God is refusing to answer my questions right now.

There are a few fairly large challenges on the table at the present moment. I would love to get some resolution on them. I’ve made that clear to God. I’ve presented my case, stated what I would love to happen and yet, nothing.

So I find myself doing what I often do in situations like this, trying to jump start God like a car that stalled out.

Instead of pushing God down a hill to get momentum and then cranking the ignition with the hope that the motor will catch, I’m going through my “Christian to-do list.”

OK God, no answer on that issue huh? How about if I read the Bible a little more? Let’s try that. Nope that didn’t fix the silence. Maybe I need to say better prayers? Or get some wise counsel or read a Christian book or go through old journals and look at other situations in which you have provided? Will that do it, you ready to talk yet? You ready to resolve the things that I think need resolving? No? What’s it going to take to get a clear answer on this issue?

I don’t literally ball my hand into a fist and yell at the storm clouds, but I might as well. God is not removing the confusion around my future and that’s frustrating. “If He really loved me, He would,” I start to think. Maybe there’s some area of my life that I’m messing up in right now and if I can just over turn the right rock and kill the snake under it, then He’ll end His silence and show me what to do. Maybe if I can just figure out where the break in the line of communication is, I can patch it and God will be able to lift me out of the situation I’m in.

Have you ever felt like that? There was an issue or a situation you wanted God to speak to and it just felt like at the time you needed Him most He went into stealth mode? You kept coming back to Him with the same question.

Is this the job I’m supposed to take?

Is this the guy I’m supposed to marry?

Will we ever not be so strapped financially?

You asked and you asked and you asked, and no matter how often you went to Him with that issue, it seemed like He refused to remove it?

I’ve felt that way, in fact that’s how I feel right now, but I’m beginning to think I might be wrong.
What if, it’s not an issue of me not hearing God correctly or me sinning in some way that is disappointing God?

What if it’s not that God is just deciding to leave me vulnerable to a season of confusion?

What if God loves me too much to answer my prayer?

I think that might be the real question I need to wrestle with. I think that’s where I need to start and a friend in high school gave me a hint that pointed me in that direction years ago.

He was a “single topic friend.” Have you ever had one of those? It’s a friend where you only have one point of connection, one thing in common, one topic you can talk about. You know he likes college football so every time you see him, that’s what you talk about. You wish your relationship was bigger. You wish you could talk about your families or your future or a host of other things, but for some reason this relationship is stuck temporarily on one thing.

And if that relationship is important to you, if that girl, who only wants to talk to you about music, is important to you, you’ll continue to be faithful to that topic. If you really love that relationship you’d never say, “I don’t want to talk about college football or music anymore.”

That would close the door. That would end the conversation. That would atrophy the friendship. So instead, while you hope and pray that there will be an opportunity to expand your relationship, you delight in talking about college football with your single topic friend.

Sometimes I think I’m like that with God. I get one thing stuck in my head. I laser focus all my prayers and thoughts and energy on one particular issue. And then I take it to Him. It becomes the biggest part of our conversation, the driving force that I keep coming to Him about and then I act confused at why He won’t fix it already.

Maybe God loves me too much for that. Maybe God’s thinking, “Jon, I want there to be a million doors open between you and me. I want your marriage and your job and your children and your dreams and every inch of your life to be a door you open to me, but right now, in this season of life, the only door you’re opening is the one called ‘the future.’ And you keep asking me to close that door with some answer from above that includes a clear set of steps on what you should do. But why would I magically take that away? That’s the vehicle for 100% of our conversations right now, why would I eliminate that? The result would be less conversation with you and I love conversations with you. I want you near me and fixing that situation the way you want it fixed would actually push you away. You would take the answer and leave.”

I don’t know what you’re praying about right now. I hope that you’re more mature in your faith than I am and have already grown your relationship with God much bigger than a single topic friendship. But if you haven’t, if there’s one heavy thing that’s weighing on you, please know that it might be that God loves you too much to remove it.

I think every Christian has a “Doesn’t Count List” (DCL), a collection of small things we do that might not be completely in God’s will for our life, but they’re so tiny they don’t really matter. If you say you don’t have a DCL, apparently lying is one of the items on yours because that’s just what you did.

Here are some things I recently realized were on my Doesn’t Count List:

Speeding
God is completely cool with this. I know we’re supposed to honor the authority we’re placed under, but God is like the state troopers on this one when it comes to driving faster than the legal limit, “Under 5 you’re fine, Over 5 you’re mine.”

Using the internet at work for personal reasons
Come on, I’m reading www.biblegateway.com and listening to podcasts of sermons. Surely God’s OK with me using time that my company pays me for that? I mean people take smoke breaks all day and I don’t smoke so I’m owed a few minutes of Internet break time here and there. I know that no matter what we do, we’re supposed to do it for the glory of God, which means working hard at work, but let’s be honest, that verse was written before Youtube, and that site has everything.

Doing things you wouldn’t recommend that other Christians do
I caught myself in this one last weekend. A friend sent me a link to a lil’ Wayne remix of Jason Mraz’ song “I’m yours” and it was awesome. I listened to it four or five times to make sure it was clean and then was about to tweet it from my twitter account when I thought, “Is that Christian of me to share that link? I mean it’s lil Wayne. I better not, I don’t want to recommend that other Christians listen to that.” But me? I’m apparently impervious to all sorts of less than holy forms of media. Me? I can handle that. (The second problem in that scenario is that by editing what I tweet but still listening to that song, I create a “twitter Jon” and a “real Jon.” I’m not sure if other Christian bloggers struggle with the temptation to “holy up” how they present themselves online but that is some whackness I need to get under control.)

Hook ups
If you thought I was going to talk about making out, you should be ashamed of yourself. I’m talking about the hook ups friends and family members can get us at stores. For instance, a few weeks ago when I decided to buy a mac laptop, they had a deal where if you were a college kid you could get a free iPod touch with the purchase and a free printer. I seriously considered finding a neighborhood kid to go in with me so that I could get the deal. And although I didn’t take advantage of that discount which honestly did not really apply to me, I’ve done that a number of times in the past.

Those are all pretty silly I guess. You could easily read my Doesn’t Count List and think, “Everybody does that. We can’t be perfect, what’s the big deal?” And you’d be right, we can’t be perfect, but what I’ve found in my own life is that the DCL is never satisfied with staying small and insignificant. It’s a hungry little list. It always wants more of your life. It always wants you to add new things to it. To grow and stretch until it’s a mile long.

When I was in college, I got into an unhealthy dating relationship. We were mutually bad for each other and our combined brokenness only managed to amplify the hurt we were able to cause. When my girlfriend got into techno music, so did I. When my girlfriend started going to raves, so did I. When my girlfriend started doing ecstasy, so did I. How?

I put it on my Doesn’t Count List.

After having years of practice adding “small things” to it and justifying why some things don’t count in God’s eyes, it was surprisingly easy to rationalize ecstasy. As I’ve written about before, in my head I told myself, “Cocaine is a real drug because you have to snort it. Heroin is a real drug because you have to shoot it. Pot is a real drug because you have to smoke it. Ecstasy is just a pill, like aspirin. I’ve swallowed pills before, that’s not a dangerous drug. That’s just a pill.”

As stupid as that sounds, when you’re living in stupid land, stupid decisions and stupid logic make a surprising amount of sense. So I started doing ecstasy. But that wasn’t enough for the DCL. So eventually I smoked some pot. And finally, in one of the scariest nights of my life, I did some acid. I kept adding to my “Doesn’t Count List” until it choked out all the good and made my life not count.

As gross as that all was, the bigger issue might be what keeping a DCL reveals I believe about God. Apparently, in my heart, God is still up in heaven keeping a massive list of things that count and things that don’t count. He’s Santa Claus and I’m a kid trying to hide the pieces of a broken vase under my bed in the hope that they don’t count. Christ’s death must not have been enough, because in my mind, there are still two lists going.

Let’s lose the lists. It all counts. If we could have been saved by a list, God wouldn’t have sent His son, He would have just given us more paper and pens so we could keep better lists. It has to count or Christ’s life doesn’t count. The grace, the mercy, the deep, beating heartbeat of hope from Christ beats loudly because it does count. The gap between me and God was wide and dark. But it was crossed.

Not by me.

Not by my goodness.

Not by lists.

But by Christ.

Because it counts.

I don’t think I’m alone in this. I don’t think I’m the only one holding a list in my hand sometimes. How about you? Have you ever had a Doesn’t Count List? What’s on it?

I got kicked off the New Jersey turnpike once for being too fat.

Let me rephrase that:

My father in law and I got kicked off the New Jersey turnpike for having a moving van that was slightly over the legal weight limit of what the road could structurally support.

What’s slightly overweight mean?

In this case, 4,000 pounds.

There was two tons worth of stuff too much in our 24 foot Penske moving truck. I thought briefly about whether we could jettison some of our heavier items like they do in the movies. I imagine myself opening the back of the truck while barreling down the highway at 70MPH and yelling at my father-in law:

“We’re too heavy; we’re not going to clear the New Jersey border. We’ve got to lose some weight. The china has to go. There are 12 place settings. We ate lunch at Costco last weekend; we’re not fancy enough to have that much china. And fiesta ware? That stuff is made of lead. You could kill a man with a fiesta ware plate. So heavy. Throw that out the back too.”

But because I love my wife and promised her I’d never throw her china out of the back of a rented vehicle on a federal interstate, I wasn’t able to lighten our load. So instead, we were forced to get off the turnpike. The weird thing is that the NJ turnpike goes through backyards and small little neighborhoods. As soon as we got off we were completely lost. Since this was before GPS devices, way back in 2004, I had to take the support vehicle back to a rest stop and buy a map while my father-in law waited awkwardly in some neighborhood cul-de-sac with our panting yellow beast of a moving truck.

All in all, that day turned out to be a geography lesson I would have preferred to miss but for some reason that’s a subject I can’t seem to escape right now.

Getting lost, not knowing where you’re supposed to be, fumbling with maps both physical and metaphorical, these are all things I find myself constantly doing right now.

The idea of “place” has been something I’ve been wrestling with a lot lately. I’ve got this overwhelming feeling that God wants me somewhere else. Whether that’s a product of immaturity or selfishness, there’s a part of me that loves to focus on there instead of here. I want to pray for chances to witness to far off people in far off places. It’s always sexier to think your mission in life is going to involve some sort of adventure with a rope ladder over a ranging river full of piranha as you carry a vaccine and the hope of the gospel to a lost tribe of people that will eventually give you a wicked cool village nickname (mine would be Rik-Rok) and perhaps your own machete. It’s a lot less fun to think that maybe you’re already in a mission field and the annoying guy who you pass TPS reports to, the guy who sits near you in a sea of cubicles, the sniffler, yeah that guy, he needs to know about the love of God.

I get caught up in that attitude and when I do, I eventually start peppering God with geography questions. Have you ever done that? Have you ever said to God:

Where do you want me?

This doesn’t feel like where I’m supposed to be God, can you please give me a sign?

Can you tell me where you want me to go?

Is this job, is this relationship, is this church, is this city where you want me to be?

Do you want me to move cities? States? Countries? Continents?

I fire off thousands of questions that center around the longitude and latitude of my life at God. And do you know how God answers me when I ask Him those kinds of questions? Do you know how I promise He will answer you if you ask Him those kinds of questions? Do you know the first answer God always gives when we say, “God where do you want me to go?”

“In my presence.”

We won’t get a city name first or a country or a street address. God isn’t Google Maps. Punch in as many prayers as you want, but more than anything else, God is going to say the same thing to you as He says to me,

“In my presence, that is where I want you to go. Better is one day in my courts than a thousand elsewhere. I’ve got other destinations planned for you, far off places and close to home addresses that you can’t even imagine, but every destination, every adventure begins with the same starting location, in my presence.”

Stop trying to force a map on God. He might give you laser specific directions for your life and your journey and your next steps. But first, long before He does that, even after He does that, He’s going to remind you of the one place He wants you to go most of all,

“In my presence.”

My wife and I spent Thanksgiving in Pensacola, Florida a few years ago. Since our kids go to bed awesomely early, 6:30 eastern, we were stuck in the hotel by ourselves at 5:30 central time every night. There are few things as depressing as sitting on a bed for five straight hours in a Sleep Inn hotel room. In addition to suck your soul out fluorescent lights, the room had kind of this potpourri of bad smells. It was part smoke, part cat, part old Hardee’s hamburger and a smidge of feet.

It was admittedly a good time to catch up on conversation with my wife, but after a few straight days of staring at each other, we were both a little stir crazy. One night I walked down to the BP gas station that was beside the hotel.

Behind the counter at the gas station was a sad woman in her mid thirties. She looked tired, like maybe life was hard for her a decade too soon. Like maybe she didn’t get to be a kid long enough and all that adulthood was starting to catch up on her.

On the outside of her hand was a small greenish gray tattoo of an X. I was curious about what it meant, so I asked her the significance. Here is her response:

“Oh that? That doesn’t mean anything. My mom gave me that one night when she was drunk.”

That was a kind of weird answer, so I asked her how old she was when it happened. She scrunched up her face for a second in concentration and then said, “I think I was 13.”

When I was 13, I was really concerned about my clothes. I was worried that my mom would buy me a Knights of the Round Table shirt instead of Polo. Or that I would have Reeboks instead of Nikes. These were the kinds of things I focused on, because at that age, kids would tease you for the smallest thing.

But what about showing up to school one Monday with a jagged, bloody green x tattooed on your hand? What was that experience like? How would kids react to that? Didn’t it hurt when her mom gave her that? She was drunk, writing on her daughter with a shaky hand and a hot needle.

I thought about that the rest of the trip and was considering writing about the marks that our parents give us. They’re not all as obvious as that and many are actually positive, but I realized that was a narrow way to look at it, because it’s not just parents that give us marks. It’s coworkers and spouses and friends and strangers. And when we don’t know they’re there, sometimes they actually stick.

Someone once asked me to review a memo at work that included some disparaging remarks about my writing ability. There on page 4 was a giant circle with a big red line through it that said “Fluff” and a sentence that promised a coworker was going to eliminate my fluff writing. The person that handed me the memo didn’t realize it was about me. They wanted me to focus on a completely different section of the document but my eye caught some criticism about the company’s writer, and since I was the only writer there, I couldn’t help but read what was written.

As I walked back to my desk, I was crushed. I felt like my complete lack of value had not only been noticed but captured in a memo. In the quietness of my head though, I felt like God popped in and said, “Hey, that memo doesn’t get to define who you are. I do. And I say you are my son.” I was blown away and instead of spiraling into despair and shame over that memo, I went back to my desk and wrote what was probably the best thing I’ve ever written for that company.

I wish that single event was enough to forever shake off the bad marks I’ve got on me, but it isn’t. I still doubt. I still believe the lies of the marks. I still, like lots of other Christians, forget who I am. I still give other people’s words too much power. I don’t have it all figured out. Instead, more than anything, life feels like it’s been a long series of believing that I am not who other people define me to be, I am a son of God. I am God’s work of art. And the more I have been open to believing that, the more He’s shown me it’s true.

The thing I realized, is that an experience can’t change that. My relation to God is not a mark. It is not a big tattoo or a little sticker, it is who I am. I can not completely cover that up or blot it out with failure. The prodigal son tries, he completely messes up his life. But more importantly, he shows how sometimes, the worst marks are the ones we give ourselves. “I’m a bad husband. I’m a terrible employee. I’m ugly.”

These are the words we sometimes hear from ourselves and they are the kind of words the prodigal son tries to say to his father. (I have written about this story so many times it’s getting a bit ridiculous but I love the lessons it has for us.) When the prodigal son rehearses his homecoming speech, he decides to conclude it with, “make me like one of your hired men.” That was the last thing he was going to say. But when he speaks to his father, that is the one thing he is not allowed to speak. The rest of his speech comes off without a hitch. “Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.”

These words are delivered without incident, but he doesn’t ever get to say “make me like one of your hired men.” Why is that?

Why are those eight words left out? You can certainly read that as just accidental, that regardless of the words, the father was going to cut him off before he finished speaking. And maybe that’s right. But when I read that, I read a father stopping a son from saying something the father would never do. The father would never make him like one of his hired men. He would never give the son a new mark of slavery. He would never call him employee, instead of son. So he doesn’t even let those words out. He stops him because no new mark would be given that day. The old truth, the one at the core of the son, still holds true.

Despite the pigpen and the prostitutes, the dirt and the deception, the father doesn’t see a hired man.

He sees a son.

He sees his child.

And that changes everything.

A friend of mine is starting a church and fortunately some haters have materialized out of thin air. I say fortunately because only ordinary things ever get full consensus from people. Doing something extraordinary should never make complete sense to everyone in your life. People will always support photocopies of what’s always been done, but if you start something new, something different, you should expect resistance. (That last paragraph was the first time in months I’ve heard the faint whispers of the Newsies’ “Open the Gates and Seize the Day.” It’s been too long Crutchy, it’s been too long.)

When I called my friend and asked him how the church plant was going, he said that a member of the first church he started in the 1980s had written him a letter. In it, this former member that had not spoken with him in close to a decade said that he felt my friend was starting the new church out of ego.

Then, in what baffles me, he told my friend, who has a degenerative eye disease, that he was “Praying more earnestly than I’ve ever prayed in my life that God would destroy the rods and cones in your eyes so that you would go blind and only the sight that God gives you will be able to guide you.”

That’s not a direct quote because my friend’s wife tore up the letter in a fit of justified pastor’s wife rage, but the gist was that he was praying for the destruction of his rods and cones.

Wow.

That is crazy. Maybe this was just the angry ramblings of an 80-year old former minister who has lost touch with the whole love your neighbor thing. Maybe the letter writer just had access to a typewriter on a day when whatever bitterness that was bubbling inside of him had a chance to spill out. Maybe he’s just a messed up human being like me, but whatever his reason was, that is one crazy letter. The really crazy thing though is that I think I understand what he was trying to say.

Sometimes, if you’ve come to Christ through some tragic circumstance like a death in the family or an all consuming addiction or a specific pit so deep only the light of God could find the bottom, it’s tempting to think everyone needs to have that very same experience you had.

So you start to develop this weird kind of “brokenness pride.” That sounds completely stupid and impossible, I know, but I think it’s true. Or rather it’s true of me. A few years ago I made some mistakes that no amount of intelligence or wit or temporary, “I’ll do better this time, I can fix this” could remedy. In the midst of that, Christ grabbed hold of me.

And yet somehow I found a way to turn that into pride. I started thinking things like, “That guy hasn’t been broken yet. Look how deep my faith is compared to his. He hasn’t seen the depths of hurt or darkness I have and is still holding on to things I had to let go of. Maybe someday, he’ll get broken like me and experience a real relationship with God.”

Ugh. When you start to define faith by the tragedy that helped bring you there it’s tempting to pray some really weird prayers. I wish I had a dollar for every time a parent has told me, “I just pray it doesn’t take a horrible tragedy to bring my son to Christ. I just pray that when he hits rock bottom it doesn’t kill him.” The hard thing is that at the heart of that is a truth. I want people to know the love of God more than anything else in this world. So losing a job or going into credit card debt or a million other things that temporarily hurt is not nearly as important as missing out on a life-changing relationship with Christ.

But I don’t think that means you pray for someone’s rods and cones to deteroiate. I don’t think that means you pray someone goes blind. I don’t think that means you identify a tragedy and pray that it befalls someone.

I think it’s weird to pray for something bad to happen to someone so that they will see how good God is.

Fortunately, my friend who received that letter is smarter than me. When I asked about it, his answer was perfect. He told me,

“I’m not mad at the guy who wrote that letter. I just wish he would have prayed that God would have restored my sight and in that experience I would have been able to see His great love for me.”

Pray for love. Pray that the people in your life will experience the deep, all consuming love of God in a way that only God on high can predict and orchestrate. It might take something big and scary to quiet someone’s life enough so that they can hear the voice of God. That was my personal experience four years ago but I know my parents and my wife didn’t pray for a tragedy to occur. They prayed for love and hope and God shaped that in the way that only He can shape it.

Above all, please don’t tell that 80-year old rod and cone guy about this post. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t read blogs and I don’t want him praying I get in some freak cougar accident and lose all my typing fingers.

I got fired once, well twice if you count the “carnival incident” but you really shouldn’t count that one.

I was writing for an advertising agency. I didn’t understand what it was they wanted me to do and I had a bad attitude about that. So a few times a week, my bosses would pull me into a break room and explain the job to me. Then I’d go write something that was different than what they asked me to write. Then they’d pull me back into the break room. This cycle of instructions given, instructions poorly followed continued for a few weeks until finally I didn’t get pulled into the break room. I got pulled into a conference room.

There, the president fired me and told me something like, “I don’t think you’re supposed to be a writer. Have you ever thought about being a salesman instead?” And it was the right decision on their part. They had given me a series of tasks, explained them over and over again and I had blown it. I didn’t get what they needed me to do and when I didn’t enough times, they didn’t need me anymore.

Sometimes I worry that God might treat me the same way. Maybe He won’t out and out fire me as a Christian, but I fear that He must be getting tired of explaining the same things over and over to me again.

There are a handful of things that I think God is trying to tell me and I just can’t seem to understand them nearly as quickly as I think I should. Things that if I were a better Christian I would be able to figure out or see clearly.

Have you ever felt that way?

Continue Reading after the jump

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I met Michael Jordan one summer while he was golfing at a country club in Pinehurst, North Carolina. My uncle and his family lived on the golf course and I was spending a few weeks there before I started the eighth grade.

When word spread that Jordan and a gang of other important people were in the clubhouse that morning we all went down to get a closer look. This was before Jordan became human. Before the gambling and the baseball experiment and the tabloid fodder. Jordan was a god at the time and I had a Nike swoosh mark shaved into the back of my head to prove it. I told everyone in Pinehurst that summer that I had my haircut that way as a tribute to a friend in Boston that had been shot and killed for a pair of Air Jordans.

I’m not sure why I lied like that. None of that was true. Maybe I’m like Samson, razors bring out the worst in me, but Michael Jordan didn’t know any of that. Neither did Dean Smith the legendary coach of UNC or Dr. J, who were both with Jordan that day.

They all signed the back of my shirt with a big marker. Later that afternoon, with the autographed shirt safely tucked in a drawer, I went back down to the clubhouse. It had been 3 or 4 hours and I wanted to see if I could get Jordan’s autograph on a piece of paper I could frame.

The party had already finished golfing and all the fans had gone home. I saw Jordan walking to his car in the parking lot. I ran out after him as fast as my little seventh grade legs would carry me and said, “Excuse me Mr. Jordan, can I please have your autograph?”

He stopped in his tracks and turned, a golf bag resting high on shoulders that towered over me. With a look that froze opponents on basketball courts across the planet he said, “Didn’t I already sign you kid?”

Life is Limited
In the real world, in parking lots in Pinehurst, North Carolina, life is limited. Your hero turns to you and tells you that he’s not going to give you another autograph. Your hero tells you he remembers you and that you’re not getting a second signature, the only thing you want that day. That stupid summer, with a lopsided swoosh mark growing in the back of your head and a mouth full of lies.

Sometimes I think God is like that. Bothered by me, tired of my requests for His time, even if it’s just 3 seconds for Him to sign off on some prayer I’m saying or need I’m sure I can’t live without.

He’s on His way somewhere important after a round of golf with Moses and Elijah or Elisha whichever one plays. I’m chasing Him down in the parking lot. He turns with His big God golf clubs and He looks down at me. And He says in that massive voice of His “Didn’t I already forgive you kid?”

Forgiveness is the thing I ask for the most. In my head maybe I know that God’s forgiveness is eternal and inexhaustible but in my heart I feel like He’s going to run out of it. That He’s got a limited supply. And I’m burning them up, one by one, sin by sin.

The Day After the Party
I’ve read the story about the prodigal son more than anything else in the Bible. If you’ve messed up life like I have it’s a pretty good read. I think when you get arrested they should read that to you right after the Miranda rights. I think that’d be a nice way to take a little sting out of going to jail.

Part of the reason I’ve read that story so many times though is that I think there’s something missing. I feel like there’s some verse or passage that I must have skipped that makes the whole thing make sense. It seems too good to be true. The prodigal son takes his inheritance, blows it on fast living, ends up in a pig pen and then gets a party thrown for him when he returns home. I’ve always wondered what the day after the party was like:

The first rays of sunshine crept across the floor and landed on a pile of party favors being swept up by a servant. A welcome home banner was being taken down and across the house the sounds of morning reverberated.

In his old bedroom, the prodigal son rolls over and opens his eyes. He’d dreamt it so often, dreamt of this place so often, he didn’t believe it was real. Those nights in the dark, curled under a bush or beside the barn when his money was gone and his hope with it, he’d wondered if he’d ever know safety again. He sat up, surprised to find himself there, laughing at the memories of the night before. The feast, the party, the ridiculousness of it all. His family who celebrated his return as if his absence had increased their love for him, amplified it. None of it made any sense. There was a knock on the door. He had a door again, that was something he had missed.

The head of a servant peered in:

“Sir, your father is waiting for you in the kitchen.” This servant didn’t go to seminary either and didn’t seem that concerned that in Biblical times “kitchen” was definitely the wrong word to use in that context.

“Well, you’ve got the rest of your life for it to come back to you.” The father said taking out a pen and writing “family inheritance” at the top of the list.

For most of my life this is how I would have written the second part of that story, the directors cut if you will, an alternative ending that was too harsh for the version they released in the Bible.
The father’s anxious sprint toward the lost son doesn’t make any sense. That’s not how life works. People pay for their mistakes. They don’t get a party for them. When you return home from wasting your inheritance on the world your father says “Didn’t I already bless you kid?” End of story.

Forgiveness
I don’t understand forgiveness and it’s always depressing to me when I read a book that tells me that’s the first step of the Christian walk, believing that God forgives you. If I can’t get past that first step than the rest of it, all the rest of it remains completely closed to me.

It’s not that I think I don’t need forgiveness. I just don’t understand how it’s possible. If I can’t earn it, than it’s out of my control and I’m powerless.

I remember the first time I ever knew how outrageous and insane real forgiveness was. I had gotten myself into some serious trouble at work. The kind of trouble that’s so big and ugly it makes you ashamed that there are people in your life close enough to you to get some of the trouble spilled on them. I wanted to push everyone away, to expel people from the planetary system that was me and just go float somewhere and die.

I called my wife on the phone and told her as much.

“I’m sorry you met me.” I said through angry, frightened tears. I was desperate for her to go, to pull away from me so I could inflict pain on only one person. The person I felt deserved it the most. Me.

“I love you!” She yelled through the phone.

“How can you say that? That doesn’t make any sense.” I responded.

“You don’t get to decide who I love. I love you. That’s my decision. You can’t take that away from me. I love you. I choose to love you.” She repeated words like these over and over again. She attacked me with love that day. And forgiveness I didn’t deserve. Forgiveness I couldn’t earn or make sense of.

I was overwhelmed that day. And I think that was such a thin sliver of what God’s forgiveness is like, how big and nonsensical His love is. I heard a minister once say that His forgiveness, God’s grace, is given wastefully. He pours it out on us in such abundance that it’s almost wasteful.

The Tenth Party
I have to confess that some days I still think there’s a list God will ask me to work through the day after He throws me that welcome home party. I have a hard time understanding how something can be true and illogical at the same time. And so much of God is that way.
But some days, when I least expect it, in ways I can’t control, I believe a different story about God’s forgiveness.

The first rays of sunshine creep across a dusty road and grate against the eyelids of the prodigal son trying to sleep uncomfortably on a bed of gravel. His teeth felt dirty, his mouth and hands stained with the red of cheap wine. A long scratch ran across his cheek, a shoe was angled beneath his head for a pillow. “How many times did this make?” he thought from the part inside him that still remembered returning home. He was doing so well, things were so happy but his never agains always seemed to fail him in the end. How long would he be gone this time?

Miles away, an concerned father stood by the front window of his house as a servant approached with a message.

“Sir, I checked his bedroom and the barn. His things are missing. He’s left again.”

“I know.” The father said with sad eyes.

And then with slow steps he walked to a large closet and motioned to the servant.

“Help me with this Welcome Home banner.” He said pulling one from a pile of a thousand.

“Today could be the day my child returns.”

(This was originally something I wrote for the prodigal Jon site.)

Let’s be clear here, I’m not afraid of spiders, I’m just not a fan.

There’s a difference. Fear would have me on a chair in the living room if I saw a spider casually strolling across our television like some 8 legged harbinger of doom. And I don’t do that, regardless of what my wife might tell you.

It’s not that I find them terrifying, I just can’t get behind any creature that seems to delight in biting you. A bee will only sting you if provoked. A cockroach is content in the dark. A mouse saw that box of Frosted Mini Wheats you weren’t using and got opportunistic. A spider? A spider will bite you while you’re asleep.

What’s that all about? I get that when we’re both awake, all is fair in love and I’m going to squish you with a rolled up issue of Guideposts magazine. But while I’m sleeping? That’s just a thrill bite. That’s a crime of passion. That spider is biting me not out of necessity but out of love for the game. And that’s just not cool.

Knowing spiders get down like that is part of the reason it was so hard to sleep peacefully the first week I stayed in Costa Rica. I was there for about four weeks during my junior year of college. I was staying with a family that had carved out a small “bedroom” under the stairs. In addition to a blanket that covered a hole in the wall and a parrot that would yell Spanish names at 6AM every morning (Hectorrrrrrr!!!!), there was a tribe of spiders I shared the room with.

The wall directly behind my bed was exposed brick, hastily stacked together. There were two inch gaps between the jumbled bricks and in those gaps a squadron of arachnids had established quite a little society. (Based on their social interactions I would say they were in that pre-empire stage, where there’s one central city located by my pillow and smaller hamlets spread about my ankles.)

Every night I would come home, click the light on and watch them slowly back into the corners of the wall, slightly annoyed that I had disturbed their dark interactions. Then I would cover myself with bug spray, pretend that spiders were affected by bug spray, and then lay in bed, waiting to hear my hairy legged neighbors scamper back out of their hiding holes.

At first it was difficult to sleep with dozens of spiders, but like most things in life, I was able to get used to it. By the end of the trip you could have thrown 100 more spiders in that room and it wouldn’t have fazed me. To tell you the truth, I probably wouldn’t have even noticed. I was so full up on spiders that I had long passed my threshold. I had reached spider saturation. Whether there were 50 spiders in there or 200 spiders didn’t really make a difference.

I was proficient in spiders at that point, in the same way that I was proficient in Spanish, but apparently I’ve lost that numbness to the 8 legged bugs. The other night, while we were having dinner, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a spider crawl across the table toward my daughter. I yelled, or shrieked depending on who you ask, and swatted at it with a napkin.

And then, having protected my family from what was probably a Brown Recluse, Black Widow or simple house spider carrying eight mini switchblades, I started to wonder about that reaction. How could I sleep with 100 spiders but freak out when I saw one on the kitchen table? What happened to me?

What happened to me is the same thing that is happening to me with lust. Back in the day when I was neck deep in porn and sin, I had reached my threshold with lust. I was digesting so many vulgar images, ideas and content that I became immune to a lot of things. An article in GQ called “Cool Things that Hot Girls Wear” wouldn’t have fazed me because it was simply one more spider in a bed already jam packed with spiders. I wouldn’t have batted an eye because I was so desensitized. I was so numb and callus to all things lust that I wouldn’t have even noticed that as possibly something I shouldn’t look at.

But lately, as I’ve actively pursued a life with Christ and worked to eliminate the spiders from my life, I’ve started to notice little things again. Now, when something that years ago would have just been one more spider in a room crowded with spiders, enters my life, I notice it. Like that spider on the kitchen table, it feels out of context and big. It feels like something that doesn’t belong there. And whether that means ripping a cover off of Rolling Stone so I can still enjoy the record reviews without learning the inner workings of Lady GaGa’s mind or realizing I need to apologize to someone after I’ve gossiped, the little things are starting to matter.

I’m not perfect. I’m far, far, far, far from that. There are still areas in my life where I feel like God kicks over a whole nest of spiders I didn’t even know I had and we sit down to talk about it. But of the two ways to walk through life, clear headed and spider conscious or drunk on sin and sleeping with the spiders, I can tell you which one I prefer.

How about you? Are you at a point right now where you’re covered with spiders or are you noticing if a single spider tries to casually stroll across the kitchen table of your heart?

When I’m nervous and meet new people, I tend to read them my resume.

Not literally, I don’t carry it around with me, but I usually find a way to rattle off interesting tidbits about myself.

I did this recently at the Orange Conference. When I went to the blogger lounge I felt kind of insecure and didn’t know what to do. Everyone had their laptop and business cards all over the tables and I had neither. I immediately thought, “Oh yeah, bloggers are supposed to carry laptops not Moleskine notebooks. I’m so dumb.” After a few minutes of standing there like someone that’s eating alone and has forgotten to bring the “don’t feel pity for me I’m reading a book” book, I walked to the Land of a Thousand Hills coffee stand.

I asked if my friend was working at the stand that day and the guys behind the counter said no and then kind of said in a kind way, “And you are?”

I immediately started blabbering about how I had a blog and I once told thousands of people about their coffee and it’s read in all these countries and I’m a special person and look at all my accomplishments, me, me, me, resume, resume, resume. Even as the words were coming out of my mouth I wanted to grab them back, but I couldn’t.

And I find myself doing this more lately as I struggle with the impatience of wanting to be an author and a speaker. The Stuff Christians Like book will come out in March 2010 and I’m speaking at a bunch of conferences this fall so I completely get the foolishness of this thought but it’s still there. It’s a completely dumb thought to have but usually in life it’s not the wise thoughts we have that do the most damage. It’s the dumb ones.

When I pray, when me and God wrestle, there’s a part of me that keeps saying, “How come I only get to spend such a fraction of my day on Stuff Christians Like? How come I feel like I’m bursting with ideas and I’m only getting to write about them an hour a day? How come I’m not a super fantastical mister important Christian writer person right this second God?”

In the midst of those questions, in the midst of being wildly impatient and selfish and arrogant and a million other words that mean “whack,” I feel like God reminded me of a simple question,

“Why do you keep refusing the gift of the desert road?”

That’s kind of a weird question, but it comes out of some verses I’ve written about before. In Exodus 13: 17-18, as the Israelites are leaving Egypt, the Bible says:

When Pharaoh let the people go, God did not lead them on the road through the Philistine country, though that was shorter. For God said, “If they face war, they might change their minds and return to Egypt.” So God led the people around by the desert road toward the Red Sea. The Israelites went up out of Egypt armed for battle.

I love the simplicity of that. God knew that if the Israelites took the short way, if they took what probably seemed like the logical route, they’d face a war they weren’t ready for and would probably willingly return to slavery. So out of love, out a deep, big love for His people, he took them on the desert road.

As an Israelite, having spent decades doing hardcore physical labor and leading the kind of manual labor lifestyle that puts the P90X exercise program to shame, you’d have to be thinking, “What? I’m armed for battle! The desert road? Seriously? Look at this sword, I’ve got skillz! Let’s take the short way and give the Philistines two tickets to the gun show. Hey, I just compared my biceps to a weapon that is still centuries away from being invented, that’s odd.”

OK, maybe they wouldn’t have thought that last sentence, but I promise that they probably felt a little confused at why they were on the desert road and maybe at some point in your own life, you’ve felt that way too. Maybe you’ve felt ready for something and for some reason instead found yourself taking the long way around.

I don’t know what your “thing” is.

Maybe you want to fall in love and get married.

Maybe you’re at a job that doesn’t use your God-given talents and you feel desperate to get out.

Maybe you want to start a ministry.

Maybe you don’t know what your thing is, but you know it’s not what you’re doing right now.

Maybe you want to have kids.

Maybe you want to head out to the mission field overseas.

Your thing, your dream or goal or vision could be a million different things, and when it doesn’t happen, when it takes longer than we want, it’s so easy to get frustrated. To get disappointed, to think that the time delay is because maybe you’re not doing something right. Maybe God is mad at you. Maybe if you were a better Christian things would be happening faster and you wouldn’t be on a desert road.

But what if that’s not right?

What if God loves you too much to send you to war? What if He loves you too much to throw you into situations you’re not ready for?

What if that desert road is a gift?

I still struggle with the desert road concept. I’m not “done” with that idea. But my hope for you and my hope for me is that the next time I find myself on one I’ll pause long enough to ask God this simple question:

“I’m on a desert road, what war are you protecting me from right now because you love me so much?”

We are developing faster, smarter ways to mess up our lives. Thirty years ago, the Internet didn’t exist and no one started off their testimony with the line, “Things were going well until I discovered Internet porn.” Now though, if I had a nickel for every time I heard that I would easily be a Christian Thousandaire and wouldn’t need to start my Stuff Christians Like scented candle line as a way to earn extra cake.

We can download, connect, and social network our lives into the pit in about 4 seconds. We don’t even need a computer to do it, we can be in a meeting on our iPhones having side conversations that are going to wreck our marriages and our lives. And when a friend asked me about this trend, about whether I thought the world was getting worse or better, I was quick to say worse. “We live in a fallen world” I said, and we keep going deeper into levels of fallenness. (See that? Fallenness isn’t even a word and I just flaunted it as if it were. For shame fallen world.)

But if I’m honest, then I have to confess that sometimes I use that as an excuse to not work for positive change. I toss out “fallen world” like some sort of stamp when I don’t want to make the effort to care about a certain cause, or become emotionally involved in a difficult situation.

Crime rate up? We live in a fallen world, there’s nothing you can do.

Hate your job? We live in a fallen world, there’s nothing you can do.

Canada Geese refusing to migrate back because they like the sweet, tender grass of your lawn and prefer your predator free neighborhood instead of the northern tundra, crossing the road at in opportune times regardless of traffic rules, hissing at you when you refuse to feed them salty cracker treats, and constantly reminding you that they are the most entitled bird in the world?
We live in a fallen world, there’s nothing we can do.

School systems crumbling? Recycling not working in your town? Healthcare problems?
We live in a fallen world, there’s nothing you can do.

Hopefully, you’re not like me. Hopefully you see that when God gave us His two greatest commands, love Him and love others as much as we love ourselves, He didn’t say, unless you live in a fallen world. There was no caveat that gave us the freedom to give less than love if the world we’re living in is less than perfect. If anything, a fallen world is a world that needs love the most.

The depths we sink to as a society force us to give even deeper love.

The darker things get, the stronger the need is for brightness.

That we live in a fallen world is not an excuse to give up or not try, it’s a motivation to try even harder. God placed us here, in this time period, because the world needs love like never before. My love, your love, our love. That we live in a fallen world shouldn’t prevent us from living out of God’s love. If anything, it should prove the need for us to be doing that.

And even though that last paragraph felt a little “benefit concerty,” I think it’s true, fallen world or not.