How we will know I have given up

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How we will know if I have seriously given up on that dream job at my alma mater:

• I will switch churches.
• I will stop blogging anonymously.

The second one may never happen (due to laziness or a philosophical choice related to my beliefs about writing and art and stuff).   Next time, I'll post about the first one.  For real.
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How we love . . .

I really need to write something about how (and why) I need to find a new church to serve in, so that seems to be the last thing I actually want to write about.  While I was procrastinating and cleaning a lot of things right now, including archived post topics (I'm set for the next ten years in terms of topics), I found this quote from a blog post, and it got me thinking. 

"I’ve also found that the more I trust in Christ’s redemption to be sufficient, the less overtly religious I am. And, quite honestly, the more suspect overtly religious people become to me. When I’m with somebody who talks zealously about faith, about Jesus, about the Bible, after a while, I find myself wondering whether or not their faith is strong at all. For instance, if I were with somebody who kept talking about how much they loved their wife, going on loudly and profusely, intuitively I would wonder whether or not they were struggling in their marriage. I would wonder whether they were trying to convince me they loved their wife, or if they were trying to convince themselves."

I found myself thinking about the great shema.  We are called to love the Lord with heart, mind, soul, and strength, and I wondered how talking about God is loving him.  Which of those categories does it fall under?  All?  None?  I wonder if this comes back to the fundamental truth that love is an action, a verb, something you prove by your actions.  Is it that our words, to some extent, don't matter?  Or is the problem that our actions and words don't match up? 

How do we love God?  How do we show others that we love God?  Is the answer to both these questions the same? 

Rhymes with respect, I think

I was thinking the other day about what is required of us as believers.  We are called to extravagant, even ridiculous, love that isn't given only to the deserving and those who will appreciate it and thank us.  It's supposed to be like the outrageous love that has been given to us (while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us).  What a mystery the love of God for His fallen creation is.

Came across this definition from Gina Dalfonzo while catching up on email from the past, er, five years.  It made me think.  I really need to remember this when I'm getting irritated at my noisy cube neighbor or when someone is talking my ear off even though I am shouting with every kind of body language known to man that I want to be left alone or when I'm in a bad mood and am tempted to return a snide comment in kind.

"Christian courtesy is rooted and grounded in the idea that every person—however much we may dislike him or her—is made in the image of God and precious in his sight. It is an ideal that we may struggle to live up to, but the struggle makes us better people; it reminds us to show kindness when every impulse and instinct is urging us to do the opposite. It requires of us something deeper than a rally or a video, something more than the obligatory apology that follows most celebrity catfights. It's a lifestyle that has to be consciously lived every day."

I really wonder what this looks like.  I don't think it's quite the same as kindness.  If it's something we're supposed to imitate from Jesus' life, I think there are certain times when the gloves are supposed to come off (He had a real problem with people cloaking their agendas in the trappings of religious holiness, for instance), but I do wonder how my behavior would change if I was able to see each and every person in this light of truth

Serious political mudslinging season is nigh.  If the politicians who claim to be believers would practice Christian courtesy towards their opponents, well, wow.  What would that be like?

3 random quotes that made me think

1. "It may seem circular, but such is the nature of the gospel. God loves us because he loves us. It doesn't get any simpler, or more profound, than that."

2. "Just because the issue is morally complex doesn't mean there aren't answers. It does mean, however, that there are limits to what we can say with certainty."

3. "Giving money to the poor is part of what God has ontologically made the very structure of the universe. That is, the universe operates by a principle of charity. That God loves the world. That God loves the poor. We're to love the world and love the poor, and if we do such we will benefit from acting in a way in which God himself acts."

Any thoughts?

Relationships between men and women: an experiment in brotherhood

"One way the church has contributed to this problem is to make relationships between men and women only legitimate when romance/sex is a possibility. We've made freindship, or even the simple act of riding in a car, or eating a meal together seem unsafe for people who might be married/dating but not with each other.

"Posted by: Jennifer at November 10, 2011"

Interesting article, actually.  Be sure to check it out and let me know what you think.

I've talked about this before (this post comes to mind), and I thought that the book Singled Out (about the need to reinvent celibacy in the modern church) touched on it decently without really offering any ideas about how things should look, especially for people like me who aren't searching for a mate.

I'm in the early stages of what I'm calling an experiment in brotherhood, where I am cautiously becoming good friends with a male, which has resulted in many of his friends asking tiresome and typical questions, which he relates to me with a certain amount of glee.  And a certain amount of wonder because he admits that he has never had a serious relationship with an adult woman he has not, on some level, wanted to sleep with.  He related this to me late at night while we were sitting in a car (possibly after spending some time eating together in a cafe).

Our relationship apparently started no differently, and he tells me he still has to deal with tamping down expectations that rise up sometimes out of his back-brain, but he has come to terms with the fact that I will never desire him that way, and we are cautiously trying to figure out what it means to be friends in a fallen world.

He is very honest, and I find myself concluding that this kind of relationship would definitely be impossible for me to have with a man who belonged to a conservative, non-mainline Protestant denomination because there is no way he would be this honest.  Probably he would also be looking so desperately for a spouse that he would have no time to waste on cultivating a relationship with a celibate sister in Christ.  And neither of us would be able to survive the gossip for long.

Why are so many of us so fake around the people we should be the most real around?  In the church, we're all people who know we fall short, people who know we are sinners who deserve nothing but eternal punishment but have been inexplicably granted eternal life and love and so much grace.  Why, surrounded by such people, are we so likely to try so hard to hide ourselves and our sins and failures?  Why can't we have real relationships, brothers and sisters who love each other and care for each other?  Why can we only legitimately "love" our spouses deeply enough to sacrifice for them?

It's a good thing Jesus didn't care about these constraints, even if they were present in His culture.

Well, I'll be rambling about similar things again soon, no doubt.  Until then, the experiment continues.

Today

Today I decided that I would stop
thinking about what I've lost and what doors
are closed to me.

Today, I decided that maybe
it's okay (and one kind of God's will)
for me to plug away at this decent job I
have been given until I pay off my debts
and then maybe there will be a teaching
post I can take (as charity work).  If not,
still I will praise Him.

We will see how tomorrow goes
because this didn't work
very well
today.

Neither asexual nor celibate? And the Church . . .

So I'm uncomfortable with both asexual and celibate labels.  Why?

I feel more like I'm being practical than sacrificial. If you don't have to get mixed up in the morass of romantic/sexual relations, why on God's green earth would you? I think all people desire intimacy, but some of us just realize that sex doesn't have the market cornered on intimacy, and sexual relationships are not necessarily superior in the intimacy department. Unfortunately, a lot more people don't realize that, so relationships in the church are skewed from the ideal just as much (if in different ways) as those outside the church.

The church, the body of Christ, should be about real love (intimacy), but nowhere do people get as hysterical about the idea of intimate, chaste, male-female friendships as in the current church. It's unconscious and systemic. The book Singled Out picked up on it and painted kind of a beautiful picture but stopped before going nearly far enough with the analysis and suggestions. I hope the authors are working on a sequel.  (Does anyone know of any other books that explore this practical aspect further?)

The church should be the place where people are a family, one body, intimately involved with each other's lives and not so LASER-focused on spouses and children to the exclusion of any other intimate relationships.

Yeah, I said it.  It's pretty radical, I know, and it's hardly well-developed and well-thought out enough to write a book about. But when I look at what I know of the life and example of Jesus and the early church, I can't help but think that maybe it's true.

What do you think?