Faithfulness

"Faithfulness is the gift of the spirit most foreign to our generation."

I'll never forget hearing that statement. Aaron Baart was towards the end of a series of chapel's on the Galatians text and dropped this seemingly uninformed line. Surely peace or patience is scarce these days. Self-control and even joy are ill-practiced manifestations of God's movement among us. The only place I had previously heard about faithfulness was as a sterile, moral counter to adultery. Baart explained how the days of our grandparents are gone - working for companies for their entire vocational life and companies trying to keep them employed at great expense. He then went on to talk about the modern narrative - companies being unfaithful to their employees in trade for profit and employees returning the favor for personal gain and professional advancement. Friendships are sacrificed for power and grace is withheld to enforce superiority. Our obsession with being right depletes the strong and humble nature of pursuing a right relationship with another.

My main inspiration lately has been the concept of being a peace maker.  My earliest attempts at peace making centered around can I respond to each individual in a way that shows I support the truth of their opinion while trying to lessen the distance between the "opposition?" This sort of conflict resolution centers around all sides being heard and affirmed, being cautious to dance around high tension with carefully manicured language.

The national discourse this week has been too much for me. Pressure to have a comprehensive, eloquent and prophetic answer to every question has stolen the majority of joy or health from my soul and many of my relationships. I strive to stand for justice, become exhaustively informed, focus on empathy, and call others to action while trying to stand up myself for the just cause. I am determined to please all sides, trying to make the hands of every side of a polarizing culture meet.

My conversations around recent international events have led to a realization - I have consumed many lies intended to profit a distant messenger a small amount at a great cost to my life. I am guilty of spreading hysteria and fear when it was socially profitable to me. I have been trying to bring a visionary kingdom by the means and broken rules of the world. In order to be faithful to my neighbor, to pursue God by tangible peace making, and to be faithful to myself I must first recognize the complexity of being human. We must be suspicious when we can be split into two ideological camps. We must pause when our conversations become binary. Our views are not as divided as our quick-to-respond group identities would have us believe. Our differences are sure, but not at the cost of another's worth.

The fruit of peace is not an avoidance of conflict but the diligent work of reconciliation and inspiring justice to affirm what God affirms and dethrone what he denounces. When we don't take time to look past the loud rhetoric and sort through the muddy tension we miss our opportunity to be faithful. We must sacrifice our pride and calm our amygdala to listen to the oppressed and call back the humanity of the oppressor. We must defend life and the struggle of humanity as we find it. In pursuing justice, we want to dream bigger than a transfer of who's in power and proclaim there are enough rooms in the house and an abundance of food at the table for all.

I am quick to further polarize and divide. I am slow to truly hear the cries of my neighbors and respond in faithfulness. Wherever we find oppression we must overthrow it; wherever we find light, may we enhance it. Let us establish pillars of faithfulness to create space for reconciliation.

Belonging

Hello blogspot my old friend. It's been a while since I have practiced engaging myself and others through writing. Lately, transition and general life-things have left room in my soul, longing to grapple and synthesize what I see in the world, what I feel in my heart and the vision I pick up from great leaders into one, cohesive understanding. In short, what the heck is going on in the world? What is God's plan, if any? How are we to be transformed and actively proceed in this world?

Unemployment has granted a lot of reading and listening to many social leaders and pastoral thinkers. My general interest has been social psychology - how the dynamics of an individual changes in a group setting. What has really stood out to me is the perversion of belonging. I heard Jay Pathak of the Vineyard movement say although there is a God-shaped hole in our heart, Christians rarely speak of the human-shaped hole that often remains, even in our communities. It's easy to make the story mundane - God created the world good, apparent perfection. Yet when Adam walked through the garden alone, God saw the one thing that was not good - a lone wolf, of sorts. Adam was seemingly created with this need but even the entire original cosmos nor God himself did not quench this need.

Fast forward millions of friendships and romances, births and betrayals, wars and acts of reconciliation, and we find ourselves today with the same need, along with the original temptation. 

Delusions present a little truth slightly distorted. The deep longing for social wholeness begins with the blessed desire to build up others and be edified ourselves. A simple slight of hand and we suddenly arrive in groups of people that generally think, look and act like our self. Diversity is outcast in order to protect our values, comfort, children or even to defend God himself! Fear creeps in and we suddenly find ourselves unable to hear those outside of our group, but blindly supporting those inside of it.

Jesus warns us of the death of community. The toxicity that flourishes in divisiveness stems from our separation of our individual or communal selves from the larger whole of humanity. In Matthew 5:21+ Jesus warns of an act more divisive from the originally blessed "other" than murder - anger, insult and exclusion. The death of our neighbor's humanity in our hearts.

How can we be blamed for this? We rarely have access to the entirety of a group, others have taught us more about another group than we have experienced and even our minds are hardwired for confirmation bias! 

More so, our identities are greatly defined by group affiliation. Our initial questions of an acquaintance are to more easily understand and interact by categorizing them. A demonstration - I am a husband, barista, Pentecostal, son, brother, craft beer drinker, independent and am currently unemployed. What nuances about my story, worldview, passions, fears, experiences, dreams or even work ethic were overlooked by initial assumptions when reading this social profile example?

We are a people quick to devalue diversity and exalt conformity. We belong to groups when we have the same (not similar) morals and self labels. Jesus warns us the symptoms are simple: "Whoever says, "Raca (or, you fool!)" will be liable to the hell of fire." (Matt 5:22) We feel this manifest in our guts when out of frustration we cry "Idiot!" to the driver (granted, most likely making an endangering error), political adversary or even when we have been truly wronged. Even worse is that our groups focus on our differences from other groups instead of the goodness our affiliation affirms!

The devaluing of the humanity of our neighbor. When the common humanity is lost, we have committed a sin against the other and God far more dangerous than murder, we have committed an image-bearing suicide; laying down the inherent goodness of our role as fellow creators and peace makers for the cheap substitute of social superiority or being found right.

I could do more to love my neighbor through creatively engaging before rebuking, researching before reposting, affirming as fellow instead of fool, and being intentionally aware of the struggle of humanity we all know to be more common than shared views.