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It isn’t easy negotiating an unknown and potentially serious medical condition especially when you are the mom of young children. A friend of mine is facing that challenge. It’s been going on awhile and still the doctors still aren’t sure exactly what she’s facing. She wrote me this week about being overwhelmed with the fears of what it could be and the weariness of dealing with the symptoms and tests.  My heart hurts to her and many others I know facing similar circumstances. As I prayed for her my mind was drawn back to an email I’d just read from Patricia in Wisconsin. In fact, it had come in two minutes before the one I received from this young mom.  

It told an amazing story that I thought would encourage this mom and perhaps give her some insight as to how to deal with the latest round of tests.  Here’s what Patricia wrote:   

I hit a bit of a wall a few weeks back waking up feeling as if there was a black cloud hovering over me. I asked Jesus, “What is it that I’m not getting about your love for me? ” I asked him to show me. I was pretty discouraged, Wayne, not understanding why. I headed out the door to water the flowers. Being with flowers always seems uplifting. Stretched across the walk was a big snake. Although I assumed it was non-poisonous, my reaction could be described much like when you slam on your brakes when someone suddenly cuts you off in traffic. Frightened, I stomped my foot and the snake quickly slithered into a space between the walk and the front porch. Great, I thought, now it’s in the basement! I had a vision of it hanging from a pipe the next time I needed to make a trip downstairs.

 

Just then Jesus seemed to speak to my heart. “You become afraid, stomp your feet driving your fear deeper inside.” The next morning I went out to water the flowers and once again there was the snake stretched out across the walk. This time I turned my empty bucket upside down several feet away from it and sat down. I had an interesting conversation with Jesus about my fear. The next morning the snake was there and the day following that. I began to say good morning to the snake. Although I didn’t feel the need to drape that baby over my shoulders I appreciated it’s presence. I began to view the snake differently.

 

By the end of the week he was gone. So was the discouragement. I was left with a deeper, more authentic relationship with Him.

Our fears only grow greater in the darkness and our view of God much smaller. I love this story of the snake and the fact that Patricia would sit down near it and have a  conversation with God about her fears. I love how that engagement changed her view of the snake and her connection with the Father who loves her so much. When people encounter difficult circumstances, some try to ignore them, others dwell on them with fear and panic. What would happen if we sat down with God in the face of our fears and talked it out with him? I’ve often heard preachers or worship leaders telling us to lay down our fears when we come to him. In their minds admitting to fear is proof we have no faith. But that is only denial. It takes far more trust to bring our fears along as we sit or walk with him. 

So I sent this story to the young mom facing the scary medical diagnosis, with this encouragement:  “You and God can find some deep, deep fellowship staring down your fear and finding out that your whole life is in Father’s hands. It has always been. So is everyone else’s. And those are pretty good hands to have it in, regardless of the outcome.”

She wrote back saying my email had begun to draw her into different space. “Your last email made the tears fall… I talked to God… felt like I was flinging myself into his lap like my kids do when they are hurt and scared. I want those deep conversations. I’m tired.”

Awesome. What other option to any of us have? We can’t change our circumstances. We can’t win over our fears. We can only sit down in the midst of them and let Father do what Father does best—draw us into freer space.  Fear only makes God seem more distant.  He is not.  It’s not in his nature.  If we take the time to sit with him and let him sort out it out. He knows how to handle it all and make himself known to us.  As he settle us in his love our fears lose their power as we know we are not alone and that the one who is in us is greater than any circumstance confronting us.  

What else are we going to do, throw a tantrum and drive our fears under the porch where they only becomes even scarier?

I am finishing up my time in Europe and am ready to leave for home tomorrow. It has been a spectacular time, first with the family God has given me celebrating our anniversary. We saw so much together, laughed so hard, and enjoyed each other. Sara and I agreed that these days were some of the most enjoyable of our lives.  Then I went to France to gather with some “friends and friends of friends” to share God’s life. We had people from France, Ireland, South Africa, the U.S., England, and I’m not sure where else. What great days, so encouraging and stimulating. 

For the past five days I’ve been in the south of France near Nimes, through five days of conversations about our life in Jesus and how he invites us into the new creation of a live well loved instead of negotiating the demands and obligations of religion. They have been so warm and responsive and it has been such a joy to watch God warm hearts and stimulate journeys that have been wearied by the false teachings of religious performance. I am reminded again how much God’s work has continued to shape in my own life and how differently I think and live now than I did twenty years ago.  I would not trade this way of knowing him for anything. 

Throughout the whole trip I have visited many religious buildings where at great expense and time people have tried to create buildings worthy of God, when the only temple he desires to live in is us, and the only one he wants to build is his church as he invites us to love others as we’ve been loved. While the buildings are magnificent in beauty and engineering, they have not helped those who frequent them know God as intimately as he desired.  He cannot be found in buildings, no matter how ornate.  If he is more real to you in a Cathedral than he is in your own home, you have missed the most powerful lesson of the Incarnation—God is with us in our world, every day, every moment.

I’ve also visited many places where protestant Christians were imprisoned and tortured by the all-too-easily threatened Roman Church. It’s horrible what they did in the name of God to those who sought to follow Christ without following Rome. Obviously they did not know God or his love.  Yesterday I was at in Aiques-Morte a walled city built in the 13th centuryby Louis IX at a French seaport on the Mediterranean.  The Tower of Constance (pictured above) was a garrison when it was built was converted to a prison for Protestants in the 18th century.  Perhaps the most well-known is Marie Durand, who engraved the word “resister” (below), which in English means resist, into the edge of the well and it can still be seen.  Along with as many as 200 other prisoners she had been imprisoned from the age of 15 until she was freed at 53. Despite the power of the Roman church in her day, she knew the glory of resisting what is false to embrace what is real and that to submit her conscience under the threat of torture would deny her the freedom Jesus purchased for her.

She knew resistance is not futile. It is necessary and because so many like her refused to submit to Roman torture, God’s glory grew in the world. In a day when people find it difficult if friends and family judge them for following their freedom in Christ and not conform to religious demands of our day, it was a great encouragement. Yes it is not easy being judged by those you love, but it is still a far cry from being imprisoned for resisting religious leaders who have not a clue who God is.

Summer is here, our grandkids are out of school, and in celebration of our fortieth wedding anniversary that happened last month, Sara and I are off to Europe with our children and grandchildren for the next couple of weeks. We are looking forward to some of the things we’ll get to see there, but more importantly we are looking forward to celebrating the family that God has given us. We’ve never done anything like this and are looking forward to spending so much time together. This is one fun family to hang out with! 

However, since this is a two-horse operation, the offices at Lifestream will be closed until June 29 when Sara returns.  We’ve got people to still fulfill book orders for those who want them, but other than that, things will be quiet here. I’m going to spend as little time as possible with email and websites during my time in Europe. There will be no new podcasts unless something amazing happens. I may post a few pictures on my Facebook Author Page if I find the time and Internet connection.

I will be staying on in Europe to connect with some brothers and sisters in Barcelona, attend a gathering of Friends and Friends of Friends in the south of France, and finish off sharing with a group of believers near Nimes, France.  If you want more information on those you can get it on my Travel Page.  

If you have anything important for me, please wait until early in July to write.  You’ll get a more reasoned response and my inbox will not get so full.  We are blessed to be able to take this time and celebrate God’s goodness and take a break from all the writing and interacting to just enjoy the Father’s work in us. This is a very special time for us and we’re excited.  

One more note: The Shack Movie went into production this week. You can read more about that here. Just be warned this is one of those websites I detest with annoying and intrusive ads and a really lame preview trailer.

I meant to tag on some sample quotes from Josh Packard and Ashleigh Hope’s new book, Church Refugees yesterday and in my haste forgot to tag them on to my review.  So I will include them here. I know many of you will enjoy this book and the insights it offers…

How can the church possibly hope to survive and thrive as a relevant and meaningful social institution if it keeps spitting out Ethan and people like him? If people who are so dedicated to the church feel the need, ultimateily, to leave for their own survival, what does that say aobut the church and it’s future?  … He and his wife didn’t give up on God; they gave up on the institutional expression of church. They didn’t stop doing things to advance what they believed to be the work of God; they stopped doing things to advance the work of the church.  Their suubstantial energies and skills are now poured daily into activities and structures that happen completely outside the purview of organized religion.  They’ve opted for relationship over structure, doing over dogma, and creating with rather than creating for. 

 

From one of the people they interviewed: I had a chat with a pastor at a church that I was interested in attending, and I said, “I don’t want to hear about what you believe; there will be plenty of time to talk about that later.  I’m not interested in seeing if we agree, because I’m sure three will be disagreement.  The only question I have for you is, How do you deal with people who disagree with you?  How does the church handle that?”  Because really, for me, that’s the most important thing.

 

Again in these stories we see a return to the concept of the reluctant leaver, which echoes back to the refugee.  People are trying, sometimes for years, to make church work for them before eventually, reluctantly moving on. And when they move on, they move to things that look nothing like the activities that consume the traditional church. They move on to community gardens, art therapy, meals in living rooms around a communal table, Internet chat rooms, and quilting groups.  Nobody, not one single respondent mentioned replacing church with a worship service or with a sermon series or with committee work. They are replacing church with meaningful activity that engages their communities and build relationships, things they find missing in the church.

 

As we say throughout the book, they’re leaving to do more, not less, and they’re doing it with a broader and more diverse community. They aren’t exhausted or burned out. They aren’t retreating to small like-minded groups. 

The Dones might lament the loss of the church and grieve the abandonment of an institution they once loved and were so hopeful for, but that won’t stop them from actively expressing their faith. As one respondent, Ava, tod us, “There’s pain in leaving.  There’s loss. But there’s hope, too. We’re able to do things now.”

I just finished Josh Packard and Ashleigh Hope’s book, Church Refugees. I’ve been aware of this book for five months now and have become acquainted with one of the authors. I’m working on a longer review of it. It’s a great read that you’ll enjoy if you care about the state of Jesus’ church today and what he is doing beyond the walls of our conventional congregations. One thing it does so well is dispells the myth that you have to belong to a “local church” to have a vibrant and fruitful relationship with Jesus and engagement with his people and the world.  For now, I just want to share this quote with you about those who are leaving:

They aren’t weaker Christians than those who stayed.  They aren’t less faithful. They aren’t backsliders or spiritually immature. They have simply endured too much in the instituaionl church and see no reason, theologically or practially, to continue in that relationship

Get yourself a copy.  You won’t regret it!  

It’s a scary moment when someone realizes knowing about God is not enough to fill the longing of a heart that wants to know him. But if years of religious involvement has not made that connection, where do they look now?  The search to know God beyond the concepts and rituals of religion can be disorienting and unnerving. They question everything they’ve been taught and wonder if any of it was real.

I’ve watched many people go through this transition, which is why I recorded the Engage videos years ago. A lot of Christians who attend church haven’t really developed an ever-deepening relationship with the Father, even though Jesus came for that purpose. They believe in him as some distant presence, but haven’t yet engaged his presence beyond the principles and concepts they believe to be true of him. He is not a presence in their day real enough to give guidance and strength as circumstances unfold. Instead he’s a distant thought, a hopeful idea, even a place to invest their prayers in hope of a desired answer, but not someone who knows, them loves them, and wants to walk through life with them. 

It’s one of the saddest realities of institutional church life. Even those who’ve been through extensive discipleship training can end up better at religious practice and miss what it is to engage him. That’s because a real relationship with God is not something we can build with him. It’s what he builds with us. Instead of trying to achieve it, we need to learn to recognize how he is doing this in us. 

Here’s a recent exchange with someone who is in the middle of this process herself: 

I just listened to Engage 1 & 2 and the tears are flowing as I realize after all these years (52 years of church life and living for God).  I now struggle with the doubt of His existence.  How could that be?  After all the study I’ve done, the years of believing what I was taught,  after all the “following hard after Him,” which included years of writing devotional stories and teaching others about God and His love, how could I be in this place.?  What has happened to me? All these years I believed He was real and now after years of hard situations I am left wondering if what I was told was true. Is He real?  What have I believed all these years? I want Him to be real so badly yet I am questioning it all now. I feel so horrible that I am in this place.
All I can do is ask Him, as you suggested.  “God if you are real, would you reveal yourself to me?”  I honestly struggle to believe that He will answer that cry.  Many years of His silence after years of begging prayers has brought that to me.
Thank you for these videos.  I truly hope and pray that God will reveal Himself to me in a way that I will know in the depths of my being His existence so that I never doubt again.

My response:  You might be thinking about this a bit backwards.  He has not been silent.  It’s not in his nature. Every day he whispers his love and desires for you.  Religious performance just tuned you to the wrong frequency.  Now he is re-tuning you and this disorientation is part of it.  You’ve pushed away from that which you’re familiar with, but it didn’t bring you life. Now you’re learning to live differently inside the reality of who he is. 

He’ll show you, just don’t put any expectations around it.  Just look for him and listen for him.  In the past you were trying to make it happen, now you’re going to let him make himself known to you as he desires and you’ll find yourself relaxing into that reality.  It takes time, that’s why human performance is easier to sell.  We want to be in control, but that only makes it more difficult for us to see him. 

This is a great journey, one I wish we’d all taken when we were younger.  But if we didn’t then, it’s a good time now. I know it seem so risky, but since he is in it the risk is just a perception of our own uncertainty.  He can work with that!

These words are powerful for me.  You have given me eyes to see something I cannot see.  I was talking to God today about my doubt of His existence and how I “feel” like this is going to come down to something I have to do in order to believe, and I remembered your words and was grateful.
I have listened to several of the Engage series and am also listening to The Jesus Lens series:
Here are two things that have struck me. 
1. My view of God.  I see God as distant, a far off, over in the corner with His hands folded watching what’s going on.  He’s watching over things, making things work together for good, etc.  I realize I do not see him close to me, like I do Jesus.  I see Jesus with His arms around me, giving me a hug on BEHALF of the Father. 
2.  I heard the words today about making God in our own image and it struck me.  Unbeknownst to me I have done that.  With the religious teachings and my limited understanding I’ve made God into the image in my head….

I love what her heart and mind are sorting through here.  She’s seeing things from a very different perspective and that will bear fruit over time.  This process is not quick or easy, but once we learn to engage God as he wants to engage us a whole new life in him opens up that is filled with adventure and hope. 

If you’re wrestling with some of these same realities, why don’t you join her working through Engage?  It’s a series of short videos about recognizing this amazing process.  You listen to one every couple of weeks or so and process it in your own work with him.

On the recommendation of a friend, I purchased Hope for the Flowers and read it Saturday night with my ten-year-old granddaughter. No, it isn’t a children’s book, though it is easy enough for them to understand. It is a book about life and freedom and our failed attempts to find it by human effort. A friend recommended it to me a few weeks ago, surprised I’d never read it or heard of it.  It was originally published in 1972 after all.  

It’s the story of two catepillars trying to find the meaning of life and being sucked into a pillar of catepillars who are climbing all over each other to try to get to the top of the heap, because of an insatiable drive for to be high up in the sky. They don’t know realize the desire can only be fulfilled by flying, so they climb all over each other trying to get as high as the can.  The form a catepillar pillar.  Even though those at the top feel superior to those below, they are not really flying after all. Catepillar effort can’t fulfill its own destiny. Only those who give up their life as a captepillar to find its way into a cocoon can the transformation take place. 

Hope for the Flowers is an amazing story of the failure of human effort and how all our attempts only manipulate others to try to find what we seek so desperately. It’s about learning to die to ourselves to embrace the insatiable desire Go dhas placed deep within us. It’s a story of transformation that comes only as we come to the end of ourselves and embrace a reality far bigger than any of us. It’s a simple but powerful look into the world of butterflies to once again realize that God has put before us every day the most amazing image of how he wants to work in us.

Read it with or without a ten-year-old at your side and you will be invited again into a world of transformation, where our deepest desires invite us to a greater reality than human effort can ever achieve. Instead of disappointed hopes, you’ll find the path where flight is possible and where freedom and joy become a part of every day life.  

No one thought it was even possible. For years popular wisdom assured Christians that they couldn’t leave their traditional congregation and survive spiritually. So when researchers discovered a large pool of people who done exactly that and were not only thriving in their faith but engaged with other believers as well as the world, they were surprised. It has been called The Rise of the Dones, an incresing pool of passionate followers of Jesus who no longer participate in a traditional congregation and yet are still deeply involved in the life of Jesus’ church as it takes shape in the world.

The research doesn’t surprise me. I’ve been living among those kind of people for the past twenty years and tell that story it in my newest book, Finding Church:  What If There Really Is Something More.  

Last week in Loveland, CO I got to sit down with one of the researchers on this project, Josh Packard, and talk about his new book, Church Refugees, which will be released June 1.  You can pre-order it from Amazon, or read the first chapter here.  Let me give you just a taste of it here, though.  One of the stories he tells in the book is from Ethan, who grew up in a congregation, was active in campus ministry when he went to college and then was making a career in ministry bevore finally concluding that the he had to look elsewhere.  This is part of his story:

We kept showing up and colunteering because we felt the church was God’s home.  I don’t think that’s the case anymore.  The church is wherever God’s work is being done, and too often the way we were treated and the things I saw happen in the institutional church to other people just weren’t in alliance with what we thought God wanted. 

But here’s the thing:  I don’t think the institutional church is filled with bad people.  It hink the church in America is an inherently flawed structre that comepls people to make poor decisions.  You’re basically judged on how well you can preach and the numbers you bring in.  I realise the church isn’t perfect, and it’s made up of people who aren’t perfect, and I’m not perfect either, but the church needs to see that there are things that are broken about the structure, not the people.

Here’s what the researcher concluded about Ethan’s experience:  “He and his wife didn’t give up on God; they gave up on the instittuioanl expression fo the church. They didn’t stop doing things to advance the work of God; they stopped doing things to advance the work of the church. Their substantial energies and skills are now poured daily into activities and structures that happen completely outside the purview of organized religion. They’ve opted for relationship over structure, doing over dogma, and creating with rather than creating for. In short, they’ve created a new religious home.”    

Ethan isn’t alone. My travels and my email continue to show me just how many people there are looking for other expressions of Jesus’ church in the world, and finding them. Tomorrow I play the first part of my interview with Josh on my podcast at The God Journey. It’s a fascinating study that will encourage many who have not found the traditional congregation a helpful place to be.  Hopefully it will open a dialog that will allow us all to discover the church in her greatest splendor.  

I’m at the airport this morning getting ready for my trip to Denver, and then continuing next week to Richmond, VA.  This is an amazing trip with lots of meetings for reasons as diverse as sharing the journey, consulting with a publishing company that is looking for an appreciation for the “Dones”, to meeting with some people from Kenya who might be able to help us formulate a development strategy for Pokot, and finally to helping a friend with his novel.  It will be 12 days with a host of meetings and connections that I hope will advance God’s kingdom in the world.

As I go, I thought I’d leave you with this exchange that explains why I’ve never liked the term, “unconditional love.” 

Eileen: I enjoyed your books He Loves Me and Finding Church so much and can’t wait to get the latter one on audio book. Well the question I have that I struggle with a little bit us is Gods Love unconditional? My husband and I listened to a message titled “choose life” in which he suggests that there is no such thing as an unconditional love. Even Gods love for us is conditional. Some of the examples he gives are, “ask and you shall receive, knock and it will be opened, you are my friends If you keep my commandments. Those are all conditions he claims. He loves us despite of how we are, which I do agree with, God is love but not unconditional I struggle with. At least that’s what I heard from his message. Wanted to hear your thoughts on that.

My response:  When you hear someone teach and it doesn’t sit right with you, there’s usually a good reason—his Spirit within you. When your yuck meter goes off, trust it!  In this case it is well-set.  

To take Jesus’ invitation for us to engage his Father and turn it into a condition for us to earn his love is poor scholarship at best and manipulative at worst.  Seeking him is not a condition for us love, it’s an invitation to draw near to him so we can see how he’s making himself known to us.
You’ll notice that I don’t use the term “unconditional love.”  I know a lot of people like that term, and though I like what they often mean by it, I don’t like using it because it gives the impression that something called “conditional love” actually exists.  It does not. You either love someone or you don’t. If you can stop loving them because they do something wrong, stupid or hurtful, then you didn’t love them in the first place. God’s love is not conditional, he loves us all the time, even at our most lost and broken.  His love never changes.  The drama of our story shifts when we begin to discover how loved we are and then respond to him in a way that allows our engagement with that love to grow.  
But that doesn’t mean that our actions don’t have consequences. We reap what we sow, but that isn’t God ceasing to love us, it’s the way he made the world work so that we would learn from our mistakes and that our brokenness would invite us back to him. He keeps loving us through the consequences of our own choices, always making a way for us back to his heart.  

Eileen:    I just wanted you to know that what you said makes perfect sense…that’s the way I’ve carried out my life, but when you’re repeatedly told you have to be in church, you start to believe that your the one doing something wrong. I’m so grateful that God has put you in my path, if for no other reason than to confirm what I’ve always believed—you can win people to the lord by just loving them.

Amen to that!