• Typically those who are caught in the servant stage of faith are broken people who have acknowledged these aspects of their lives and sought healing and growth. Have you genuinely dealt with your brokenness? Are there personal problems (e.g., anger, sexual or emotional issues, over/under eating, bitterness, a wounded past, continued broken relationships, etc.) standing in between you and an intimate relationship with God and with others? Are there some issues in your life that you really need to face but you are afraid to do so? Let’s be honest, how is your life overall? Is your life in shambles and you have multitudes of secrets and sin? Does your marriage or personal life need work, but you are too proud or afraid to get help because others think you have it all-together and they might not think so highly of you anymore?
• Do you really believe you have it all down pat: your theology, doctrine, who God is, who people are? When someone challenges you on an issue of faith, do you get defensive and do not genuinely listen to them? In conversations like these, do you think the other person is always wrong? After listening to a message or reading a book, do you first and foremost scrutinize what was said and what was wrong about it rather than humbly applying what you learn to your life? Is your relationship with God simply a bunch of head knowledge?
• You might have a lot of Christian friends, but how close do you get? Who knows your secrets and do you let people in? If you had to write down the darkest sins of your life, who know about them? Anyone? Not even your spouse?
• Is the basis of your relationship with God based on what you know, but not what you have experienced? Be honest, do you have a growing relationship with God or do you just know a lot about him? Perhaps you have grown up in the church, but never made your faith your own? Do you know a lot about the Bible, but there’s not much of connection in terms of experience and relationship with him? Is your relationship with God just based on a lot of knowledge? Does Jesus know you?
• Do you feel close to God when you are obeying all the rules for your life, but when you break them, he feels distant? Does your relationship with God live or die by how you live day-to-day? When you feel like you live “sin-free” for a day (no one does by the way), do you feel closer to God? When you have a rough day and are confronted by your sin, does God then seem distant?
• Are you a hard person to be with because you put a lot of do’s and don’ts on others? Does everything have to be controlled? And with that, is anger and rage always simmering just underneath the surface toward others? How easy are you to be with? Are you fun to be with or is it a chore to hang out with you? When you look back at your life and your friendships is there a long string of broken relationships. More often than not, do the people closest to you think that you are never satisfied? That when they are with you, that you always have to be in control and do everything “your way?”
• Often are closest relationships reveal the intimacy of our relationship with God. As Jesus said, if you can’t do earthly things however would you expect to be able to do heavenly things. (John 3:12) How close are you to your spouse in your marriage and how strong is that relationship? If we asked your children (teenagers and adult) this question how would they respond: how close are you with them to the point that they want to spend time with you—that they truly enjoy your company and don’t spend time with you just out of obligation? Do you genuinely love them on a regular basis or is the relationship held up just by control, manipulation and obligation?
• Have you become the Savior for other people? Do you think that you can help everyone around you? Do you spend just as much time working on your own life as you do helping others?
• Really think about this next question—God might love you, but does He like you? When you picture him, is he simply a stern and mean father or does he genuinely care about you and genuinely likes you?
• Those caught in the servant stage of faith do not typically have an intimate relationship with God (they base their faith on what they do) and therefore worship is uncomfortable for them. Do you genuinely like to worship or does it most of the time make you uncomfortable? Do you worship when no one is watching and sing on your own (on the way to work, in the shower, etc.)? Could you do without worship during a church service? Do you really enter into the worship experience or are you most of the time simply going through the motions? Are you just singing words or truly singing and worshipping God?
• Do you really know God’s love personally? Is Jesus your Lord, but to call him your friend would be totally alien to you? Does it seem sacrilegious to you that you would call Jesus your friend?

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Poetry today is a lost art and one which we need to refind. Back in the beginning of the last century, some of the most famous and popular writers were poets and we need to recapture this art and make it common place again.

E.E. Cummings is probably my favorite poet. Ever since I bought his Complete Poems back in 1987 his words, which are playful and sometimes misaligned, have always captured what lyrical and profound writing could become.

May his words inspire you to enjoy this day.

i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and love and wings;and of the gay
great happening ilimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any — lifted from the no
of all nothing — human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

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‘The law of Jehovah is perfect, restoring the soul.’ (Psa. 19:7). Most laws condemn the soul and pronounce sentence. The result of the law of my God is perfect. It condemns but forgives. It restores—more than abundantly—what it takes away. Jim Elliot

If you live in Chicago, you know that you naturally spend a lot of time in your car because of traffic and getting from Point A to Point B. On these stop-and-go drives, I usually listened to Chicago sports radio. The Bulls were winning championships left and right and it was fun listening to the banter about the pride and joy of our city.  If you know me, you know that I am not a regular listener to Christian radio or television. However, that night for some reason I turned the dial to some Christian radio station being piped in from one of the suburbs. That night driving down Roosevelt Avenue lonely and sad, I inadvertently came across Bob George’s People to People radio program. If you have ever listened to Bob George or read his books you know that he talks about one thing over and over at great length—God’s grace. For the first time, as I was listening to his words, God began showing me a grace I had not seen before—one that I actually began to experience. In that car ride, listening to his Southern twang talk about acceptance, it opened up my eyes like never before. It was as if Jesus mixed some mud together, rubbed it on my eyes and then commanded me to open them. A couple of days later I grabbed Bob George’s book Growing in Grace off the bookshelf at a store and took it home. I read it in one sitting and in that time came across this passage below:

Now realize that I am talking about ourselves being acceptable to God, not necessarily our actions. In my identity I am eternally acceptable to Him, but that doesn’t mean that everything I do is all right. He may put His arm around me, so to speak, and show me the truth about something in my life that is out of line: an attitude, action, or habit. Why? So He can change my attitude that is out of line, resulting in a change of action. But at no time is His acceptance of me ever in question.

But at no time is His acceptance of me ever in question. This was one of the missing pieces for me. I knew something like this in concept, but had yet to experience it. Now I began to do that or as the psychologists term, I began to internalize this truth.

During that period in my life, Jesus was also saying that some significant changes needed to occur in my life so that I could really begin to understand that freedom he desired for me. At that point, I made a commitment to not date anyone, even casually. Likewise, I decided I needed to pursue friendships with men, which for the most part was a bit of a challenge for me. Hanging out with women even from a young age was easier for me and for the most part, I enjoyed their company more than hanging out with the guys. However, I began to see that this on some level was contributing to my problem with having healthy relationships with women. With this decision, not until years later did I realize that in this time of healing for me, as I was pursing my relationship with God, I was also pursuing healing in terms of what it meant to be a man. I also decided to remove myself from any ministry context and began reading voraciously books on sexual healing. Specifically, the works of Walter Trobisch had a tremendous influence on me; his books speak openly about sexual issues from a Christian perspective and address certain issues that most books written at that time wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole.  Jesus, no different than with Peter, had flipped my world upside down and it was an amazingly lonely, but healing time in my life. In essence, with all that he was doing in my life, he was saying that I had all this focus on ministering to others, but that I had gotten the cart before the horse, and that first, he needed to minister to me. Something, for the most part, I had never allowed him to do.

Ironically, at the end of the day, the main way in which Jesus dealt with me in this healing in terms of all these relational and sexual issues was that he simply forgave me and just as importantly, taught me how to forgive myself. Strangely, these were the two key components that began to change my behavior. Yes, I was reading books, seeking counsel, and doing a myriad of other things to attempt to bring change to my life, but it was these two pieces that began to transform me—His forgiveness and my own forgiveness toward myself. I, for the first time in my life, had truly experienced forgiveness beyond just knowing it in text-book fashion and in word only.

In particular, I can remember one day when I was reading the Bible, God through His words basically said, Buddy, there are a lot of other areas of your life that you pay little attention to that need even more change than just this area of lust. I remember that moment because it struck me that I began to see that in some ways the sin of pride was just as damaging to myself and to others as what my sexual sin could be. This was a freeing moment for me. It made me realize how focused I was on this one area of my life, but was neglecting so many others. Again, God was teaching me in a way only that he could, that I was a sinner through and through to the very core. Through this relinquishment, not only did I begin to heal, but I miraculously began to change. The beauty of this time, now that I look back at it now, was that even though I was in this completely broken state, Jesus was extremely patient with me and slowly, but surely was in the process of changing me for the better.

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Bought this on vinyl two weeks ago by Explosions in the Sky.  The song title is Be Comfortable, Creature.

It’s worth your time.

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After loss of identity, the most potent modern terror, is loss of sexuality. Jeanette Winterson

 I had my own experience in which I had lived a servant too long. Ironically, just as my move from believer to servant began in a car ride, in a way, so did my transformation to becoming a friend to Jesus. As I have said before, for about ten years I lived in Chicago. It is a city I deeply love with my Chicago Cubs (yes, I am a glutton for punishment), the lakeshore, its unique architecture, and deep-dish pizza. While living there a couple of years after college, I was now a couple years in my first “official” job. I worked for a large catalog company as a print and paper buyer and loved my job with all of its perks. I often ate at some of the best restaurants, got to see Michael Jordan play on many occasions, and because of my position, I was schmoozed on a regular basis by the other companies that I worked with on the different projects I oversaw.

However, a couple of negative things were also happening, especially in my relationship with God and in my personal life. First, I was becoming callous in my faith and jaded. I had been a Christian for some years, had moved into various places of leadership and was beginning to like that spotlight. In my early years as a Christian I threw myself into many endeavors and slowly but surely was getting burned out and basically, becoming tired of being a Christian. I was leading Bible studies; mentoring a couple of rambunctious seventh graders through Big Brothers; trying to get off the ground a college ministry at the school I graduated from; attending not one, but three different churches. You name it, I was doing it. The problem was…I also trying to keep up appearances, because what once seemingly was a thriving faith had deteriorated. And here was the big problem—the problem was that if you knew me then you would have never known that by looking at all that I was doing. You would have thought I was this great guy who had it all together, serving God and serving others. How do I know this? Because at that time so many around me told me this in not so many words. I had become a very gifted actor and was fit to be the next Robert De Niro.

And underneath all of this, issues from my past had surfaced and secret sins began to pile up. On the surface everything looked like it was in working order, but inside I was hollow and there were so many problems in my life that I wasn’t recognizing. First, I was beginning to grow an anger within myself that seemingly just showed up one day. I was hard to please. I was putting high expectations on others, but rarely myself. While up to that point in my life, anger had never really been a struggle or problem, however, now inside I was seething. I often would walk around just a bundle of annoyance and chagrin. I almost never showed this to others, but inside anger had taken a foothold in my life. Second, I had become very arrogant and prideful. I would go to church and not listen to the sermon for self-reflection, but to critique what was being spoken. With others, when someone would have an opinion on some given issue, I often had to disagree. Being a Christian had turned into for me an intellectual exercise and not a spiritual one. That’s not how you interpret that passage! Boy, was that sermon boring! That’s not what Jesus meant when he said “Love your enemies!” Because I had been a Christian for some years, I was slowly becoming a know-it-all and if someone disagreed with me, I could almost in every occasion convince them otherwise. At that time, I learned this—sadly, rarely do people ask tough questions of their leaders.

To top this off, while I had lots of friends, I was distancing myself from them—I carefully hid who I was becoming and where I was struggling. In particular, there was one part of my life which was unraveling and was revealing my brokenness at its deepest levels—its roots, which were nearly twenty years old. Through various experiences in my childhood that had happened to me, some which we would now name as sexual abuse, my sexuality had become an intricate and acute wounded part of me. Like so many that I have met in my practice and in my role as a pastor, my sexuality had been opened up way before it should have been, and with this, the damage that was done was coming to bear. Over the years, in particular starting in my late teenage years, but especially in my early twenties, I was slowly developing a dependency on unhealthy relationships, specifically those that turned sexual.

This brokenness originated at some of my first memories. I became promiscuous at an early age, in part because of these childhood experiences that I mentioned earlier. Likewise, while in middle school, the door had been abruptly slammed open with some incidents with a high school girl who lived down the street and who was a couple of years my senior. We would sneak away to secret places during the summer nights of my eighth grade year and she opened up a world to me that was intoxicating and dangerously mysterious. As I have told many, pornography for the most part has never been a strong urge for me, primarily because of these early experiences. I did not yearn for virtual experiences; I wanted the ones that had flesh and warmth associated with them. These sexual cravings took hold of me at a very early age and would follow for me years to come.

Toward the end of my high school years, this solidified in an even more damaging way—in my freshman year in college, a woman in her twenties who was very “experienced,” entirely opened up that part of my life introducing me to a world which I had not quite imagined. Up to that point, for all intents and purposes, I had been dabbling with sex and in this relationship I gave in full blown to my desires. And of course, by no means was I an innocent bystander in all of this—I was enthralled with this lifestyle and at that same time, could not see its dangers.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, in my early twenties, I was out of control and did not have the capacity, knowledge or courage to stop what I was doing. I had recently become a Christian, but this transformation had yet to invade my relationships with women. While I might have been having lots of sex, in truth, I was beginning to lose my sexuality and in some way, was losing my capacity to love a woman. I wouldn’t of course understand this for years to come, but the ground work had been laid. In these years, I was in many relationships with women, most were just based on having both of our sexual needs met. There were a handful of Saturday mornings that I would awaken next to a woman at my side and I would lay there in a tremendous amount of guilt and shame because of this dual life I was living. The wounds from my sexual past had finally caught up with me, but I did not know what to do.

At about age twenty three, I realized I had to somehow try to get things in respectable order. The problem was—I did all this on my own, trying to piece together something that would bring some semblance of well-being. For the next couple of years, I managed to keep things together, but only barely. It was at this point where I re-committed my life to God which I detailed in a previous post. I seriously dated a couple of women and was trying to take my faith more seriously as well. With the couple of committed relationships that I did have in those years, on the surface they seemed like they were healthy relationships, but in reality, we were two people who had not wrestled with the demons of our past and present. Often in these relationships, I was the overly dependent one and in reality these relationships were becoming a substitute for my relationship with God. I knew I had a serious problem when one Sunday I was standing next to my girlfriend at church and in seeing her in worship; I became jealous of her love toward God. Can you imagine that? I was jealous of God! I remember feeling that emotion and thinking he was going to strike me dead at that very instance. At that point, I knew things were really bad and that what I was trying to do was bringing very little healing to my life.

It all culminated one night at my girlfriend’s apartment, in which, in too many words, we had another great argument about our relationship. That evening, we both decided to mutually break things off and that was the beginning for me in pursuing my own healing and relinquishing my craving for women to make me happy and whole. Relieved and devastated at the same time, that evening as I was driving home in my car, I heard a whisper of a voice, which to paraphrase, basically said, Dude, you need to get some help. Jesus was crying out for me to pursue healing instead of relationships, and soon I was about to finally relent. Remarkably, Jesus was going to begin to heal me in a way that was about as strange as when he used mud and spit to make a blind man see.

Next time, I will tell you how he did that…

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Doubting Thomas (2001), Mixed media on paper

(Click to enlarge)

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Tree-Lit Dawn (2013), Watercolor on paper

(Click to enlarge)

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venetian silence
abreast
a blink
and undressed open
beside over under
furrowed whisper
choir certain
a vestment kiss
piece by piece

uprooted
savor of coral
of autumn reach
and another
gathered or beheld
imperfect
sidestep into twist
arisen touch
woven and
kept

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[To have faith in Christ] means, of course, trying to do all that He says. There would be no sense in saying you trusted a person if you would not take his advice. Thus if you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way. Not doing these things in order to be saved, but because He has begun to save you already. Not hoping to get to Heaven as a reward for your actions, but inevitably wanting to act in a certain way because a first faint gleam of Heaven is already inside you.

C.S. Lewis

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