Help First, Cry Later

Imagine a dangerous apartment fire, perpetrated by an arson ring. Some residents have fled but others are still trapped inside, screaming for help, as the flames slowly spread throughout the complex. Several fire trucks rush to the scene, sirens blaring, and a crowd of firefighters approach the inferno, staring grimly into the twisting flames. The situation is dire, but it's still possible to bring the fire under control.

Then, one by one, they gather into a circle and begin to weep.

"I am responsible for this fire,"one whispers, tossing aside her gas mask.
Several firefighters nod and repeat her words, like a mantra.
"It's my fault." "I am just as responsible as the arson." "I am an arson."

"Why must these tragedies happen?" another says, helplessly letting the fire hose fall from his numb hands. "I am consumed with sorrow."

"Again," one mourns. "When did this start happening? When will it end?"

"I am broken," says another. "I feel no anger at the fire, only brokenness."

The emergency response captain nods approvingly. "Stopping fires begins with the recognition that we are just as guilty as the arson, and our attempts to help may be just as destructive as the fire itself, because we too are fascinated by fire. Let us now join our cries with those of the victims, to demonstrate that we are no better off than them, that we don't claim to have the answers either, that we weep with them and feel their pain."

Their voices are then lifted up in perplexed sadness, a cry of confused sorrow, until the screams from inside the apartment are cut off suddenly as a large portion of the building collapses, spreading the flames to the adjoining complex as well.

Seeing the inferno begin to spread, the fire department cries harder, unused high pressure water hoses dampened by their tears.

Later, the arson ring explains to the local news that it would be unjust for them to be held responsible for starting fires, since they were traumatized by fire fighters as children, but the fire department's response falls far short of what they would need for real recovery. "We expect to start a lot more fires before our pain is understood and healing can begin."

The fire department promises to cry more sincerely more next time.

. . .

Real firefighters, unlike those in this story, run into harm's way first; they save lives and do their jobs, and deal with the very real emotional consequences later. As the Church, we are called to weep with those who weep, but a Church emotionally traumatized by tragedy, as if suffering were an unnatural oddity by which to be stunned into inaction and confusion, is not a Church equipped to bless the world. The world is and has always been full of evil, sorrow, and suffering. That's the world the Bible is written to, and the world we're called to love and serve in.

Emotions are part of who we are, but so is logic, and so is action. There is work to be done, plans to be made, victims to assist and workers of evil and chaos to bring to justice. The problems we see on the news every day recently didn't crop up overnight, they're the result of tough long-term problems that require tough long-term solutions, if any exist.

And many solutions don't exist; you can't solve Human Sin with good intentions or even good action, let alone by "raising awareness" on social media. You are stuck in a world with no solution.
That's why the gospel is the good news and not some good news for when your faith in the goodness of humanity falters. (a non-biblical conception if I ever heard one)

But rather than recoiling in stunned helplessness, or navel-gazing and turning the world's problems into fodder for indulging our own guilt complexes, let's roll up our sleeves and engage the world with the Truth that changes minds and the Love that changes hearts. The world can't be saved, but many souls can, and the responsibility of bringing life-saving truth to them is yours and mine. There will be time for tears along the way, but first let's get moving.

"God isn't Fixing This"

Does God Care? 

After yet another grievous shooting, the NY Daily News is releasing a controversial cover, proclaiming in plus-sized font "God isn't fixing this." Clearly this is meant as a rebuke to those who claim "their prayers are with the victims" yet don't do the things the NY Daily News feels they should in order to reduce gun crime. I'm not interested in the politics here, let alone the grandstanding. "He who sits in the heaven laughs," not at the plight of humanity, but at those who would mock Him or set themselves against His authority. More interesting is that scripture clearly both states that the wicked will receive what they deserve, and has the Psalmist crying out asking God why that doesn't seem to be happening.

For the issue at hand, it suffices to say that as Christians we know men are sinful by nature, and are not corrupted by the tools around them. Perhaps we should investigate the breakdown of the family, the increasingly nihilistic worldview poured into the minds of our children, and a society become so antagonistic to human nature that mass percentages of people feel it necessary to be on antidepressants, before we start blaming tubes of metal for magically corrupting humans that secular society supposes are inherently neutral or even inherently good.

But what I'm interested in here is their intentionally provocative claim. Is God really doing nothing? Is He indifferent to humans killing each other, or is He powerless to interfere in our free will? This is often posed as an unanswerable question (Does God lack the will to stop evil, in which case He is not good, or the ability to stop it, in which case He is not great), but actually there is a perfectly good answer, that can be expressed in various ways.

So then, if God does care, and He is powerful enough to act, then...

Why God Doesn't Stop Evil or Fix the World (My personal analogy)

Ancient Chinese weaponry: one iron and two bronze swords

A Bit about Bronze

In Taipei, there is a fascinating museum of Chinese antiquities. Called the "National Palace Museum," some of China's great cultural treasures are stored there, brought by the nationalists both to hang on to them and ostensibly to keep them from being destroyed by the communists, for whom desecrating symbols of class oppression was a popular pastime and sometimes required symbolic act of allegiance.

In this museum you can see everything from very ancient jade wheels to the gold and pearl finial topping an Emperor's crown, to a piece of stone shaped exactly like a piece of pork and the most famous of all, the jade cabbage. (The food culture here goes back a very long way)

Another thing you can see are ancient bronze weaponry: swords, spear points, etc.

Bronze is an alloy of copper and tin. A game-changing discovery of antiquity, it afforded its users an advantage over those using merely copper weapons, and remained popular even well after iron weapons were developed.

Among the various reasons that iron weapons -initially inferior to their well-developed bronze counterparts- superseded them, was due to cost issues. Once iron-working was developed, the abundant iron ore meant iron weapons were cheaper than bronze, which required the importation of tin.

Why couldn't you just get tin from used bronze weapons? Because it doesn't work that way. To separate metals once they have been alloyed is an expensive and complicated process, and at least to my knowledge there was no way to do this on a large scale (possibly at all).

Even today, with complicated procedures that can do it, it's obvious that to remove the tin from a bronze weapon destroys the weapon for all practical purposes.

Alloyed with Sin

This world was made good. Humans, in choosing to sin and step outside of God's will for them, not only destroyed their own spiritual life, but wrecked up the world too, meant as a beautiful home for people living in harmony with God and each other. Sin is not evil varnish, it is a flaw that goes to the core of people and the world. To remove it, you cannot strip it off, you cannot cut it off like a frostbitten finger; to get rid of the sin, the thing once pure and now an alloy of itself and sin must be unmade.

This is true of both of us and the world. To be made new, as Christ makes all things new, we must first be Unmade. Dying that we shall live; baptism is the earthly acting out of this truth, but then for the rest of our lives we must be melted down, put into the fiery furnace so that God may skim off the dross, and coming out each time more pure. This is sanctification.

While Christians are typically aware of this, I find that many are unaware that the world is in an analogous situation. We aren't fallen people in an unfallen world, we brought the world down with us. It too must be unmade and cleansed from the corruption of sin, but that will be the end.

"Fixing" the alloy of sin. True gold fears no fire; don't be dross.

One Day

When tin is removed from the bronze sword, the sword is no more. When sin is removed from this world, the world will be no more. Suffering and injustice will be judged and come to an end, but so will everything else.

I think what people are really asking is more like: "Why doesn't God take all the bad parts out of the world and leave the good parts?" That question is easy:
1) He made the world without any bad parts, but free will meant we could screw that up, and we did
2) Outside of Christ, you are a bad part that would be taken out.
3) He's giving everyone a chance to choose His side before he does exactly what you are suggesting

The fiery end that Peter speaks of (2 Peter 3) will happen, and a new heaven and new earth will be made including all that was pure from the last one. There's a reason that day is spoken of both with hope and with respectful fear; when it happens, it is final. The beginning spoken of in Genesis has its ending in Revelation, and what happens after that is part of the next book.  Hope your name is in it, or rejoice if you know it is.

Until then, as Peter speaks of in that same passages, that God is delaying in destroying the world to burn the sin out is a mercy to those who still have a chance to choose Him, and neither weakness nor toleration of sin on His part. If the end came now, there would be no more suffering, but no longer any opportunity to repent while there is still time.

So we pray: Come Lord Jesus. But increasingly I find myself saying "but not just yet"--I have too many friends who may yet choose God before the end, and I still hope to see it. Ending the suffering in the world today means denying them of that chance, forever.

The "Courage" of Bruce Jenner

Pain on Display

I have noticed something about what people post on Facebook. Every so often, some people will post a status that is basically a cry for help: "I can't handle this situation." "Please pray for me, today was really horrible." "I don't know what to do."

This kind of status is not all that common (compared to say, pictures of food) not because people don't have problems all the time, but because most people have to arrive at a place of particular pain, emotional discomfort, or desperation, before they are willing to "go public" in this way. Some people might be dealing with even greater problems, but feel they have enough resources to handle it, or simply have the kind of personality that hides the pain instead of seeking the comfort of others. They don't want to announce it to hundreds or thousands of people on a social media site.

I neither condemn nor approve of this practice; I did it pretty often in darker, younger days, and tend not to share so much now. It's not that millennials aren't tough enough to be the strong, silent type, it's that the social conditions which produced strong silent types are much less in play in 2015. We share our lives online, and that means sometimes sharing the pain too. Being strong is great, even in a time when weakness has never been more celebrated, but being silent just means you are not participating in what has become an integral part of life for developed-world internet generation kids. (Every age has its benefits and drawbacks. One day the value of silence will be rediscovered too.)

So the sharing itself is not the problem; it's a method or channel for communicating the pain someone is dealing with, a kind of pressure valve. But the more the pain, the longer it hurts, the more desperation creeps in, the less anyone cares what other people think. The pain longs to be expressed. It can't be held inside forever. It breaks out and becomes obvious to everyone.

What Courage is Not

Bruce Jenner's very public act of doctor-assisted self-mutilation (regardless of what you think about his "true identity," physically speaking that is what occurred), is being presented, even awarded, as an act of great courage. Not caring what anyone thinks, the story goes, he (My pronouns are chosen in light of genetic realities) was willing to do something still considered extremely outre, making a spectacle of himself and being held up in many cases to derision and the ogling of the general public, in order to be "true to himself/herself," and in doing so is held up as an example. I imagine some parallels to the courage required to "come out" as homosexual (into a society where lgbtetc people currently enjoy most-favored status and can shut down businesses for not recognizing that) are in play here.

The most consistent online reaction to this idea, and to the idea of his being presented with an ESPN courage award, was the sarcastic comparison of his act with soldiers of the US military, many displaying the wounds and disfigurements they have received in the line of duty. The implication is that this, by contrast, is what true courage looks like. My Facebook feed was half-filled with this kind of post for a few days.

I want to suggest this is not a very effective reply (not addressing the real issue, anyway). We all know, I think, that there are different kinds of courage. Yes, our soldiers are an excellent example of one kind, really a collection of different kinds of courage. But there are other kinds of courage, of course: a Muslim daughter's willingness to face her parents' wrath for accepting Christ; a young pianist getting up in front of everyone for a recital; someone suffering deep and damaging depression just deciding to get up and live another day. Robin Williams not killing himself; that would have been courage. To live would have been an awfully great adventure.

We do know this. And personally I don't doubt that what Jenner did involves some level of courage, though as I'll explain below I don't think that was the primary issue here. Courage is not a trait which bestows goodness or evil on those who exhibit it, it's simply a positive trait which we admire. However, if the person is clearly using their good courage to do evil, we no longer admire that in them. We may be tempted to say it's not courage at all, but give it other names, like madness. We call our friends "full of desperate courage" and our enemies "frenzied." They themselves would call it courage, of course, we just don't want to honor their motives by recognizing they too partake in common grace and can exhibit positive character traits, even while serving a cause we find repulsive.
(tl;dr- Some of the Nazis were brave too. Doesn't mean bravery is bad or they were good.)
 
So following the analogy C.S.Lewis uses at the beginning of Mere Christianity, courage is like a note on the piano, and our sense of morality tells us when to play it. To continue his analogy: we are tempted to call it the wrong note when we don't like the song, but in reality it was the same G we liked in Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, just serving another purpose.

What people are really saying, when they post those contrastive examples of soldiers, is that they feel the cause for which the soldiers exhibit courage and risk the consequences of physical mutilation (or even death) is Right and Just, and the cause for which Jenner exhibited courage (if it was courage, more on this below) and risked the consequences of his physical mutilation is wrong, weird, and sad. I think it would be more honest and courageous to just say this, rather than

It's not a question of courage. It's a question of what ideals courage should serve.

Despair and the Blade

That being said, I believe what motivated Jenner was not primarily courage. Going back the first section of this post, I believe the identity crisis and moral confusion raging inside him for years, and tendencies of which people around him were apparently aware, finally reached a head, and in despair he no longer cared what society's verdict might be. (Perhaps some interpret this as bravery because, lacking any received truth, what society's verdict might be is the final authority for them) That's not what courage is. Despair is not courage, it's the opposite of courage. Acting with courage is doing something despite the consequences; it's brave because you do actually care very much about those consequences and are willing to suffer them for a higher purpose. Acting in despair is doing something because you no longer care about those consequences.

There are those who would say I'm being too generous, and that the media circus and worldwide attention showered on Jenner is one of the reasons he did it. Maybe it's true; maybe the real battle was fought and lost many years ago, and this was a calculated decision to profit off the resulting debacle. It's impossible to know for sure. Whatever the case now, there must have been years of mental self-torment and deep delusion to even consider doing this. And the torment and the delusion have not been "resolved" with this act, but exacerbated. Letting the inner unwellness out only increases the totality of its bondage in the end; the chains of the mind are now engraved in the flesh.

Self-mutilating in an effort to force physical reality to reflect inner brokenness comes in many forms. Cutting, for example, is an epidemic which with nearly any Millennial is all too familiar. When it hurts too bad inside, many students are driven to hurt themselves on the outside too. Now imagine if, instead of trying to help those who cut and get them to stop, to bring healing to that brokenness, we glorified it. We celebrated it. We put scarred and bloodied wrists on the front page of newspapers, on the morning news, and proclaimed it a beautiful act of courage which should be praised and awarded. Wouldn't that be sick and twisted?

But that's exactly what is happening with Bruce Jenner. This is Cutting, taken from the wrists and extended as broad as the whole body and as deep as one's sexual identity. Slice it up to make the outside match the messed-up inside. But it won't stay feeling like that. There's a reason for the sky-high suicide rates after this kind of surgery. Yet we see that many of those with the authority and ability to do so are promoting this to the world's youth. Woe to them.

Sin is not a Choice

As distracting as the controversy him has become, Bruce Jenner is a symptom of a deeper problem. There is much we don't know about his motives, but the gender confusion with which he struggled would not even have to be his own choice to still be wrong; we live in a fallen and corrupted world. Flesh-eating bacteria don't ask permission to exist and wreak deadly havoc in your body, mental disorders don't ask permission to exist and corrupt your mind or psyche. Sin certainly doesn't ask permission to corrupt your soul, that's already the default state of mankind.

A particular sinful decision is a choice, but sin overall is no more a choice than being human is a choice; an unregenerated person can't refrain from sinning. That's what it means to be in bondage to sin. Sin is not freedom, it's an inescapable prison. The new life Jesus Christ offers is freedom from that prison, and friendship with Him. And who the Son has made free will be free indeed.

Bruce Jenner is not free, he is in total bondage to sin. He cannot escape by any effort of his own. That the expression of his sinful bondage is abnormal is itself not that strange. Sin breeds more sin, deeper corruption. We have simply arrived at the point in our culture where particularly unsettling forms of sin aren't being kept out of sight anymore.

It was inevitable that this would occur. Every nation, America at every point in history, every earthly culture, is entirely composed of sinful people. All cultures, all nations, eventually decline, decay, and fail. Nothing but the Kingdom of God, a kingdom not of this world, endures and remains unstained.

So if these damaged individuals were regarded as examples of unhealthy people especially needing love and patience and reinforcement of a Biblical idea of selfhood and identity in Christ, that would be the Church acting as it should. What we see in our society today, however, is a rush to exalt this deviance and praise the people who practice it. Let us not take our cues from them and think we need to fight over this issue with hopes of "retaking our culture." We never actually had it. It's pointless to try to fight a battle with society, since: 1) Society defines its values by common accord, so you will automatically lose by definition. 2) According to scripture this is the wrong battlefield. Society was a lost cause when Adam accepted the fruit from Eve. Christ will make all things new. Our job is not to make them look like that now, but to proclaim that fact. (And in doing so, some things will start to show signs of their future glorification even now)

So How Should We React?

 

One thing the Church must do, and only the Church can do, is to speak the revealed truth of God with the indwelling love of God. That means we very firmly reject the idea that what is wretchedly wrong can be called right, and that one man's confused self-nihilism should be put on display and celebrated as a model for others. At the same time, we must show sacrificial love, as Christ did. That means caring more and doing more for damaged souls than seems safe or prudent, while never legitimizing the damage itself.

If any condemnation is deserved -and indeed, the uncomfortable, twisted wrongness that is so obviously present in this situation does deserve and demand condemnation- let it be directed toward and fall on those who approve of this sin, promote it, and lead others into similar deception:

Woe to those who call evil good and good evil,
Who put darkness for light and light for darkness,
Who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!
(Isaiah 5:20)

The deceived will sin and certainly receive their due punishment, but it is the deceivers for whom scripture reserves special condemnation. It is from them that a love of deviance spreads through our society. We all have a sinful nature, but there are those who go further, who are described by Paul in Romans 1 as "those who invent new ways of doing evil," or those Jesus speaks of as leading children astray and for whom drowning is too soft a punishment. These people are not the misled sheep, but the misleading shepherds, themselves misled by their father, the Father of Lies.

A culture cannot be saved, only individual human souls. But if a reaction is proper, let us push back against those who are actively seeking to deceive, rather than giving in to kneejerk reactions against those who have been deceived by them. In recent years this is a typical trap set for the Church, and we have a bad habit of falling right into it. Make sure you are not simultaneously condemning those who are themselves partially victims and unwittingly supporting those who promote and push for acceptance of the lies in which an entire generation of youth are being daily saturated.

Instead, pray for those youth, disciple them and model Christ to them. (You yourself may be a youth, you can still do all of those things) Pray that God would give you wisdom in how to love sacrificially while also speaking truth and not condoning sin. And pray for Bruce Jenner. He is a soul God created, one that is wrong, confused, exploited, and statistically speaking may be on suicide watch soon. But imagine the witness he would have if he was delivered from his bondage to sin into the freedom of Christ and the light of truth.

It's time for the Church to once again fearlessly proclaim the grace and freedom and power of Christ into a world burdened with disorder, violence, and falsehood.

Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound
That saved a wretch... like me
I once was lost, but now am found
Was blind, but now I see

Christians: Prisms, and Space Probes

Prisms

Let's start with prisms.
Have you ever seen how a glass prism splits and reflects the light that passes through it? Most of you probably have, in science class or on that Pink Floyd album cover if nowhere else.

That's right. I am using this for an illustration of our life in Christ.
1 Cor 9:22 all the way.

Like a mirror, the prism doesn't generate its own light. It takes the light it receives and reflects/refracts it out into the space around itself.

Actually the Pink Floyd triangular prism example above is about as simple as it gets. Anyone who's seen cut crystal for things like fancy light fixtures knows that the more facets a prism has, the more light it reflects in more directions. There's a reason diamonds are elaborately faceted into what's called a "brilliant" cut.

And if you are truly seeking to follow God, you will not feel like you're being gently sanded into a smooth sphere; you will feel like He is cutting pieces off of you. Smooth spheres might have a certain inner luminescence, but they don't reflect the light like multifaceted gems, don't send it shooting out in rainbow sparks. The gemstone must "suffer," must be cracked and fractured, to assume that kind of final brilliant form.

This is not a diamond commercial. Do your research, some are "blood diamonds" indeed.

The more we are shaped by God, the more we reflect the light of truth from Him to those around us. Yes, we do not merely passively shine; there is effort involved, but if we are not mature in our faith, if we have not sought out God to be in His presence, we are not going to put forth His light as we could, because we are simply not the right shape to do so. We must undergo fruitful suffering, to let the gemcutter grind new facets that will reflect His glory in new ways.


Note: Missionaries

So if believers are like prisms that reflect/refract the light they receive all around them, missionaries are simply prisms that have been placed far away, in places that may be quite dark. Imagine a fine cut gem* in a coal mine. Shine a light on it, and the effect is dramatic in the total darkness. Yet we cannot do anything to the coal, we can only keep reflecting our Lord's light; it is He alone who can exert the infinite Divine pressure to convert the coal into the rough diamonds for whom the cutting and polishing process can begin as it once began for us. (*- You can immediately see a problem with sending immature believers to the mission field...)

Left by itself in the coal mine, however, the jewel's reflective surface will quickly be coated by coal dust and stop reflecting light. In a nutshell, this is why missionaries need your prayer so much. It's not business as usual; we're not only in a darker spiritual environment, but being here tends to slowly dim our reflectiveness too. We need to be covered in prayer so that the coal dust doesn't stick to us and obscure our light, especially when the enemy is slinging it at us.

Space Probes

A prism doesn't only reflect more light by having more facets, of course. It also depends on how it's oriented with respect to the light it is receiving. (If you have ever played with a prism, or a dangling bit of chandelier or light fixture, you will no doubt have noticed that turning it at different angles towards the light changes how the light is reflected)

So orientation to the light is important, especially as we have "not yet been perfected" and are still undergoing sanctification. Our reflection is still partial and unbalanced; we need to stay rightly oriented to God for our light to shine effectively.

When discussing a craft in flight, especially space flight, one can speak of altitude but also attitude. Attitude in this context refers to the orientation of the craft with respect to some other frame of reference. (It could be the orientation of a space probe with respect to the mysterious planet it circles, or to an inertial frame of reference, etc.)

Bad image quality, but you get the idea.

Without the right attitude, an accelerating spacecraft orbiting, say, the Earth, will soon leave its proper orbit. It might dip too low, begin coasting through the Earth's outer atmosphere, and be dragged down, burning up in an unplanned, fiery re-entry. Conversely, it could swing too wide, begin to escape the earth's gravitational field, and head out into deep space.

Believers are no different. Without the right attitude -without the right orientation towards God- our effort will not result in productive progress for the Kingdom. We might sink lower and lower and burn out, or raise our opinion of ourselves higher and higher and grow distant from Him. In fact, with the wrong attitude, the more effort we put in, the faster we move in the wrong direction.

This is why ministry progress is a dangerous and misleading focus for Christians. Our focus must always be God. He is our frame of reference. If we are rightly oriented with Him, our efforts will progress in the right direction, in fact that's all they can do. On the other hand, if we aren't, all our efforts only take us further from where we need to be. It might look good at first; sometimes an orbit decays slowly. But sooner or later, without an attitude adjustment, we stray. God then graciously allows us to be zinged by a mini space rock at thousands of miles per hour, which hurts and confuses us, but has the effect of knocking us closer to our proper orbit around Christ.

Summary

 

So, what's the point of these two little analogies? Just two ways of thinking about our Christian lives.

First, in order to reflect the light of God's truth to those around us, we need to be in the right shape. This involves fruitful suffering, as Paul talks about in 2 Timothy, to chip pieces off until we are like a brilliant gemstone that does not merely receive the light but reflects it back into whatever context God places us in.

Second, if we don't maintain the right attitude to God, our eternal frame of reference, not only will we not reflect Him as strongly as we could, but our "progress" in ministry will, slowly or quickly, be leading us in the wrong direction. We need to constantly reorient ourselves with respect to God, through His word and time seeking out His presence, to make sure our orbit isn't decaying, leading us spinning out into the depths of space or crashing in flames down to earth.

You don't want to be this kind of shooting star...
Actually, biblically speaking, falling stars are pretty
much always bad news in general

The Hard Grace of Failure

1. What Failure is Not

Who likes failing?

These days, maybe some people would be clever and say they do. But what they mean is not really failure in the sense I'm talking about. I'm not talking about delayed success.

Now I know in the past few decades, piles of profound motivational statements have been made about failure and how important it is. I don't have to recount a list, you've seen many of them I'm sure. Edison failed how many times before he hit on a successful design for the incandescent bulb? (It seems no one knows... I saw 700, 1000, 2000, and 10,000)

Speaking of fails... Edison begs to differ

Uh-oh, an escalation of inspiration. Someone call Oprah.

That is not the kind of failure I'm talking about. Those are not really fails, those are attempts, experiments. "Cross that one off the list and get the next one" is not failure, it's a kind of confirmation.

2. Failure of a Sort

Not winning the presidential election is getting closer to actual failure. Half the country is angry and disappointed, maybe more at the other side, but still many will be angry at you. The best you could probably do is try again and succeed in four years, but even then it's not the same. However, you'll probably still do ok. You can leverage your now-massive name recognition somehow. That's also not really failure, it's more like what used to be called a "pivot" in business-speak. (Maybe it still is. Maybe I'm also using the term incorrectly... I'm an engineer by trade, pivots are things that require memorizing force equations)

Taiwanese students know about failure. There's an national university entrance exam at the end of high school, and how you perform on it has a profound impact on the rest of your life. Doing poorly on that test (there are a few limited options for retesting, but it's not like the SAT where you can take it multiple times and use your best score) means a low-tier college, a low-tier job, and fewer alternate paths to success than in America (even America circa 2015). In the US, even with bad grades or a degree from a lower-tier school, if you hustle*, you can nearly always be successful. In Taiwan, you have to do that anyway to keep your job.

(*- Apparently the positive connotation of this word is not universal. I use it in the sense of getting out there and working harder and with more focus than the average person, not selling drugs or deceiving people)

There is also heroic failure. This is the kind of failure that is irreversible, but where the importance lay mostly not on success but on being willing to try. The firefighter that does not succeed in getting the last person out of a burning building may be haunted by his failure, but we do not blame him for it, we praise him for the attempt, for his courage, even for his grief over not having succeeded. (We wouldn't praise him nearly so much if he shrugged it off as one of life's inevitable tragedies)

Failure is not lead that can be alchemied into gold. In reading for this entry I stumbled across this quote from Elizabeth Hardwick, and felt it strikes a chord:

"Failure is not funny. It is cockroaches on the service elevator, old men in carpet slippers waiting anxiously by the mail slots in the lobby, neighborhood walks where the shops, graphs of consumption, show only a clutter of broken vases, strings of cracked beads, dirty feathers, an old vaudevillian’s memorable dinner jacket and decades of cast-off books—the dust of ambition from which the eye turns away in misery." (from Grub Street: New York)

So how about real failure? What about the firefighter who not only fails to find the trapped child, but fails to find the courage to go look at all? What about the child of brilliant parents who just can't manage to ever do well in school, year after year, regardless of her effort? What about the man who fails to get help for his addiction and drags his family down with him?

Even those stories could end in redemption. You can probably imagine movies where the low point is any of those situations, but somehow manages to end triumphantly.

Failure of the kind I'm talking about is irredeemable. It's not noble, it's not "failing upwards," it's not one small step in the long road to victory, it's not even the nadir, the lowest point, at which one begins to climb back up from the pit again. It's an unrecoverable loss. It is coming to the end and there being no road ahead, no further options. Final failure. We don't even like to contemplate it.

It's also absolutely necessary to understand ourselves and our salvation.

3. Failure to the Point of Surrender

Its necessity doesn't make it any more pleasant- the real, visceral recognition that one cannot be good, that one cannot bring anything good to God in exchange for salvation, that attempting to do so will always end, finally, in failure. Discovering that Pelagius was so very wrong, though we long for him to be right in some little corner of our personalities. Some tiny hook from which to hang our righteousness, some shiny trinket unique to us, expressing our unique value, to trade for some slight reprieve from the terror of total surrender. To finally realize that we have nothing with which to redeem any part of ourselves back from the Redeemer is a devastating kind of experience. Some reach a point and then simply refuse to look further or go deeper; the continued loss of self is too terrifying. But Christ said only by losing our life can we save it.

As believers we think we've grasped this. We can say along with Jonathan Edwards, "you contribute nothing to your salvation but the sin that made it necessary," and acknowledge that it is true, but until we've really tried and failed, we don't get it. We are like addicts in that state of denial who still believe they can quit if they just put their mind to it. Next time, for sure.

Truly recognizing your failure before God is an extremely unpleasant experience. If you have not had such an experience, it's possible you haven't tried to fully surrender to God. When you do, He will show you something you were holding on to, and you will try to argue you should get to keep it. And you are quite likely to base that argument on some goodness or good behavior on your part that justifies a trade. Finally realizing you have nothing to offer, that you are merely a recipient of grace upon grace, you may surrender, until you are called to surrender again in the future, more deeply. And on it goes.

So when Paul says in Philippians 3 that what he once counted as gain he now counts as σκύβαλον (dung, rubbish), he is speaking as someone who has emotionally grasped how utterly comprehensive is human failure. His credentials didn't matter, his zeal wasn't "a valiant if misguided effort," he had nothing, no ground to stand on. That's what he's saying in the passage: if anyone should have had a standing with God, a bit of a starting point from which to barter, any confidence in the flesh whatsoever, it would have been he, and he could see that it was all rubbish. Paul had nothing- except Christ, who is everything.


That recognition of our total failure to have, do, or be good -to bring anything at all to the bargaining table with God- is like a kind of death. Although we recognize it when we repent and believe in Christ, it's something we experience repeatedly in the sanctification process, part of maturing in Christ, as God burns away the dross. We believed truly then that we could not save ourselves; now we experience the fact more and more fully with each painful recognition and admission of our failure. 

If you want a god you can barter with, come to Taiwan. That's religion here.

This is yet another reason the prosperity gospel is no gospel at all. Without failure, without falling on our knees in recognition of our abject spiritual poverty, we do not learn to grow more deeply into God. God's blessings are but one way to experience Him. If we love God and not merely His blessings, we must continue down the path of self-abnegation that sometimes comes only with pain and brokenness. There is no promise to name and claim which skips over the valley of the shadow of death.


But the joy grows, if we are willing to surrender. When in the deep darkness of our new awareness of utter failure the door of grace opens, leading further up and further in, we become more and more willing to grasp the offered hand.To reject it either in pride or despair leads only to bitterness and fruitlessness in the Christian life; yet more fully and painfully aware of our failure, yet refusing to let His grace heal us that much more deeply. Instead we must be recklessly humble, casting aside the reasonable-sounding temptation to reject the gracious consolation of the one who allowed the pain. Bow and worship instead, for it was His pain which earned our grace.