Things I Have Learned Not to Fear

When I was a young Christian in charismatic evangelicalism (Assemblies of God, followed by Maranatha Campus Ministries), 2 Timothy 2:7 was frequently preached:

"For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and love, and a sound mind."

Other verses emphasized the point:

"For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption. . . "  Romans 8:15.

"There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment.  He that feareth is not made perfect in love."  1 John 4:18.

"You are children of God and have victory over the devil," the pastors told us.  "Be bold as a lion, be strong and courageous!"  (Proverbs 28:1 and Joshua 1:6)  We would never have described ourselves as afraid of the world, or as living in fear of anything at all.

How, then, did I learn to be afraid of so many people, so many things?  Back then I would have said, "Oh, no!  I'm not afraid of these things.  But I know enough to be cautious.  There are things out there that God just doesn't want Christians involved in!"  Looking back, however, at myself and my young Christian friends-- at the strength of our visceral reactions against certain things-- I have to say that, no matter how we denied it, what we'd been taught to do was to be afraid. 

So later-- after I married a man who, though in the same church, had never bought into many of its ideas; after I began to live more in the greater community of my town than in an encapsulated Christian community where everyone I knew had the same beliefs as me; after family members I loved and respected showed no ill effects from things I'd been taught were roads to destruction and apostacy-- that was when I began to question if these fears were actually valid, or born out of ignorance.

The result is this list.  Here are some things I've learned not to fear.

Non-Evangelical Christians.

I thought that every Christian who didn't go to the kind of church I went to, was a Christian in name only.  They didn't believe Christ was the Son of God.  They didn't believe He had died for our sins and risen from the dead. And because they didn't believe these things, if I fellowshipped (Christianese for "hung out") with them, I would find myself doubting these things too, and I could even lose my faith. So I talked only to other evangelicals, and learned very little about other branches of Christianity.

Since then I have found that, though there are some Christians who don't believe in an actual resurrection, there are tons of non-evangelical Christians-- Eastern orthodox, Catholic and Protestant-- who don't differ from evangelicals much at all on these most basic issues of the faith.  And even those who do differ are usually kind, warm, caring people-- people who, it seems, often take the New Testament's actual teachings about things like caring for the poor, far more seriously than most evangelicals do.  Who is trusting Jesus more, following Jesus more closely?  Only Jesus Himself knows, and it's none of my business.  That's what He told Peter in John 21:22: "If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee?  Follow thou me."

Atheists.

I thought atheists would do anything to get a Christian to stop believing, and that atheists, having no foundation for morality, just did whatever they wanted.  But actually, most atheists are not interested in divesting religious people of their faith.  A few are, but atheists by and large just want Christians to not try to convert them.  They don't want Christians to impose their beliefs on others, and they are happy to return the favor.  Contrary to what I was taught, atheists usually have strong ethical and moral values and strive to be true to them-- truer, sometimes, than Christians do when they think a little prayer of repentance will automatically undo any damage they have caused.

Public Schools.

The purpose of religious schools are to impart their religious tradition to children along with the ABC's and addition and subtraction.  Many Christians think public schools are the same-- that their purpose is to impart "secular humanism" as a sort of quasi-religion to vulnerable young people who don't know any better than to imbibe it.  When the circumstances of my life resulted in the necessity of sending my own children to public school, I was very afraid of this.  I remember going to my first Curriculum Night (where the principal and teachers imparted to us parents what our children were going to be taught that year) with deep suspicion.  What anti-Christian teachings and values were going to be imparted to my helpless kindergartner?

None, it turned out.  The public school system and its teachers were mostly concerned with teaching my kid what she needed to know without getting involved in controversies and without getting sued!  This meant that yes, she was going to learn about evolution when she got older, but she was not going to be taught that evolution replaced faith or that there was no need for God.  And both my kids were going to learn something that I decided I approved of very much:  empathy and tolerance for others who were different from themselves.  This was something that had not been emphasized when I myself was in public school, but it was apparently a big part of these schools' new anti-bullying program.

I still had scars from being bullied myself.  If the school was going to strongly discourage bullying and strongly encourage empathy and tolerance, I didn't care if it was a public school or not.  If it was strong on academics (this system was), if the teachers were dedicated and cared about kids (they did), and if my kids were going to learn to treat others as they themselves wanted to be treated (hmm, doesn't exactly sound anti-Christian, does it?), I was all for it.

Secular Music (Especially Rock-n-Roll).

Yes, I really had come to believe that listening to any music with a rock beat that wasn't about God or Jesus, was a slippery slope towards licentiousness, lukewarm faith, and even apostacy.  In fact, even Christian music was suspect if it had a rock beat, and any music with lyrics was suspect if the lyrics weren't about Jesus.  I remember when Christian singer Amy Grant was declared to have left the fold because she recorded a few songs that weren't about God and which were picked up by secular radio stations.  No more listening to Amy Grant!

Now I wonder what on earth I was thinking.  There is a Protestant doctrine called "common grace" which says that all good things are from God, not just those things that are outwardly Christian.  God's grace is everywhere, and nothing good is to be feared.  I still don't listen to music that contains obscenities or promotes misogyny, racism, violence, etc.-- but I am very much uplifted by a lot of popular music today.

Halloween.

When I became a Christian, Halloween was just becoming anathema (an unholy thing) in Christian circles.  A well-known Christian comedian had-- falsely, it turned out-- confessed that he was once a Satanist high priest and that Halloween (which did actually come from pagan roots) was Satan's high holy day.  Letting your kid dress up as Mickey Mouse and ask for candy at your neighbor's front doors was tantamount to letting Satan walk in your front door.  Harvest festivals at local churches were the approved non-Halloween activity for the righteous, so you could be away from home while the antichrist holiday activities were in full swing.  Costumes were permitted at these harvest festivals so long as no witches, ghosts, zombies, vampires, ax murderers or any other evil and/or supernatural costume was worn.

It turns out that Halloween's roots aren't any more pagan than those of any Christian holiday.  The early Roman church deliberately placed its feast days on the days of pagan holidays in order to give the pagans a Christian way to celebrate the same holidays they were already used to.  Carving pumpkins and dressing in costumes certainly isn't inherently evil, any more than bringing a pine tree into your house and decorating it is inherently evil (I know some Christians are still against celebrating Christmas, either, but really, didn't God create the pine tree?).

Nowadays I think giving candy to people who come to your door and ask for it, seems to work rather well as a festive observance of Christ's words, "Give to everyone who asks of you."  Luke 6:30.  And making a game of things that frighten us is a very good way of coping with fear.  It used to be called "whistling in the dark," and I know of no better way to do this than by turning death into something to laugh at, one day out of every year.

Democrats.

Good Christians are supposed to be Republicans, right?  It's the Republican party which has embraced biblical values, while Democrats are only interested in increasing the power of the inherently corrupt State.  That's what I used to think until I actually talked to real Democrats and read real articles written by them.  Lately, too, it's been kind of eye-opening to listen to what real Republicans have been espousing.  A lot of it doesn't sound anything like what Jesus taught.

This year I left the Republican party, re-registered as an Independent, read the book Left, Right and Christ by Lisa Sharon Harper and D.C. Innes, and let go of my political biases once and for all.  So far I've felt no ill effects.

Feminism.

Feminists are ruining our country and destroying our men!  Aren't they?  Turns out that feminism is simply the theory of the political, economic and social equality of the sexes, according to the dictionary, or "the radical notion that women are human beings," according to feminist Cheris Kramarae.  Certainly, there are some radical feminists that practice sexism against men, but most feminism is for men, advocating for men's release from gender stereotypes that hurt them just as much as gender stereotypes hurt women.  I happen to think men and women should be functionally equal in every area of life-- and that makes me a feminist, even though that is a bad word in many Christian circles.

I guess I'll have to get used to being called names for standing up for what I believe in.  Wait a minute-- as a Christian, I think I'm supposed to already be prepared for that, right?

People who are LGBT.

Many Christians will tell you that we are supposed to "hate the sin, love the sinner," but what I discovered in myself, much to my dismay, was that I was really "hating the sin, fearing the sinner," and I needed to repent.  Actually meeting , talking to, listening to and deciding to love real people who are gay, lesbian, bi-sexual or transgender-- and finding out they are not monsters with an agenda to take over our nation and recruit our children-- was a huge step in shedding my homophobia.  Because that's what it was, and denying it never changed anything.

Other Religions.

This was probably the biggest fear that I walked away from.  So many Christians believe that the only reason to learn anything about other religions is for apologetic purposes, so that we can learn how to argue against their beliefs.  Admit the possibility that there might be any wisdom, truth or guidance to be had from people of other faiths?  Might as well just go ahead and deny Christ and get it over with.  Your Christian friends will be praying for you.

Imagine my amazement when I found that Buddha, Confuscius and the Tao actually said some of the same things Jesus Himself taught. That Islam's concept of submission to God isn't really different than that of Christian surrender.   Sure, there are differences in the major religions, and I'm sticking to Christianity as my own faith-- but if common grace is real, then truth is truth wherever we find it.

I still believe in what Christ said:  "I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father but through me."  John 14:6.  But I do notice that He never said, "There is no truth to be found anywhere but in the Scriptures," or "Nothing that any non-follower of Mine tells you has any value."  In fact, in Acts 17:22-34, Paul commends the pagans in Athens for being "very religious in all aspects," even to the point where they had raised an altar with the inscription "To an Unknown God." Paul was not afraid of the Athenian's religion, even though he'd been a devout Jew all his life.  He related to them first through their own faith and did not condemn them.

I don't have all the answers as to how God deals with people of other faiths than my own.  But I must believe that when Jesus said, "If I be lifted up from the earth, I will draw all men unto me," He indeed meant "all."  I am not a Calvinist.  I don't believe in a limited Atonement.  I believe people can resist being drawn, but I cannot believe that God chooses certain people to never even have a chance.  So if Christ is drawing all peoples to Himself, then who am I to tell him how He's supposed to do that?


So those are most of the things I've learned not to fear.

There are still quite a few things that I fear.  Poverty.  Drowning.  Earthquakes.  People breaking into my house.  Spiders.  ElfQuest never getting made into a movie.

But I like to think that more of my fears nowadays are of things that actually can hurt me.  I feel like I may finally be learning to really live the verse I used to think I was following:

"There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment.  He that feareth is not made perfect in love."

Someday I hope to be made perfect in love.  Till then-- I promise to try not to be afraid of you just because you're different from me.

Why I Hate "That's So 30 Seconds Ago"

You've probably all seen the commercials; I don't even remember which cell phone company airs them.  I wouldn't mention the name even if I could remember, because I might have to pay royalties to someone or other-- so I'll describe them as generically as possible.   Somebody in the commercial is using their new, totally top-of-the-line SuperAwesomePhone, and when someone else receives a news feed this SuperAwesome user has already seen, he or she sneers, "That's so 30 seconds ago," or some other number that indicates how utterly more Cool it is to be that many seconds ahead of the dweebs who don't have the product.

Whereupon, instead of staring in shock at the utter rudeness of dismissing their news with "that's so 30 seconds ago," the recipient of the rudeness smiles wistfully, obviously secretly planning to go out and get a phone just like that tomorrow, or the next day at the latest.

I hate these commercials.  They seem to me to encapsulate much of what's wrong with our culture.  I'm old enough to start being  curmudgeonly about things like this, so here's a list of my gripes.

First, how exactly is my life impoverished by receiving a bit of information 30 seconds later than I would have received it with a SuperAwesome phone?  If I had that extra 30 seconds of knowledge, would I be able to alter my reality so that in some new universe I'll be mind-blowingly happier than I would be without that 30 seconds?  Do we really need to know things 30 seconds faster today than we knew them yesterday, or last week?  Why?

Today's culture is all about frantic speed, at the expense of patience, tranquility and the care it takes to make things that will last.  We rush from one event to the next, from one piece of technology to the next, from one relationship to the next.  When do we breathe?  Have we forgotten how?   And whatever happened to building things that will endure the tests of time?

Second, keeping up with the Joneses used to mean occasionally eyeing the cars in one another's driveways or wishing we could go on a trip to Hawaii like the neighbors did last year.  But now it seems that one-up-manship has become a way of life.  Commercials capitalize on our desires to be better than everyone around us, until we view every purchase as a win or a loss in a huge competition.  "The one who dies with the most stuff, wins,"  is replaced by, "The one who dies with a life full of the most constantly updated stuff, wins."   Why do we have to compete at all?  Does this really make us better, in any sense, than those who "lose"?  And how much new stuff do we really need to be happy?   Are we miserable creatures and to be pitied, if we don't have the very latest "app"?

Third, rudeness seems to have become a way of life.  No one really notices any more the disrespectful, dismissive things we say to other people, or about people behind their backs.  When a friend comes running to us with a piece of news that is important enough to them to want to impart it, how are we justified in shutting them down with a sneering, "Oh, I already know all about it!"  Wouldn't kindness alone lead a person to at least pretend they didn't know, so that their friend can have the pleasure of imparting it?  But apparently it's now funny to watch someone silence someone else with superior, 30-seconds-earlier knowledge.  Maybe we ourselves wouldn't be so rude to a friend's face.  But what about what we're thinking inside?  It's normal in our culture to write people off as losers if they don't measure up to standards imparted to us by commercials like these.  Do we have to own the very latest gadget to be respected?  Why?

Finally, updates to technology come so fast that it's impossible to become comfortable using a gadget, an operating system, or even an app.  By the time you've learned everything you can do with it, it's already obsolete.  Even to write this post today, I had to upload a new Internet browser, because someone at Google decided I needed an upgrade to Blogger whether I wanted one or not-- and the new Blogger won't work with my usual browser.  I'm at the mercy of upgrades.  I have to use the new stuff even if I was perfectly happy with the old.  Whatever happened to "If it ain't broke, don't fix it"?   But all these tech companies apparently know better than I do what I actually want or need-- and I get dragged behind, trying to catch up, and wishing I could just go along comfortably the way I did before, until I'm ready to change.

Jesus said, "Be on your guard against every form of greed, for not even when one has an abundance does life consist of possessions."  Luke 12:15.  I hope I'm not sounding too preachy or negative-- but these are frustrations I've been wanting to express, and it's my blog, so no one can stop me!

In the frenetic pursuit of SuperAwesomeness there is neither peace nor love, nor even joy.  And yet the SuperAwesome cell phone company, and thousands of other companies like it, bombard us every hour or so with the message that what we really need is none of these.  We need to run out and buy.

I for one am sick of the message.

Christmas

This time of year I get really busy. There’s shopping to do, holiday cooking and baking, Christmas cards, gifts to wrap and ship, and of course the exactly right Christmas tree (always a Douglas fir at our house) must be found and cut down at a U-cut tree farm by the whole family. I love living in the Pacific Northwest, where Christmas trees are grown for the whole country. It means we can cut our own fresh tree every year without paying a fortune.

Sometimes I long for the days when I was a kid, with nothing to do at Christmas but wait for it to come. But I still love Christmas. Sitting in the dark just looking at the sparkling tree glistening with tinsel and colored lights, my husband’s arm around me as we listen to carols on the stereo, fills me with that indescribable glow that’s one part anticipation, one part family warmth, one part a sense of peace and one part chocolate chip cookies.

I remember how magic Christmas was when I was little and believed Santa was going to come down the chimney. I always left some cookies out for him, plus a little treat for his reindeer too. When I stopped believing in Santa, there were some years when Christmas felt-- well, empty. It was fun getting gifts and all, but when Christmas had been magic, it was a real let-down when suddenly it wasn’t anymore. The wonder was gone, and with it, a lot of the joy.

I never said “Bah! Humbug!” But deep in my heart, part of me said, “Ho, hum.” All the presents were-- well, when it came right down to it, they were just more stuff. And Christmas was a fun day, but still it was just another day. The rest of me convinced myself to be happy with my gifts and grateful to be with my family; but there was this disappointment. Why did I have to grow up and lose the magic and wonder?

I shared earlier, on my birthday post, how I became a Christian at the age of 15. One of the most amazing things about that was how the next year at Christmas, the magic was back. And the wonder was stronger than ever. It’s hard to put into words what Christmas has been for me since, and is for me now.

When the lights go out, and the tree is twinkling in the dark-- or when I go outside and stare up at the frosty stars in the chilly night sky-- I think about the light of the world coming to the world, shining in the darkness, and the darkness not overcoming it. “And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger.” That son was the Word, who was with God and who was God, and who was in the beginning with God. How could the Source and Foundation of all being become one of us? How could the bright center of the universe live and walk and breathe and die here with us? It’s astonishing, really, in ways I can hardly express.

But I like to think that for one instant that night, the world was silent in breathless amazement-- and then a baby's cry rang out over the roofs of Bethlehem.

Christmas has a weight and depth in my mind and heart that it didn’t have even when I was a child-- for the story of the baby Jesus was to me then just a pretty tale and a lovely song my mother sang to me. Now it’s more than magic-- it’s a miracle, and it is recreated every year by the sparkle of lights, the smell of pine, the taste of cookies, and the anticipatory gleam of those shiny packages that I know will make me happy watching my loved ones opening them-- and my loved ones happy watching me.

This is my last post till after the big day. I’ve got lots and lots still to do. But I hope that however you celebrate Christmas, and even if you don’t celebrate it at all, you will feel a little bit of “peace on earth, good will towards men” as the season turns from darkness back to light.

Merry Christmas. Or Happy Holidays. Greetings of the Season. Whatever it is for you, be blessed this holy week.

Forests

This is the last of my introductory posts, which are about my foundations: what makes me who I am. They wouldn’t be complete unless I talked a little bit about the woods and mountains.

I was raised in the Rocky Mountains, in a house surrounded by pines. I live in the Pacific Northwest now, and I find its softer, greener mountains just as beautiful, in a different way. I love the beaches here too-- their grassy white dunes, and the trees that sometimes grow almost down to the sand. And I love the wetlands, with their cattails and cool, still waters, and the smaller trees that thrive with their roots wet nearly year-round. But it’s the mountain forests that call to me.

I remember my last visit to my favorite woods-- a mix of evergreen and leafy trees, with bark dust and needles, flowers and ferns, covering the rising ground. The air was warm that day, and heavy with the morning's rainfall, the sky a brilliant blue. I left my car and stepped under the trees. The forest, familiar but never quite expected, surrounded me like friendship. I placed a hand on a moss-covered trunk, feeling the rough, wet bark under my palm, my ears filled with birdsong and the humming of insects.

The path curved over a low hill. I stood at the top, feeling the presence of the trees. I passed through a grassy oak savannah, and then back under the pines, which gathered thick and dark around me. I shivered a little with pure pleasure as a squirrel ran across a branch over my head, and I turned back towards my car.

The woods are where I belong: the place I lived before I could talk; the place I called home before I even knew the word for home. I have not been able to live there for years, but the forest, to me, is the most real place on earth.

Every day I drive to the office, spending the hours with phones and fax machines and endless paper. Every evening I return to the four walls of my house, to television sets and video games and kids asking for help with homework. But when I can find time to return to the forest, when I take a deep breath of moist woodland air and feel the bark dust beneath my feet-- it is then that I think, "This is real life. This was here before I came and will be here when I'm gone.” My life falls into perspective in the shadow of the pines, in the silence that breathes behind the hills.

Whenever I’m troubled, or stressed, it’s under the trees that I find my center again. The forest is where I find it easiest to find God. And I find it impossible to doubt God there. The forest is where all my doubts and fears disappear in the quiet.

I love my husband, and my kids, and my work, and my life. But in the very deepest, innermost place of my being, the woods grow endlessly. And my Father walks among them.