreed on Chinese food. We headed off to a restaurant she had been to before but I had not. When we got there, the place was hopping. Several people were waiting for to-go orders and about two-thirds of the tables were occupied. It took a couple of minutes for a gentleman to meet us at the front counter and take us back to a table. He dropped off some menus, took our drink order and scurried away. We looked over the menu, made our choices and waited. And waited some more. Then we looked around to see if we could catch the eye of a server, did not see anyone and waited more. At that point, more than twenty minutes had gone by since we sat down.

I fully admit that the situation so far would frequently have my freakishly low blood pressure rising and a red haze settling over everything I saw. I think a larger percentage of people would take the same position every year that goes by. We would declare the service to be atrocious, storm out, maybe write a nasty review online somewhere and make weird guttural sounds in the back of our throats if anyone mentioned the place in our presence. Then, even hangrier than we were twenty minutes ago, we would have to find somewhere else to eat and start the whole cycle over again. Luckily, I've been working on my cranky attitude a bit lately and we chose a different route.

We had been having a pleasant conversation while waiting but it petered out just enough for us to start hearing snippets of dialog from the tables around us. This not only gave us the opportunity to make a few quiet jokes about what other people were talking about, but also forced us to shift our focus from our table to the restaurant at large. That is when we noticed there was only two people serving the entire restaurant, including the pick-up orders. And those two people were not only running their butts off but were doing it unflappably. Within moments of this shift on our part, the gentleman stopped by our table with drinks and took our food order. I'm not actually sure how long we waited for our food. Because we chose to extend some grace, we simply enjoyed some people watching. A woman eventually hustled up to our table with our plates, apologized for the wait, which we assured her was okay, and charged back to the kitchen for another table's food.

The food we ate that night was, hands down, some of the best Chinese food I've ever had. The crab rangoons tasted like they had just been put together (as busy as they were they very well may have) and the orange chicken was awesome. If we hadn't chosen grace, we would have missed out. True, we wouldn't have known we missed out but often it's what you don't know that hurts you. Or something like that. But wait, there's more. Since we were in such a good mood after our feast, we decided to take a walk and visit the rest of the businesses along the strip mall. As we approached the far end, we discovered a Brazilian bakery where we purchased some delicious sweet rolls and the delightful proprietor insisted we have some cheese rolls on the house. Those were the lightest, fluffiest cheese flavored baked goods I've ever had the pleasure to run across my taste buds. We will absolutely visit both places again and I'm betting my waistline will give evidence to our patronage.

So there you have it. An evening that could have been mediocre at best or a total disaster leaving both of us disgruntled and weary, became delightful because we remembered that we'd been given a healthy heaping of grace and chose to pass some of it on. And let's be honest, if we had chosen to storm out, that restaurant would have been just fine. Our leaving would have lightened their load for the night but, frankly, added to ours. While paying attention to the people around us does sometimes take energy we might not feel like we have, giving people grace seems to make the energy we do have go a whole lot further. And that is some good we could all use in the midst of the world's chaos.

A PSA about mass deportations

 A PSA for anyone stressing over mass deportations:

In the course of my work at the Johnson County Adult Detention Center, I come into contact with law enforcement officials from all levels of government. A few weeks ago, we were releasing a guy to ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement). An overly enthusiastic deputy eagerly asked the ICE agent if he was "ready for the mass deportations!" The ICE agent laughed out loud. He then said, "Not happening anytime soon."

Here's how he explained it. First of all, there is no budget to do mass deportations. More importantly, there is no infrastructure. ICE does not have any where near an adequate amount of detention centers to house detainees, does not have the network necessary to utilize more detention centers and certainly does not have the personnel needed to run said detention centers much less actually round people up or facilitate them through the process. He was a senior agent and said, in his estimation, it would be a minimum of two years before any of that would be in place and mass deportations could even be thought about. He also figured that the actual cost of doing them would be far more than any politician would be able to stomach. The moral of the story here is that if you want to know what's really going on, ask the people who would be tasked with doing the thing you're worried about.

Now, does this mean we shouldn't be outraged? That we shouldn't be fighting bigoted stupidity every step of the way? Of course not. It just means that mass deportations are not starting today, tomorrow or even next month. We have some time to breath, to gather our thoughts and energy and then give the powers that currently be a whole lot of hell.

Joy to the World

 We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

I feel like the problem our society has with the concept of joy began two and a half centuries ago with Thomas Jefferson. Hopefully, you recognize the quote above as being part of the Declaration of Independence (if you do not, the educational system may be in worse shape than I think). Now, let's ignore the fact that a slave holder was bold enough to declare all men as equals. And let's gloss over the fact that, for Jefferson, any higher power that existed had stopped paying attention to their creation centuries before his time so I'm not certain how those human created rights could be considered god given. For the purposes of today's talk, the issue I have with that sentence is the word happiness. Like most political manifestos, the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence is long on rhetoric but short on details or useful application. What is happiness, how do we get it and what happens if we lose it? Jefferson seems to say Beats me but you are free to go for it anyways.

In my opinion, happiness is a fleetingly fickle emotion. What makes you happy one moment might fill you with loathing the next. The things that made you happy as a child make you nostalgic as an adult (if you are lucky) but could just as easily fill you with bitterness and regret. Changes in tastes, relationships or even availability can easily turn happiness into boredom. Don't believe me? Think about something that made you happy because it was yours, no one else had it. Then someone else got it, yours wasn't so special anymore and it became diminished in your eyes. Happiness never lasts.

That's okay, I hear some of you saying. You're a grown up so you don't pursue happiness.  You are in the joy game. And joy is an emotion so much deeper and brighter and better than happiness, right?  Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news. In our era of late stage capitalism, Madison Avenue as caught on to the joy versus happiness argument and pretty much rendered both words useless. It used to be that a new dishwasher/dress/cigarette brand/car was all you needed to make you happy. Now a vacation in the Ozarks/pill to cure your erectile dysfunction/new car is all you need to give your life that spark of joy you so desperately seek. 

And how about that phrase, "sparks joy"? Feeling overwhelmed by all the stuff you bought to try to brighten up your life? Hold each thing and see if it still sparks joy. If it doesn't, let it go (and if you need to replace it with something else that will spark joy, please do that right away). That fad came and went about as fast as every other attempt to fill the happiness hole in your soul. Why is that, I wonder. Just kidding. I have a pretty good idea why: we try to fill that hole with the wrong thing.

Capitalism (or more specifically consumerism, the economic sub-brand we've embraced here in the United States since at least the early Eighties), dictates that companies sell ever more products and services. Even if the balance sheet at the end of the fiscal year shows a surplus of money, that is not enough. Develop new (or at least "improved") things for people to spend their money on, the more the better. How will those companies convince consumers to spend said money? As I mentioned above, through advertising that mainly bombards our eyes and ears with the message that we cannot possibly experience joy without buying stuff. The result? We are overwhelmed with things. Just here in America, we collectively spend over 44 Billion dollars a year to store stuff that will no longer fit in our houses in places we rarely spend even a minute longer than it takes to throw another box on the pile.

But surely with the excess of items we are also floating in a continuous river of the excess joy marketers promised would come with them. Of course not. Instead, anxiety and depression are at all time highs. We have television shows like Hoarders, where we meet people struggling with deep, thing-related mental disorders (thank God we aren't like them), and Storage Wars, where we watch the cottage industry of scavengers buying up storage units worth of stuff someone was no longer able (or willing) to pay for (that one hits a lot closer to home but thank God that isn't us either... at least not this month). Americans currently pay around 12 Billion dollars annually attempting to de-clutter their homes (and yes, that is in addition to the 44 Billion spent to store it all).

Jesus has a radically different take on what will fill your happiness soul hole. It's not about things (although my wife can make a pretty good argument for dish washers). It's not about experiences (even if I'm convinced that a really good, deep tissue massage, perhaps on a beach, could be life changing). Joy, according to Christ, comes from one place: relationships.

Relationships are, at its heart, what the Bible is all about. The big one is the relationship that God desires to have with each one of us individually. The Bible constantly tells us to "rejoice in the Lord" (in other words to find joy in our relationship with Him). In Galatians 5:22, we are told that joy is a fruit of the Spirit (joy comes from having a relationship with the Holy Spirit). And what did the angel tell the shepherds when they were announcing the birth of Jesus? "Fear not, for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy which shall be unto all people!" No matter what part of the trinity we are meeting with at any given moment, joy is supposed to be a big part of that encounter. As I've mentioned before, God promises to take care of us and that care will ultimately fill our soul hole with abundant joy. 

But God isn't the only relationship we are charged with having. Remember that in Matthew 22, Jesus said it was just as important to have relationships with (to love) other people. He also said in Matthew 18:20 that wherever at least two people gather in His name, He will show up to the party as well. To me, that says that life is better when lived with other people. 

TO BE CLEAR: I do not think Matthew 18:20 means that God can't be experienced in a one-on-one, personal relationship. I absolutely think that developing a solid bond with Jesus through practices like solitary prayer time and the quiet study of scripture is imperative to spiritual well being. I also am sure that trying to go it completely alone is a bad idea. And I am saying this as a thoroughly vetted introvert (and a solid member of Generation X) so you should probably listen. As much as it sometimes pains me to say it, we are designed (on purpose) to need other people. If you delve into the rabbit hole of what happens to humans in isolation, you'll see that science is on board with this conclusion as well.

So, what do we do about it? Just like when I suggested that love is a choice, I put forth that joy is not an emotion but an action that we can choose to do. I've even come up with a delightfully cheesy acronym for us to remember.

Join Others to Yourself

What does this mean exactly? Find your tribe. Like to play card games? Join a bridge/poker/euchre club. Like to cook? Find some amateur chefs and cook elaborate dinners at each other's houses once a month. Like to read cozy mysteries while chugging Pinot Noir and wearing nothing but a robe and woolen socks? Unless you happen to be stuck in some kind of bio-dome type science experiment, I'm willing to bet there is a group for that near you. Even in rural areas. I grew up in a town of about 5,000 people and there was a wide variety of freak flags flying there. Granted, not all of them were on obvious display (you may need to do some searching), but they existed.

It can be for almost any reason you can come up with but, and I can't stress this enough, you have to meet with your people in person. As wonderful (and equally annoying) as technology can be, if COVID taught us anything it is that four people on a Zoom meeting will not forge the same relationships that four people sitting around the same table will. There is something God breathed about actual eye contact and several months without any, screamed loud and clear that we are built to need it. And, if it makes you feel better, you won't just be bringing more joy into your own life, you'll be saving your country, too. There is a fascinating book, Bowling Alone by Robert D Putnam, that correlates the decline of Americans' involvement in group activities to the decline of American society itself. If reading a 500+ page book isn't your thing, watch Mr. Putnam in person in his dramatically (but still to be taken literally) named documentary, Join or Die!

Astute readers will notice that I said almost any reason in the above paragraph. I shouldn't need to point this out, but if the others you find yourself joined to are engaged in activities like wearing white hoodies and terrorizing people, you are not going to experience joy. I'll grant that it is possible to feel shriveled moments of superiority or something else akin to a stunted kind of power in those situations. At the end of the day, though, not only will you not have filled your soul holes, you will feel emptier than ever. Just ask anyone who has not quite managed to totally remove their "88" neck tattoo and winces when you ask them about it. Always use discernment when you consider who you want to join to yourself.

I'm also not advocating that you run out and try to make friends with everyone you see.  You know the crowd size of your comfort level. If that is the number of people you can count on one hand, stick to intimate dinner parties. If your mantra is go big or go home, attend as many galas as you can find (just don't expect to see me there). Overloading your capacity for togetherness is a road that leads straight to burnout. If you find yourself approaching the edge of sanity, don't be afraid to downsize the next few gatherings or opt out altogether for a little while. Just don't completely stop joining others to yourself. I'm convinced that is how the most joyous parts of life will be discovered. So be a radical. Do yourself and those around you some good and forge more joy giving relationships this year. The fact that your actions might cause a bit of chaos in the minds of the powers that be, is just a byproduct we will have to learn to live with.

All You Need Is Love

When I say the word love, many things might come to mind. Thanks to the animators at Warner Brothers, you might picture someone with heart shaped pupils in their eyes, floating a foot off the ground with chirping birds flying around their head. You might conjure up the image of a little, naked angel shooting arrows at unsuspecting crushes. Maybe you immediately slunk off into the woods in the middle of a full moon night in search of a potion sure to secure that special someone's affections. Did you think of your spouse or your grandmother or a mentor or a best friend?

I think I would be safe if I said that for most people, the word love tends to evoke an emotion. Warm fuzzies in your stomach when you find yourself surrounded by good friends. Your cheeks flushing when you get a glimpse of a crush. Your heart literally skipping a beat when the love of your life is walking towards you down the aisle on your wedding day. There are a variety of emotions that we collectively lump under the umbrella of love: adoration, lust, friendship, attraction, romance, comradery. Even pity or anger can creep into the mix. We have turned love into one of the most complex, convoluted concepts known to man.

And yet, at the same time, we have diluted the meaning of love almost to the point of, well, pointlessness. We overuse the word constantly. I love your hair. I love my morning cup of coffee. I love that movie, that song, that book. Sometimes it seems like there isn't anything we don't love. Except there is plenty. I don't love the performances in that movie. I love New York City but I don't love the traffic. You're beautiful but I don't love that dress on you. The sheer number of times each day we collectively declare our love (or lack of it) highlights the fact that we have become completely disconnected from the word. 

 Maybe we can gain some clarity if we look at love songs. The Beatles famously declared that love is all we need. All we need for what you ask? Well, apparently everything from saving people to singing songs, but the Fab Four fails to actually define what love is much less how to solve every problem with it. Catchy tune though. Tina Turner asked what's love got to do with it? Her conclusion was that love was a throwaway emotion and not worth the heartbreak. More recently, Minski's breakthrough hit determined that her love belongs to no one but her. Granted this is a very finite sampling of just three songs, but I don't think that we'd get any kind of consensus if we dug deeper. Sometimes love is a many splendid thing and sometimes it stinks.

It almost seems as though our society is deliberately confusing us when it comes to the concept of love. By piling on layer after layer of conflicting definitions and viewpoints and feelings, love has become a dead, lifeless, four letter word. The fact that we use it so often in conjunction with inanimate objects rather than relationships hints at deep, dark (and maybe even overtly sinister) motives. No wonder a growing number of people just shrug their shoulders when the love of God is mentioned. So what does Christ have to say about all this? Turns out, plenty.

Let me start by being fairly blunt. Christ does not give us a choice of whether we want to focus on making love the entirety of our faith. Love cannot be just a starting place or an element to make our other beliefs more palatable. Love must be the place we live, our default (and only) mode. How do I know this? Jesus said so. In Matthew 22, Jesus was well into a sparring session with the religious leaders of His day. Various factions of Jewish leaders were trying (and failing) to get him to say or do something ungodly. In verse 36, a pharisee asks Him what He thinks is the greatest commandment in Jewish law. 

Let's pause a moment to consider why that is such a politically charged, absolute trap of a question. As laid out in the writings of Moses, Jewish law consisted of 613 statutes, some regulating what you should do but a large chunk start with "Thou shalt not." They range from well known laws like "Thou shalt not murder" and "Thou shalt not bear false witness" to more obscure ones like "don't boil a goat in its mother's milk." (Stay with me here, don't lose focus giving in to your cravings for boiled goat meat.) As an expert in all 613 laws, the pharisee probably felt confident that, no matter what law Jesus chose as the most important, it would be easy to embarrass Him about His choice and let Him know how very, very wrong He was. You know that the pharisees had spent hours in late night sessions debating this exact topic. That pharisee was primed to pounce on Jesus' response.

So how did Jesus respond? He didn't start talking about the relative merits of each of the laws. He didn't gather a council of other teachers together to agree on an answer. He didn't hesitate or even try to buy time by restating the question. He said, "Love God." But He didn't stop there. He added that in order to love God we also had to love people. Those creations not only made in the very image of God but creatures that God has overflowing love for Himself. It's impossible to say you love God if you don't love people. 

Again, Jesus could have stopped there and let that answer stand on its own. But, in my favorite part of the exchange, he made it abundantly clear what our priorities should be. Every other law, He said, hinges on those two. In other words, get love right and you will fulfill all of the law. Try to bypass love and focus on one of the other 611 laws and you will end up fulfilling none of the law. The only way to be a follower of Christ is to perfect your execution of love. 

This whole love thing is a directive I often lament because, of all the laws, why did he pick the hardest one to do? It's pretty easy to not mix fabrics in a single garment or refrain from having sex with your sister (or mother or daughter or aunt; yes, that one gets uncomfortably specific, even more so than I've listed here), but to love others is decidedly less easy. What about in Matthew 5:43, when Jesus says I even have to love my enemies? How am I supposed to generate warm fuzzies over someone who is actively plotting my demise? The good news is that, at least in my interpretation, feelings are not what Christian love is all about.

Put simply, Christian love is a choice. Whoa, time out. Didn't I say a few paragraphs ago that we didn't have a choice about love? I did. We don't have a choice whether or not we act in love. But it is infinitely easier to act in love because love itself is a simple choice: Christian love is the choice to take care of someone else's needs. Where do I get this idea? Honestly, it's all over scripture.

The fact that God loves us and is actively working for our good is a theme that is repeated over and over throughout the Bible. In Philippians 4, Paul not only describes God's love for us in terms of taking care of our every need but enthusiastically says that He will provide for us in great abundance. Not only will we be good to go for as long as we live, we will have plenty of extra. Now some take verses like this and twist them into ridiculous doctrines of a "prosperity gospel," a "God wants you to be wealthy" mentality. Christ vehemently warns against trying to hoard any overflow (we'll talk more about that when we look at grace). What are we supposed to do with it then? Obviously we should mimic God's love for us and use our abundance to take care of the needs of other people. Something we can do even if we don't like other people. 

Once you embrace that idea that love is a choice, it really takes all the burden out of loving everyone. There will still be people who make your skin crawl (creepy bosses, racist uncles or anyone who hates dogs all come to mind) but remember: love isn't about tolerating evil or even fulfilling someone's wants and desires. It's about making sure their needs are covered. Ensuring that people have food, clothing and shelter. That they feel safe and part of a community. And acknowledging that when Christ said love other people, he did not put a single restriction on who those other people were. Which means we cannot put any restrictions on who we love either. White people, people of color, conservatives, liberals, trans people, heterosexual people, asexual people, old farts, young bucks, romance novelists, television preachers, Fortnite players, you name it. No matter who you personally like or don't like, it has to be literally everyone.

I hear some of you saying But I don't have anything extra, everything I have is necessary to cover my own needs. For a handful of you, that might actually be true. And by handful, I do mean as many as five of you. For the vast majority of us, however, that is not true. We all have something that we can give to others. It might be money, it might be time, it might be the ability to fix a toilet or knit a scarf or bake some cookies. It might be actually seeing someone, noticing that they exist and giving them a friendly nod or smile. The early Christian church in Acts sold all their possessions and gave the proceeds to the poor. We don't all need to make such bold, drastic gestures (although if you feel called to do that, go for it!). Sometimes all love takes is moving your neighbor's trash can out to the curb for them while they are on vacation without being asked.

So here is our chaotically good task moving forward. We need to reject the confusion society constantly injects into the idea of love, reclaim the concept of Christian love as a choice to take care of others and then actively make that choice over and over and over again. If we can do this authentically and consistently (neither of which should be confused with perfectly), not only will we be infinitely better people, the world itself will not be able to remain the way it is.