Consecration - Isobel Kuhn

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To every man there openeth
A way and ways and a way.
And the high soul climbs the high way
And the low soul gropes the low
And in between on the misty flats
The rest drift to and fro.
But to every man there openeth
A high way and a low
And every man decideth the way his soul shall go.

- John Oxenham

Those words open Isobel Kuhn's autobiography, By Searching: My Journey through Doubt into Faith. I'd never read any of her work. OMF has a collection of it on sale. I thought I'd 'try before I buy' and so checked out the first volume from OMF's library on the first floor of our building. (In doing so I could enjoy it in a old hardback first edition that nobody had checked in out since the 1970s, which added to the pleasure!)

Written in the 1950s and describing events of the 1920s, it's not surprising that the story is a little dated. It was not hard to find things I could identify with, even so.

The fundamentalist-modernist debate was raging. Isobel was tossed on those waves. An English professor at her West Coast college (the University of British Columbia) planted the seeds of doubt, asserting that no intelligent person could believe in heaven, hell, and the the Bible 'in this enlightened age.' Isobel had never really questioned her faith. But unwilling to be thought a fool, she turned away from God and sought her meaning and satisfaction in 'worldly pleasures.' Then - as now - these had little power to really satisfy. She found herself in the misty flats - "The in-between place... where men walk in the mist telling each other that no one can see these things clearly... life has no end but amusement and no purpose. It was a popular thing to be on the misty flats, you had plenty of company."

After a broken engagement she thought about suicide; what was worth living for? She only hesitated because of the pain it would bring to her parents. That night, a line from Dante came to mind (there's a good English major!) "In His will is our peace."

"Dante believed in God. What if there was a God, after all? If so, I certainly had not been in His will. Maybe that was why I had no peace? An idea struck me. No one was watching to see if I were a fool or not. Sitting there on my bed's edge, I raised both hands heavenward. 'God, if there be a God,' I whispered, for I was not going to believe in what did not exist just to get a mental opiate, 'If You will prove to me that You are, and if You will give me peace, I will give You my whole life. I'll do anything You ask me to do, go where You send me, obey You all my days.' Then I climbed back into bed and pulled the blankets over me."

The rest of the book tells how God did answer her prayers and led her into a life consecrated to him. Consecrated: We don't use that word much, these days. Some of the things it led Isobel to give up are things we would tend to consider harmless, but they were getting in the way of her obeying God and loving others, so I think she did the right thing.

K's Wedding, Friendship

Last weekend my friend K. got married. Several of us from Colorado flew out to Ohio for the event, which was great fun. Sad, too - I couldn't help but crying over my own disappointed hopes and the recognition of just how much the community I was once part of is scattered across the world. Opportunities to spend time with many of my favorite people are rare.

Some of the weddings I've attended in recent years have offered few opportunities to really enjoy the bride and groom and see their personalities shine through, but this was different. S. & I were able to attend not only the wedding and reception but also a bridal shower on the night before the wedding and a less-formal party held AFTER the reception. So there was more interaction. And the couple put quite a bit of effort into things like introductions, through the printed programs, etc.

Plus the groom comes from a country where it's traditional that the reception include long speeches - not just short toasts - starting with the groom. They also do skits, performed by the family and close friends of the bride and groom. Watching the groom's brothers dress up pretending to be K & O 'at the old folks' home' looking through old photo albums and reflecting - with slides - on their life (some history, some prophecy...) or the bride's sisters do a 'little people' skit (where someone else under the table 'does' the hands...) of the bride and groom packing for their honeymoon while talking about their courtship was hilarious.

I met K. about 4 years ago when she went on one of our research projects and did an internship with us. After that she joined our staff, raised support and moved to Colorado. We worked together quite a bit, traveled together, taught together. K. was not only the MVP of our office in quite a few ways, as I see it, but she also became one of my closest friends. Her decision to relocate to pursue her relationship with this guy she has just married was both very exciting and quite painful.

I care about her as a friend, a great deal. Plus I know she also loves and enjoys me. Given that, it would have been appropriate for the two of us to talk a lot in the last year as we've both gone through great upheavals. But we didn't. My fault, really - I pulled away; couldn't bear it.

What is it that makes a friendship close? Partly it's a decision: The makings of a great friendship are not worth much if you don't cultivate the relationship. On the other hand - as in a marriage - it seems like there's not something else there, a fairly strong level of sameness or identification, you can't make it happen.

While friendship - discovered, developed, or both - is one of the things I prize the most, I don't seem to consistently make decisions that reflect that value. I'd like to see that change. K., of course, understands and forgives me for pulling away from her this year. But overall, this is something I want to give over to God and seek his guidance about in days and weeks to come.

Lord, in your mercy, give me close friends, and show me where to start to be a better friend to those I feel close to and maybe to those I don't. I know I've turned away from what might be some of your greatest blessings to me; I'm sorry! Thanks for your mercy and for second chances. May you be glorified in these relationships; may your kingdom, your purposes, come in our friendships; your will be done here as it is in heaven.

Fasting and Feasting / Women in Missions Paper

An article about Muslim fasts and feasts which I wrote for Encountering the World of Islam has been republished by PIONEERS. You should be able to read it online here.

The paper I wrote for the Evangelical Missiological Society a year and a half ago, "Choosing How to Live in a Muslim Context: Case Studies from Missionary Women" (mostly drawing from Through Her Eyes; not much new stuff) was also published in a new volume, Missions in Contexts of Violence, released last weekend at the EMS annual meeting in Minneapolis. Just got a copy. (Sadly, as with many volumes in this series, it is poorly formatted and not well 'poofed.' Some good articles though, if I do say so!)

I'm hopeful that both of these pieces will be used to help equip Christians to engage Muslim cultures with increasing compassion, wisdom, and understanding.

Healthy

It is possible to discover
a new depth of healing and freedom…
to experience the love of God…
to find intimacy with him. – ChangePoint Ministries

“I am the Way, the Truth and the Life…” – Jesus

For many years my home church in Auburn, WA has attracted and served people who were coming out of problems with addiction and abuse. Many recovering alcoholics have found it a safe and refreshing community. We’re pretty ‘into’ things like healing prayer, using spiritual gifts, etc. – at least, for Presbyterians! (My friends in more deeply charismatic circles might say it’s pretty tame stuff and we still have a long way to go!)

It’s been 13 years now since I moved away, and there’s been a lot of turnover. The entire church staff has changed, and most of the people in the church now come from a different town and culture – Enumclaw, not Auburn (the church is in the middle). But I think many of the best things about the church have only gotten better.

A few years back a ministry of personal healing and transformation developed through the church, eventually spinning off into a new organization, ChangePoint. For the last month or so I’ve been carrying around their August newsletter, chewing on one of the articles, by a woman named Yvonne. Here’s part of it:

Do you know anybody you would consider healthy? …is health important to God? What does being healthy mean? Are we healthy, and if so, what is the evidence?

We learn in the Old Testament that God required that sacrifices be without defect. In the New Testament Jesus was offered as a sacrifice for us – a lamb without blemish or defect 1 Peter 1:19). In Romans 12 we are told to offer ourselves as living sacrifices. Psalm 103:3 teaches us our source of health is Jesus who “…forgives all my sins and heals all my diseases.” Our health is a result of Jesus’ sacrifice; our journey as believers is one of learning to live in that reality.

Most definitions of being healthy contain the idea of it being a process of continuous adjustments to the demands of living. A healthy person is able to handle normal levels of stress and to recover from difficult situations. Physical, spiritual, or emotional perfections is not required for us to be considered healthy. Someone who is healthy is someone who is able to change with life’s circumstances. People who walk closely with God know this kind of healthy. They know that God is the source of their ability to adjust.

…Physical health cannot be maintained without a healthy immune system. The same is true for spiritual health. …It is only in intimate ongoing relationship with God that we are protected from the onslaught of the enemy’s attacks against our defenses. ..It requires a deep understanding of who God is, who we are in Christ, and a humbling knowledge of what we’ve been saved from. …When God is at work in a life there will be evidence of physical, spiritual, and emotional transformation. The fruit of healing is revealed as the fruit of the Spirit changes how we look, what we say, and what we do.

I had never really though about spiritual or emotional health in the same terms as physical health – that it could be ‘measured’ by one’s ability to change and respond to change, with a healthy immune system that can resist and recover from attacks. But it rings true, doesn’t it? Not that we want to set up some ideal of the Christian life as being one that doesn’t include sickness or suffering, or that walking with God means not having these things. But so many of our troubles are of our own making – or our own magnifying, at least.

So thankful for the grace of God in all this. He doesn’t say, “You idiot! Why don’t you get up and walk?!” He is gentle, and he is spirit, able to work in our inner being to empower, transform, and renew.

Another friend of mine shared in a recent sermon that he’s been struggling emotionally for the last 6-12 months. He lost some important people in his life – seemed like one right after the other. And he was expecting himself to just get over it, after all, he’s a pastor, shouldn’t he stop moping around? But he couldn’t seem to get past it, couldn’t get over it.

When it was time to take a vacation he went a few days early by himself. He was still miserable – exhausted, but unable to sleep. He went to church, and the preaching was bad and he didn’t like the music and the people were nice but they didn’t really mean it, he could tell. Oh, he knew it was him, not the church – he was in bad shape. It was like he was at the bottom of the well and nobody’s help, or love, could reach him.

One day he was standing on the end of the cliff and tempted to jump off. “You could be with your friends… you wouldn’t hurt anymore,” said the voices. "Brad, do not do this thing," said other voices. He cried out to God. And next thing he knew he was away from the cliff. And overcome by a great weariness. He stumbled his way back to where he was staying, laid down on the bed fully clothed, and slept for the next 18 hours. When he woke, he was no longer at the bottom of the well.

How does God respond to a suffering, confused, or rebellious heart? He notices, he sees it. He doesn’t ignore it. He hears its cries. He listens. And he answers.

Closet

I still have that house fantasy about meriting a master bedroom someday - with the big, walk-in closet and maybe a queen-sized bed!

Meanwhile, though, I'm quite pleased with a recent solution to my closet problem. I put a ban on buying any new clothes until I found a better way to organize and take care of the ones that I had.

Introducing: shirt hangers. I'd long been a fan of multiple-skirt hangers, those that can hold five or six skirts, keeping them visible and relatively unwrinkled without taking up a lot of space. I got something like that for organizing my scarves. But now I have a similar, handy system for my T-shirts. Did you know they made such a thing?

Much better. Now I won't forget what I already have - a good safeguard against over-shopping. No, it is clear to me just how many reddish knit shirts I've acquired... (a rather large collection) as well as easier to figure out which skirts or whatever will go with them.

Now the shelf space I have is primarily filled with things that don't wrinkle, and all but the pants and sweaters are organized in actual bins (a step up from my decade-old cardboard boxes) neatly lining those shelves. Ah....

I'm no Martha Stewart, but I wish I'd tried this long ago!

Living Hope

Praise to God for a Living Hope

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ!

In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade—kept in heaven for you, who through faith are shielded by God's power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time.

In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials.

These have come so that your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.

Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him...

(1 Peter 1:3-8)

Drawing by Megan Noel

More on a Theology of Listening

Two things I found when I Googled 'Theology of Listening.' (Highlighting mine...)

Source: Article by Lloyd Steffan

…Resisting the call of the other to come out of oneself and make oneself available to the other, which is the temptation of self-centered-ness, can itself be countered by performing various activities of openness, none of which is more important than listening.

The ability to listen depends not in the first place on any particular skill or technique, but on a fundamental respect for one’s partner in conversation. Listening is thus a moral act. Listening ...disrupt[s] our comfortable self-images and threatening to undo our everyday experience of ourselves (and others) as familiar and basically unified personalities. Not listening becomes a way of securing ourselves from encounter with the mystery of otherness. Listening exposes us to our own desires not to want to share of ourselves. Listeners are required not only to welcome the strangeness of the other but to risk self-disclosure in the act of listening, for the listener must at some point recognize and then expose to the other his or her own strangeness -- and not only to the other but to one’s own self.

As a college teacher, I often hear colleagues at my own school and at other institutions bemoaning their students' poor communication skills, especially their writing skills. Poor writing, however, is a symptom of a deeper problem: students also have difficulty reading. Many students do not love reading or working at reading and therefore have not learned how to engage a text. Many do not listen to those who would speak to them through written words, which is to say they do not understand that they must approach a text, even one they find disagreeable, with respect and the openness of humility. The reading problem, then, is itself a symptom of a problem with listening. Many students do not know how to listen, even to themselves.

After talking about this deeper problem for a long time, my colleague ... and I developed an experimental course called The Listening Point. ...It used no books. The premise of the course was that the students would be the texts. They were required to engage one another in conversation, to develop listening skills, and to learn to think through their own and one another’s ideas…

Each week, students were given listening assignments, usually requiring meetings of three students. They would meet outside class to discuss an issue: two people would talk while the third would listen and then report to the class what happened in the discussion. Students were continually called on to summarize the main points of someone else’s remarks, to ask critical questions or seek clarifications about ideas they did not understand.

…Several students complained that they got headaches from having to pay attention for the two-hour Monday night class; several others told us that they could not seem to relax after class, and that they kept conversations going into the wee hours.

The final exam was to participate in a conversation about a question previously discussed in the course, selected at random. Students were evaluated not only on how well they listened to each other but on how much they helped the other person clarify and articulate his or her positions. That is, they were finally evaluated on how well they helped another person listen to herself.

This course was eye-opening. Students got to know one another and professors got to know students in new ways. Most students found out that they really were interesting texts; others confronted some serious personal issues, turning the discussions in a therapeutic direction -- an allowable move since clear thinking and self-confrontation are essential to both philosophy and therapy. But what was most important was the development of listening skills.

The first stage of listening required that students simply attend to the other person and hear what the person is saying. That required students to eliminate distractions, to be present to the other person, and to stop interfering with communication by anticipating one’s own response before the other person had even finished speaking. Second, students learned to evaluate critically what they heard. Here the test was to be able to repeat what had been said, to summarize the other person’s position to the other person’s satisfaction, then to seek clarification and offer critical response, usually in the direction of seeing how adequately the speaker’s argument could be defended. Imagination was required at this stage of listening, for students had to consider implications and imagine possible problems that might arise from the other person’s thought; they also had to attune themselves to the other and actually try to see things from the other person’s point of view. The third stage, which we rarely saw but occasionally glimpsed, occurred when persons presented themselves before the other and revealed themselves in a true engagement with the other, sharing not only words but gestures and intentions, and being understood so well that another student might actually volunteer to articulate a position or idea better than did the person offering it -- yet without necessarily agreeing with it.

Students seemed most amazed by how much they disagreed -- something they were not finding out from their other classes or even from their social life. They found that their disagreements were very interesting and not cause for alarm or embarrassment or increased defensiveness.

Also found this: Bonhoeffer on The Ministry of Listening

"Brotherly pastoral care is essentially distinguished from preaching by the fact that, added to to the task of speaking the Word, there is the obligation of listening. There is a kind of listening with half an ear that presumes already to know what the other person has to say. It is an impatient, inattentive listening, that despises the brother and is only waiting for a chance to speak and thus get rid of the other person. This is no fulfillment of our obligation, and it is certain that here to our attitude toward our brother only reflects our relationship to God. It is little wonder that we are no longer capable of the greatest service of listening that God has committed to us, that of hearing our brother's confession, if we refuse to give ear to our brother on lesser subjects." - Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, p.98.