Profound Contentment

It's interesting that we are transitioning from a few weeks looking at how to achieve balance in our lives to a study of Paul's letter to the church at Philippi. What's interesting about this is that Philippians is a letter about living vigorously and joyfully.

Joy was described as "profound contentment, serenity, and peace." Surely this is the result of somehow achieving balance! I wonder. The ideas we're going to encounter are things like humility, unity, self-sacrifice, pressing toward the goal. lack of anxiety, and the ability to do all things.

Maybe we've got it backwards. Maybe balance comes from profound contentment. In Paul's words, "I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation." This is a secret worth knowing!

Read the whole book of Philippians in one sitting like you would read a letter from a friend. It's about 15 minutes long. Do it a couple of times this week and see what seeps in.

Balance

We talked today about how to achieve "balance" in life. This is clearly a big issue for many of us, so I think it's worth a few sentences on what that means. What is a balanced life, is it something worth striving for, and how do I know if I've got one?

One thing balance might mean is figuring out how to get everything done without getting stressed out over it. Our world puts a lot of demands on us. Phone, email, work, kids, TV, house, spouse, cars, career, the economy, world peace, the environment... the things on our to-do list seems endless. And on top of all this, I go to church and find out I'm supposed to study the Bible and pray without ceasing! So, there's lot competing for our time and lots of stress over not getting it all done.

Maybe balance means a literal balancing of time and activities. Equal time for the various slices of my life. It makes sense that the more important things ought to get more time that the less important, so some kind of a prioritizing scheme seems to be needed. For example, people talk about wanting to spend more time with their families and less time at work. Nobody seems to suggest spending ALL their time at anything.

Balance might simply mean figuring out exactly what to do from this great list of expectations. It might mean picking the "best" of all the things I might do. But isn't this just another thing to do? Now I need to find the best thing to do before I can do anything. No stress there! There's some truth to this in that I clearly don't want to neglect important responsibilities to do meaningless things (well, actually, I do that pretty regularly!).

When we talk about balance in our lives, I think we mean it in this prioritizing-of-activities way. Some things are more important, and we want to be doing the important things in life... but does this lead to a balanced life? I suspect it does not.

How about Paul, Mother Theresa, Martin Luther, Moses, Abraham, Job, or Jesus? Were any of their lives balanced? I've been trying to thing of people worthy of admiration, real role models, who lived balanced lives and I'm not coming up with anybody. Great people seem to be pretty focused, single-minded and unbalanced about life. They throw themselves into one big thing completely.

What is it God wants of us? Balance? That's not a word I would choose to sum up our calling as Christians. God doesn't want part of us, he wants all of us. He doesn't want to be our top priority. He wants to be our ONLY priority. That's about as far from balance as you can get! God doesn't want me to have a balanced life, far from it.

We all know this, so why do I still feel uncomfortable when I spend too much time at work, not enough time with the kids, and minimal time in Bible study? Why do I try to get my life in balance? Maybe it's because I'm still trying to have it all. I want what I want, and I also want a relationship with God. I want everything, so I strive to get it all in balance somehow. I wonder if that's even possible.

In John 17:13-18, Jesus says that we are "in the world" but not "of the world." He says that he doesn't want to take us out of the world even though the world hates us because he has sent us into the world. I'm here on a mission from God... The Blues Bothers had it right all along! I'm not here to live a balanced life where I get a nice family, a good job, an early retirement, and everything I deserve. Maybe I should be trying to figure out what my mission is, not the go-into-all-the-world-and-make-disciples mission, but MY mission. Read the first few paragraphs of The Purpose Driven Life:

"It's not about you. The purpose of your life is far greater than your own personal fulfillment, your peace of mind, or even your happiness. It’s far greater than your family, your career, or even your wildest dreams and ambitions."

Maybe my feeling of being out of balance comes from too much "of" and not enough "in." That's what's really out of balance.

Love, Language, and Obsession

It's February, and love is in the air...actually love is in the language as far as our class in concerned. We've been talking about Gary Chapman's book The Five Love Languages (5LL) for the last couple of weeks so the topic of communication has been on my mind.

Communication is a tricky thing at the best of times. We often fail to communicate what we mean to, and when the target of our message doesn't respond as we think they should, we blame them for being unreasonable. The idea in 5LL is that even when we try hard to communicate our love, we can fail because we're talking the wrong language. We say "I love you" (see, I bought you this expensive vacuum cleaner) and our spouse either doesn't "hear" anything, or misunderstands what we're trying to say (you think the house is dirty?).

The other thing that struck me in all this discussion is that love is not about me, it's about my spouse. That's why it's so hard for us to do well. We spend a lot of our mental energy thinking about how to get what we want out of marriage. That's what a happy marriage is...one that makes me happy, right? Actually, it's not. Marriage works a lot better when we both start to put the other's interests ahead of our own. Sounds sort of Biblical, don't you think?

So that explains the "Love" and "Language" parts of the title. What about the "Obsession" part? Well, that's why there's been such a gap in posting to this blog. I've got another one too! Oh, well.

Last Blog ... at least for this year!

I'm not sure why, but I just can't let this year close without a parting comment. Maybe it's a numbers thing--I want to hit 20 for the year. I've already exceeded the 2007 total, although posts-per-month is down.

Anyway, here goes the final thought for the year...

We were talking a while back about whether the things that happen to us are caused by God, allowed by God, or just happen without God's involvement in any way. I think your beliefs in this regard have a lot to do with what you think God is like, and how much you've thought about where your beliefs lead you.

If you believe things happen to us without God's involvement, and perhaps without any special interest on God's part, then I think you don't believe in the God of the Bible. God is clearly portrayed in both OT and NT as being actively involved in creation. The stories of Abraham, Moses, David, Elijah, and Paul, Peter, and countless others show that God directly influenced their circumstances and that they were not surprised by this.

The other two possibilities are a bit more difficult to deal with if we are to be honest. The problem is that some of God's attributes are not easy to reconcile with each other and our experiences. God is all-powerful (omnipotent), meaning that God can to anything that can be done. God is all-knowing (omniscient), so the smallest detail is not overlooked or forgotten. God is also the definition of love, loves us, and wants the very best for us.

The problem this causes is we have difficulty answering the question, "Why do bad, unpleasant, downright nasty things happen to us?" God surely knows they are happening, could take action to prevent them, and loves us. So why do they happen? It actually matters less whether God actively causes them to happen or passively allows them to happen. In either case they happen because God intends them to happen. I actually prefer the active explanation because I think God is in direct control of all of creation, not just some portion.

I think our difficulty with this question comes from our unspoken belief that we're at the center of the universe. From that viewpoint, good things happening to us are good and bad things are bad. But maybe there's another viewpoint. Maybe we're not the center of the universe. Maybe it's good for bad things to happen to us. I don't claim to understand how or why that might be so, in fact I find it appalling that God could want it that way.

I'm left with the belief that God is good and loves me more than I can imagine. I don't see how having bad things happen to people is "good", and I guess I'm OK with that. God is God and I'm not.

A Thought I Can Call My Own?

Have you ever come up with an idea you thought was truly original? It seems to me that this has happened to me more frequently than normal in the past few months. The problem is, the Internet stands ready to show me how unoriginal and outdated my "original" thought actually is. Even this potentially-original blog topic has been endlessly discussed (for example, here, here, and here). There's even a seven-step process to have your own original thoughts.

Of course, this is not an Internet phenomenon. Have a look at Ecclesiastes 1, especially verses 9 and 10:

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one can say, "Look! This is something new"? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time.

Wow, talk about a lack of originality! My "novel" topic was discussed thousands of years ago. It's almost enough to make a person surrender to the sound-bite mentality of our modern world. Almost.

We don't spend enough time on any one topic to really think deeply. Most of our understanding of things is superficial, even of the important issues of our day. How many people in this country spent more than 15 minutes thinking about how they were going to vote? How many Christians have thought much about abortion, euthanasia, war, salvation, predestination, the nature of God, or any of a dozen other thorny issues? Not enough of us discipline ourselves to make the time required for deep thoughts.

Paul warned Timothy about this tendency in us in 1 Timothy 4,

Preach the Word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke and encourage—with great patience and careful instruction. For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths.

So, I guess I'll continue to search for my original idea even though I know it is unlikely to exist. The purpose is the looking, not the finding.

We Survived Ike!

Not an especially spiritual title, but an intensely spiritual event nonetheless. God is good, and he has preserved us. Events like this are a wonderful reminder of what is really important. Our family is growing closer as we work together to deal with the remnants of this storm. We have been very fortunate, and we pray for those facing greater challenges than ours.

I expect to hear stories of God's provision and protection in the coming days. It's not prophecy on my part (more about that in another post) merely a belief in God's goodness.

Creating Humans

My wanderings along the roadways between home and work have taken me into another of the Modern Scholars series of recorded lectures. This time it's "Creating Humans: Ethical Questions Where Reproduction and Science Collide." I picked it up because it covers the ethical aspects of some recent advances in the science, but I pretty much already knew what I thought about all that (not an unusual attitude for me, I'm afraid). I don't know that the lectures changed my mind a whole lot, but they did make me think more about the real complexity of the issues that I so easily paint black or white.

The issues that stand out as most difficult to resolve are these:

1. At what point, exactly, does a person exist having not existed prior to that point?
2. What are the acceptable methods (processes, procedures, whatever) we can use to create new people?
3. How much are we allowed to interfere with the development of another person in order to produce characteristics we desire in them?

The lecturer came at most of these issues from a non-spiritual direction, so there were lots of things I could take exception with in his thinking. Nevertheless, uncertainty remains in my mind.

At what point does a person come into existence?

I thought this was one I was fairly certain about. Life begins at conception. Easy. The problem is, that position works best for the "normal" mechanics of reproduction, and even then there are some questions. For me as a Christian, a person exists when God creates one. I think that's when the person has a soul, but I can't find much in the Bible on the mechanics of soul-body connection. One problem with this occurring at conception is that that at some point after conception and embryo can either divide into twins or remain a single individual. Before this point it's not clear whether there's one soul or two, so perhaps there's none?

So I guess I'm left believing that a person comes into existence some time after conception but well before birth. That's why I don't think that a woman ever has the absolute "right to choose" abortion. This is not just a question about her right to control her own body. The life of another human being is involved, and the woman does not have the absolute right to take that life. It's the same reason parents aren't free to kill their children.

In terms of abortion, the issue of twins doesn't have much practical impact because it happens so early in the pregnancy (it does affect the ethics of day-after pills). It has a bigger impact on some of the other issues though.

What are the allowable methods of creating new people?

I already knew there were issues here, and the lecturer didn't help clear any of them up for me. Here are some of the ways new people might be created:

• The old-fashioned natural way. (Ask Griff about it if you must.)
• Artificial insemination (AI) - mostly the normal mechanics with a bit of an assist at the beginning. Some issues of parentage (who's the father?).
  
• In vitro fertilization (IVF) - conception occurs in a petri dish, the rest is the normal mechanics. More parentage issues (father and/or mother).
  
• Surrogacy - either AI or IVF followed by growth and delivery by a 3rd-party. Lots of parentage issues. The parents may not be involved at all!
  
• Reproductive cloning - make another one just like me. Luckily, it doesn't work yet except for sheep.

My thinking on this is that it doesn't matter much HOW we make new people. As far as I'm concerned all of the above-listed methods would result in real people, souls and all. I think some of these methods involve a lot more risk of problems resulting from our incomplete understanding of biology, so they should be avoided, but all make people.

There is a thorny little problem with IVF and the notion that life begins at conception. The normal process of IVF involves the creation of many fertilized embryos, one of which is selected for implantation. So what about the rest of them? They are typically discarded. Part of the debate over stem cell research involves the use of these "discarded" embryos as a source of embryonic stem cells. I don't know quite what to think about IVF, but it bothers me some.

How much can people interfere in other people's development?

Parents do this all the time, in face we demand it of them. Mothers try to eat right during pregnancy. We expect parents to provide stimulation so their children develop thinking skills. They teach them to share their toys. They don't let them eat too much junk food and get fat. It goes on and on.

So, should people be able to use IVF to select only male embryos to implant? Should they be able to abort a pregnacy if the embryo's sex is wrong? What if antenatal screening identifies a serious condition like Down's Syndrome? Can that pregnancy be terminated? All of these are unacceptable to me as a life-begins-at-conception guy, but all are commonly practiced and accepted by our society.

The final issue, and we're just approaching this as a feasible technology is genetic enhancement. It will soon be possible to "adjust" the genes in an embryo to change the characteristics of the person who will be born. These changes might be trivial, hair color, eye color, etc. They could also be more significant characteristics like intelligence, musical aptitude, physical strength and size, and so on. If we are able to make these adjustments, should we? In a sense we do this already in that we tend to choose mates with characteristics we find desireable. Is there anything wrong with being more efficient in our methods? I think I'm OK with this, but I suspect it comes with some risks we don't understand just yet. I don't think we can avoid learning how to genetically enhance ourselves, but I hope we do it carefully.

So, where are we going?

I don't find many prohibitions in the Bible regarding the acceptability of scientific reproduction methods. I do hear a clear message that God thinks people are extremely important. I think we need to worry more about how this technology affects the the relationship between people, and make sure that we place as high a value on himan life as God does.