burst the bubble

Had a couple of great conversations with two of our close female friends this weekend. One of them is a Navy wife whose husband used to be stationed here, transferred to Washington State and is packing up to move to Hawaii. She called my wife and I in tears because she was finding this latest move even more draining than the others. She misses us and a tragically small number of other good friends she's made in her years of doing the Navy Hop all around the country.
She was telling me about the difficulties she's had connecting with people at her church, and when she told me about their approach to ministry and relationships in general, I can understand why. And I don't know how she lasted as long as she has in that place.
She described an environment where "fellowship" is a mile wide and an inch deep, where trust is rare, where politics flavours relationships, where "concerned brothers/sisters" report possible lapses in others' Christian behaviour to the pastor, where it's all about image over substance, sin management instead of life transformation, and where tips and techniques and platitudes keep the naughty little sheep corraled neatly in a tiny corner of the Kingdom of God until He comes back to claim them.
That's only my impression of her description of this place, and shouldn't be construed as a judgment, because I'm in no place to make one. But I have personally been neck-deep in such a place, and the sad thing is that once it infects you, you bring it everywhere you go.
If what's coming up next shocks you, you probably need it. If you think I'm off base, or crossing lines that shouldn't be crossed, by all means let me know, but please be prepared to defend your position with the Word and the Spirit. I have heard most if not all the arguments before.
The incident she described which left the greatest impression on me was one where a young sailor who was a shipmate of her husband's was on the floor in the front of the church, praying and weeping as he struggled with something obviously very painful and difficult. As she was a good friend of him and his wife, she went over and laid a hand on his shoulder while she prayed for him. Afterwards, when she was leaving, she was stopped by two women of the church who asked her how she knew the man. When she replied that he was a good friend, they told her that the church usually has male pastors pray for the men.
This reminded me in stark raving colour of how incalculably blessed I am by my friends here, and how ruined I am for what most in our culture call "church as usual." For Christ's good sake, what was dangerous or inappropriate about that? This was not some clandestine tryst, this was praying for someone IN CHURCH. Dear God, these people would have a stroke if they walked in on us and our friends at a cell group meeting.
I bought into this way of thinking long ago, that women and men had no business ministering to each other in any deep fashion unless they were married to each other, that appropriate boundaries between the sexes preclude almost any affection beyond the briefest and most perfunctory of hugs, that the only way men and women ought to need each other is in the context of marriage or blood relations.
Stuff that.
If every good and perfect gift comes from God, then what am I to make of the good works that have been done in my life through my friends - including my sisters in Christ? Who, if not Him, gets the glory for that? These convictions that I'd had were screaming at me when I first joined Grace and Peace Fellowship, when these incredible women were beckoning my wife and me farther and deeper into more and richer life in Him than I'd ever dreamed possible. I begged my wife and my brothers to tell me I was doing something horribly wrong. I would confess to them dreams and desires of (healthy) intimacy with my sisters and wait for the ax to fall. It never did.
What if intimacy really is okay? What would you say if I told you that once when I was facing a very painful time of healing, that it was a sister, one of my best friends and the wife of another of my best friends, who was walking me through it? What if I told you that at one point she wrapped her arms around me and held me? Held. Cuddled. Lingeringly embraced. Prolonged body contact. There. I said it. Are you scandalised? My wife was holding me too. Does that sanctify it, or make it a threesome? If you choose the latter then someone needs to bitch-slap you until your ears ring.
The whole time they were holding me I was begging God to forgive me. WHY?! I didn't initiate this; all I did was receive it. Blissfully. Do you really think there was anything sexual in it for me, her or my wife? There wasn't. So where's the problem? How sexual do you think I want to be with a friend like that? I am committed to her well-being and that of her husband and children. I love them far, far too much to cross that line.
Here's the kicker: I DON'T WANT TO. Not a bit. There is no desire in me to be immoral with these people I love so dearly. I love my God, my wife, and them too much for that consideration to be anything but repulsive. This was okay because they saw what God has been doing in me, and freely choose to partner with Him in it. Nothing has happened in a corner. My wife has been there through all of it. She trusts me and our friends. My sisters trust me. My brothers trust me with their wives and children. There is nothing I want badly enough to throw that away or even threaten it.
Don't get me wrong. I had good reasons for subscribing to those beliefs, such as deep-rooted problems with lust and a decades-long addiction to pornography. For a sizeable stretch of my walk with Christ those restrictions were healthy and necessary. My own personal observations - and experiences - have confirmed that there is indeed real risk of unhealthy attachments between genders. The enemy puts a great deal of his limited resources into destroying families. Even now, there are definitely some things I won't discuss with a woman other than my wife. I'm careful who I'm alone with, and for how long, and about what happens while I'm there.
My problem is less with those beliefs than with the depressingly prevalent attitude in the Western church that such strictures are the immutable and undisputable will of God for all people at all times. That attitude has no basis that I can find in Scripture. The more I follow Christ, the more I see the fear that is driving so much of our thinking in the Church today. Fear is really nothing more than misapplied faith. We put more faith in our own depravity and fallenness than in God's desire and ability to redeem and transform them into His glory and power and love. That is an insult to His sacrifice on the cross for us.
Any relationship includes risk if it's going to be deep enough to matter at all. There is real danger in using a stove. But that doesn't mean you never learn to cook; it just means you wait until you're mature enough to learn how without burning yourself.
I love and need my brothers, but God never intended them to be enough. I need my sisters. I need the balance their femininity brings to my hard-edged little world. I need them to keep inviting me farther into life and beauty, to awaken that which God made me to be. Their touch, the scent of their hair, the gentle, firm press of their embraces, their trust in and acceptance of me when I dare, ever so tremulously, to burst the bubble, arouses in me something so pure and priceless, so worth fighting for, that the lust that so used to define me cowers and slinks into oblivion. Nothing else in my life has given me such power over those base appetites, nothing else has helped me become truer to my own wife like their love. Many will flatly refuse to believe what I just wrote, but I am no liar. And those things are the design of no one but God. The Church needs to be a place where such intimacy can be nurtured and practiced, because it will destroy by contrast the bondage of sexual and emotional vampirism that the enemy has been weaving between man and woman since the Fall.

"well, I'm lost, I'm angry, and I'm armed." - Mal

Back on the Internet after a few days with a fried modem. Posted most of this on the RH forum a couple of weeks ago, pretty much sums up my stance on an issue that's important to me. If the fact that it is scandalises you or fills you with contempt, convince me of my error or stay out of my hair. I'm willing to learn, but not to engage in empty invective, and maybe it's not so unthinkable that I could possibly be learned from on a point or two. It's amazing how many people will line up either to lambast me as a bloodthirsty warmonger because I believe in the God-given right to defend oneself or (especially) others, or to deride me as a limpwristed fence-rider because I'm not itching to pull a trigger at the merest hint of a threat. Stuff them all. They aren't living my life or addressing my responsibilities. I am.
So...
If Christ meant "turn the other cheek" to forbid defence as well as revenge, then the Christian response to all forms of evil is non-resistance. On a personal level, that means to let the pedophile have his way with your child, let the rapist enjoy your sister or daughter or wife, let the assailant do what he will with you. On a national scale, that means no police, no military, no defencive capabilities of any kind for a nation that calls itself Christian. How long would such a nation last in this world?
If obedience to this precept precludes the use of any sort of violence, then Christians have no place in the military or police. If this is true, then my brother-in-law, several good friends, and God alone knows how many more professing Christians are not only walking in sin, but making a living off of it and in some cases leading others into it. Also, were all Christians to take this view to heart and leave such professions, then that means in the case of the United States that everyone who pulls a trigger, drops a bomb, or drives a warship (or issues orders to those who do) answers to no higher authority than Uncle Sam. Am I the only one shuddering at that prospect?
This also raises the question of why Jesus commended a Roman centurion (a senior NCO in the Roman army who likely had spilled a great deal of blood in his day) for faith that put that of all Israel in the shade, yet made no recorded attempt to urge repentance in the form of leaving the legions. Also, if my understanding of history is correct, the soldiers who questioned John the Baptist on what true repentance meant for them in practical terms were likely Roman, i.e., armed agents of a rapacious pagan empire. Yet John (who was Spirit-filled from birth) never suggested that they leave the service of Rome, only that they conduct themselves therein in a manner that reflected the fear of God and love for those He loves.
As an aside, I find it telling that although police organisations tend to favour gun control, individual officers (and I know two well enough to call family) tend to be some of our nation's most ardent supporters of the Second Amendment. Yet perhaps no demographic is at greater risk of injury or death by a firearm in the hands of a private citizen. They simply make the distinction between a law-abiding citizen and a criminal. It's a judgment of actions, not heart or human worth.
Just to be clear, let me state my own position:
I do not own firearms because I fear death. I don't. I know where I'm going, and frankly, the sooner the better. I own firearms because they expand my options in the face of unrestrained evil. They are by no means my only options, or even my first. I will avoid trouble if at all reasonably possible. I will pursue peace with all as much as it depends on me, though sometimes peace is achieved because the one who would gladly and callously break it chooses not to because they don't want a load of 00 buckshot in their thorax. I will risk my own life tremendously to defuse a confrontation with someone who wishes harm to myself or those I love without violence. I will never pull a trigger or even brandish a weapon if there is the merest hint of any other reasonable option. I will never, ever take or even threaten a life to preserve mere money or property. I would vastly prefer to deter aggression than engage it, but if armed I am much better equipped to do either. I am prepared to face evil unarmed, but I don't want that to be my only option.
And honestly, I don't know how someone can love an enemy and shoot him to death at the same time, except that an evildoer can make a choice that leaves no other reasonable option for he who would act in love. C. S. Lewis, a former WWI infantry officer, went into much greater depth on this issue in his essay Why I Am Not A Pacifist, from his collection The Weight Of Glory. I tend to trust the perspective of those who have been there, because frankly, I'll be happy if I never do.

scenosaur

So long ago. No internet or cell phones or iPods. Cut-and-paste involved sharp things and chemicals, both of which we were already intimately familiar with. Vinyl records and scratchy radio shows on far-off college stations at weird hours. Piles and stacks and oceans of cheap cassette tapes, endless combinations of nameless songs by bands whose names we never learned. A pathetic few of us huddling together under the disapproving stare of the rest of our species, and reveling in it. Sick of the masses sieg-heiling their pet guitar gods and Spandex-clad generic messiahs, the party-hearty cultural fog of the 1980's clinging to every surface, the faceless dread of being showered with ICBMs resolved into a bitterly cheerful resignation, the fever and push to become a something that does nothing but consumes and conforms and flees for its very non-life from anything that would cause an actual thought.
We were always hated and misunderstood, which sounds self-pitying and melodramatic even when it's true, but we didn't brood over it except for brief spells which we would help each other out of any way we could, be it a kind word or a slap in the head or an explosion in the backyard. What did the normals know about us, or care? We had each other, and we knew there were others of our kind all over the world. The power we wielded to rip holes in the illusory fabric of normalcy was intoxicating, whether at school watching the same tired drama day in and day out, or packing into Bunny's Escort to the Crystal Mall in full regalia to flaunt our outcast glory, or tormenting a house full of stoners and metalheads with "music" so bad other punks hated us.
Been on both sides of the stage at a million shows. Black Flag was my first. Leon and I must have been the youngest there by a fair bit, and damned well the scaredest, pasted up against the back wall of UConn's Student Union Ballroom. The Ramones, Husker Du, Supertouch, Sheer Terror, Chronic Disorder, Bloodbath, Forced Reality, Killing Time, Big Mistake, Hatebreed, 25 Ta Life, Eastcide, Follow Through, Stepkid, Smackdown, The Afflicted, Rotzkinder, The Enemies, Golgo 13, No Innocent Victim, Headnoise, Flatfoot 56, The Dropkick Murphys, The Last Hope, Madball, pH, Under Investigation, Suiciety, Think Tank, Crossthread, Warpiper. Some were huge, legendary, eternal, others were gone as fast as they formed with barely ten kids to remember they even existed, but it was still heat and sweat and leather and nicotine and beer and blunt-force trauma and grins and yells and boots and fists and patches and ratty old Chucks and one big happy dys-f*ckin'-functional family.
They are my tribe. I love them. Some are older than me, some young enough to be my progeny. They are all wonderful. I love their honesty, their feverish yearning for reality, their refusal to pretend that the world isn't going to hell. I mourn that their best efforts all too often short-circuit themselves, yet even so they struggle with all their heart to be so much more than just another clique with passwords and secret handshakes and uniforms. I grieve that they are millimeters away from understanding the One Who died at the hands of the authorities whose sham and hypocrisy He exposed, yet they revile Him because someone fed them the lie that He and the "authorities" are on the same team.
I fed that lie every time I caved in to the pressure to be someone else's idea of holy, every time I poked around someone's life and made arm's length judgments out of fear rather than speaking truth in love, every time I worried more about what my new church "friends" would think than what those beautiful, ragged, heart-kicking kids needed to hear from a God Whose love for them put Him on a cross.
I don't know what to do for them anymore. I don't know if I can even go back again. I want to, somehow. On God's terms, not mine. But dear God I want them to know Him. Fuck religion. If they meet - really meet - Jesus, they'll fall in love with Him, and religion will slide off them like snot off Teflon. They'll be just what the church needs. I think they already are.

jones

this hurts like f*ck.
I am being crushed under something I never thought I could have too much of. love.
some things really are so good that there is no "too much", except that my capacity for them is pitiful.
God, do You understand what it means to be so needy that nothing ever assuages the ache for more than a moment, and those moments so rare and precious rocket through Your soul like emotional heroin? did You have friends here on earth who filled you with this yearning, this terror that the love You have for them will never find its mark but choke the life from you because it's so huge and inexpressible that it turns Your spine to water?
why is it so natural to believe that they don't understand, don't care (they don't have to), don't need anything they will ever find in me? why the need to be needed? I wouldn't wish this on anyone, least of all them. they have done nothing to make these doubts realistic, it's my fault, not theirs.
why can't I make them see, or if they already do, why can't I know that?
the glory of You they reflect used to inspire and revive me, now it makes me want to flee and hide my poverty of life and mind and vision.
when will I ever learn? why do I still feel alone and unseen?
I want to honour what they have invested in me, because it comes from You.
God I believe. help my unbelief.
it hurts it hurts it hurts. there is no pretense to strength or might or power left. I am undone. I've heard this is a good place to be. wish it was easier to agree.
how will I ever offer this love to someone who needs it if I can't grasp it for myself?

thank you

how did you know?
you saved me again.
threw me a lifeline just as I was starting to cosy up to the idea of drowning.
your timing is impeccable.
not really your timing, but His, yet the choice was still yours.
I'm trying, God, I'm trying. don't know why I lose my grip so easily, yet even that helps someone. and what a someone.
it would seem that nothing I do matters because it will all work out for someone's good in the end.
but it does matter, because I still want to choose something better than hate and death.
even more than that I want to see what you see when you look in this direction, to know as well as you do that the contempt I am bracing for when the guts tumble out does not exist, that the love waiting for me is huger than the contempt would be even if it did.
I do not know how to fully believe, live, own what you say about me, but I want to. you're one very large reason why one of my most repeated prayers to God is "Lord, I believe - help my unbelief."
the gift you just offered me in His name gets every scrap of whatever belief I can muster.
and I believe that someday that will be enough, but I will not quit.
I love you.