I finished reading book number four on my 2009 reading list: Donald Miller’s Searching for God Knows What. Miller has proved once again that he writes the books and exact statements I wish I were capable of writing. This week I’ll be posting bits of the book I wish I’d written.

The hijacking of the concept of morality began, of course, when we reduced Scripture to formula and a love story to theology, and finally morality to rules. It is a very different thing to break a rule than it is to cheat on a lover… If we think of God’s grace as a technicality, a theological precept, we can disobey without the slightest feeling of guilt…
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In this way, it isn’t only the moralist looking for a feeling of superiority who commits crimes against God, it is also those of us who react by doing what we want, claiming God’s grace. Neither view of morality connects behavior to a relational exchange with Jesus. When I run a stop sign, for example, I am breaking a law against a system of rules, but if I cheat on my wife, I have broken a law against a person. The first is impersonal; the latter is intensely personal.

…the call to morality is delivered through a changed and forgiven heart, a heart regenerated and delivered by Christ.

Morality is the end, not the means. From the outside, people often don’t see this distinction and assume Christians get to heaven by being moral, when the opposite is true: we are moral because Christ has given us heaven.

If we could be more transparent about the motivation behind our morality, I believe we wouldn’t have so many people seeing Christians as a club of hypocrites and judgmental Pharisees. The question is: how do we do that?

I finished reading book number four on my 2009 reading list: Donald Miller’s Searching for God Knows What. Miller has proved once again that he writes the books and exact statements I wish I were capable of writing. This week I’ll be posting bits of the book I wish I’d written.

It seems that we feel we must trust people before we let them know anything remotely vulnerable about us, and to ask for more before trust has been built is to contravene a social etiquette dating back to the fall of man. All this, I suppose, is connected to the fact that our validation seems to always be in question.

And yet it is through this system of defense Christ walks with ease, never seeming to fear taht He would do damage by rummaging around in the tender complexity of a person’s identity. Instead, He goes nearly immediately to our greatest fears, our most injured spaces, and speaks into those places with authority.

Perhaps another argument in favor of radical honesty? Or maybe this is something Jesus was uniquely qualified to do. Makes me wonder where the line is drawn in our striving to be like Christ.

I finished reading book number four on my 2009 reading list: Donald Miller’s Searching for God Knows What. Miller has proved once again that he writes the books and exact statements I wish I were capable of writing. This week I’ll be posting bits of the book I wish I’d written.

Humans, as a species, are constantly, and in every way, comparing themselves to one another, which, given the brief nature of their existence, seems and oddity and, for that matter, a waste. Nevertheless, this is the driving influence behind every human’s social development, their emotional health and sense of joy, and sadly, their greatest tragedies.
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The better basketball team? the alien might question, wondering out loud why twenty thousand people would show up to find out which basketball team was better than the other.
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You are trying to feel right by comparing yourself to others. It is ridiculous. Who told you there was anything wrong with you in the first place? Don’t you know that a human is just a human?
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Listen to the conversations you have for the next week… you’ll probably hear a hidden conversation beneath the real conversation. Stuff like movies and food and people become ideas, and we all are deciding whether we’re on the right or wrong side of these ideas, knowing that if we aren’t on the right side, there is a price to pay.

Here Miller took the perspective of an alien to our world, trying to see the underlying drive of the human psyche from an external perspective. He argues that the driving motivation of most of our actions is to compare ourselves to everyone else, judge others and to find ways to be seen as better than others.

It’s the social food chain. We don’t do much to improve humanity if all we care about is appearing good to those around us. Not to mention the fact that it doesn’t make much sense given, as Miller said, the brevity of our existence and the fact that we are all humans, none better than any other.

I finished reading book number four on my 2009 reading list: Donald Miller’s Searching for God Knows What. Miller has proved once again that he writes the books and exact statements I wish I were capable of writing. This week I’ll be posting bits of the book I wish I’d written.

…Moses, unlike most writers in Scripture, would stop the narrative to break into [poetry], a kind of poetry called parallelism, which is when you say something and then repeat it using different phrasing. [The] way Moses wrote wasn’t unlike the way people who write musicals stop the story every once in a while to break into song.
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The reason Moses would do this… is because there are emotions and situations and tensions that a human being feels in his life but can’t explain. And poetry is a literary tool that has the power to give a person the feeling he isn’t alone in those emotions, that, though there are no words to describe them, somebody understands.
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I wondered if when we take Christian theology out of the context of its narrative, when we ignore the poetry in which it is presented, when we turn it into formulas to help us achieve the American dream, we lose its meaning entirely, and the ideas become fodder for the head but have no impact on the way we live our lives or think about God. This is, perhaps, why people are so hostile toward religion.

A great, albeit indirect, argument for reconciling art and the gospel. Like Schaeffer said, evangelical Christians “have tended to relegate art to the very fringe of life” rather than embrace it as a fundamental tool to help comprehend that which is beyond our words, formulas and theology.

I finished reading book number four on my 2009 reading list: Donald Miller’s Searching for God Knows What. Miller has proved once again that he writes the books and exact statements I wish I were capable of writing. This week I’ll be posting bits of the book I wish I’d written.

I didn’t have a relationship with God; I had a relationship with a system of simple ideas, certain prejudices, and a feeling that I and people who thought as I thought were right.
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If God didn’t answer the serious questions about life, then I didn’t have any responsibility to believe He existed.
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I tell you all this only to say I came back to God. All the complexity about life was begging for an explanation; and me actually being god wasn’t answering very many questions. And so in a way, I left the old god of easy answers… But I left room open for another God, a God who might explain my existence…
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With God… it was as though a thread had been pulled from the fabric to reveal a thread of a different color, a color less me-pleasing, but a color all the same. God was still there. I tried to shake Him, but I couldn’t find a place where He wasn’t.

This series of quotes from a story Miller tells of himself denying God then eventually coming back to Him hits home. The way he describes his thoughts before, during and after all of this remind me so much of myself at certain points in my faith.

There have been several times, especially in the past year, where I was one step away from concluding that the God I thought I knew, the one presented to me my whole life, was shallow and self-contradicting and therefore must not exist. I toed the line of agnosticism (or, as some call it, “polite atheism”) for months.

After much talking and and processing, it became clear that the god I had believed in truly did not exist. What took its place, though, was the one true God. The old god was one built by evangelical ideas that could be broken down into simple explanations, elementary ideas and lists of rules.

What followed was a feeling of contempt against the evangelical church and Western Christian culture as a whole. I felt betrayed and misled, as though what I knew of the Church had intentionally been hiding the truth of a God beyond our ideas and simple explanations in an effort to make Christianity and faith easy to process and digest.

Faith is neither simple nor easy as I once believed; it’s the most difficult thing in the world. While it may seem contradictory, it seems to me that as I have stripped away those empty ideas, the foundations of my faith have become simpler, but have opened up an infinite, complex, and highly unexplainable world of ideas about what it means to know God and to be in relationship with Him.

I wrote a long rant-fest on Buzzgrinder about the Joshua Radin show I went to on Friday, so I am excusing myself from blogging for a day.

Enjoy that little slice of my smart-ass persona. It comes in handy when writing about music.

I just watched the pilot of Lie to Me, a new CSI-esque show about a psychologist that studies “microexpressions” to tell when someone is lying or telling the truth.

The show was suggested to me by a friend because one of the supporting characters practices the idea of radical honesty. However, I was more intrigued after the introduction to the show because everything he was saying sounded familiar.

After a bit of Googling, I realized that the main character’s background was being set up almost exactly the same as the life of Paul Ekman, who got a chapter-long profile in Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink, which I just read recently.

Nothing deep to say; I just thought it was a funny collection of coincidences. The show is fun and interesting and I’m curious to see where it goes. And I really hope they signed off with Ekman and Gladwell about this, because it’s practically plagiarism.

In the continuing saga of “to be wise is to be sad,” financial blogger Ramit Sethi chimes in:

Have you ever noticed how everyone seems to have “the answer” to the healthcare crisis or the economic meltdown? The problem is, they usually don’t see above their own situations to the larger problems. That’s why any one of our opinions is largely irrelevant.
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Everyone’s got an opinion, usually drawn from their own narrow experiences, not seeing the full picture.

This is why product managers know how difficult it is to ask their users what features they want in a product.

It’s why politicians can’t just tactically respond to what people want, but have to show leadership in what they need.

And so, someone else adds to my argument that it’s okay to not care about things you aren’t an expert at. I don’t have too strong an opinion about these financial bailouts and stimulus packages because it is such a complex situation that I can’t imagine any one person could possibly have a good response that will fix the majority of the problem (which is really the best we can hope for). Considering that not even career economists can’t agree on this, my guess is it’s beyond pretty much all of us.

I write about things like this sometimes in hopes that I might encourage others to also not care about things that are beyond their comprehension and, really, to admit that there are things beyond their comprehension. Try it sometime. It’s kind of nice.

I was watching 30 Rock last Thursday. It was yet another episode where Liz Lemon goes on a first date and everything goes terribly wrong. But at the end of the date, instead of running away as fast as he could, her date said (in some form): “What if we just get everything out on the table now? Instead of covering everything up to look good in hopes of scoring the second date, maybe we should just get all of our problems out right now and if, by some stroke of luck, we don’t hate each other by the end of the night, then maybe we’ll know this could actually work.”

That character struck a chord with me by saying that. That general concept of radical honesty is one I think about often. I wonder: Why can’t we tell our friends what’s really going on in our lives? Why doesn’t my coworker just tell me he’s having problems at home so that I not only understand when his fuse is short but I have the opportunity to be a listening ear for him if need be?

And on the flip-side: Why do people have to exaggerate a problem or give excuses when the truth is they just can’t (or — heaven forbid — don’t want to) show up on time or do good quality work?

The truth is that doing this hurts. By being radically honest we run the risk of people taking advantage of our weaknesses. It requires a level of truth that perhaps isn’t achievable by imperfect people such as ourselves. But if we all did it together maybe we would all trust each other a bit more, we’d cooperate better, do better work, live more realistically. (Wow, that sounds cheesy and utopian-ish, doesn’t it?) Certainly there are downsides, but that’s life. Why cover up a downside with another downside by lying?

At my job we’ve started having monthly state-of-the-union type meetings; everyone seems to agree that, while it might be a time sink at times, it helps us see the big picture and know how we fit and understand better what our outlook should be in hard economic times.

A good friend just lost a job due for reasons whose foundations are not very clear to him and that may be faulty. Maybe he’d still have lost the job if those reasons had been stated, but at least he’d know for sure what happened and what he can work on and prevent and watch out for in future work situations.

A friend hasn’t admitted a major hurdle he’s facing in his life right now. I found out by alternate means and it’s explained some of his behavior as of late, though I still wish he’d told me in the first place so I could have acted accordingly in my interactions with him.

I recently read an article about a business man that practices radical honesty and I’m intrigued and kind of want to try it. Anybody else with me? It’s not something I can do alone.

I have been trying to go easy on the computer use over the course of this long weekend, for fear that my laptop keyboard is creating a repetitive stress injury in my left arm, so here is a goat that yells like a man: