Programming Note

I know I haven’t written in over a week, and I’m sorry for the abrupt interruption in service. However, I think there’s a pretty good reason. I’ve been overwhelmingly busy preparing to move to Medford, Oregon for a new job at Talk Radio Network as an Executive Producer. We are selling our St. Louis house, clearing out of our Phoenix house, and somehow or other trying to triangulate all that stuff and “to do” into a place to live in the great northwest. The short version of this amazing thing God has done in our lives is that I’ve been hired to do a job I’ve never done in a place I’ve never been to, working for people I’ve never met who are paying me better than they usually would. And this job starts 7 weeks to the day after my show was cancelled, the exact extent of my severance package from the radio station. ! Oh, and did I mention we accepted the job on our 14^th wedding anniversary? Best anniversary gift ever, Lord!

Sooooo…for the moment, I haven’t been writing for obvious reasons and I probably won’t be for a little while either just because of all the logistics and starting a new job. But I do intend to continue opining, presumably on a regular basis. (Tom Brown nearly forced me to promise I would do so at lunch the other day.) And when I do, I’ll still send these out to all of you either in this format or in some other one.

In the meantime, please be praying for us as we start a new adventure, one that is so obviously God’s doing that I just can’t wait to see how it unfolds. I know this is a terribly unfair thing to mention since I’m not actually giving you the details of it all, but when I recently told some good friends the entire story of all the threads that wove together for this process, it took about 45 minutes of just me talking to tell it all. So, trust me when I say God loves His kids (all of them!), and you can trust Him to do whatever He says He’s going to do. When He works a plan, it’s astounding to behold.

Happy anniversary.

Today is the fourteenth birthday of our marriage. I bought nothing special for my wife. She bought nothing special for me. I didn’t give her a card. She didn’t give me a card. In fact, most of the day, we both worked on things that needed to be done. Then, in the middle of the afternoon, we ran a few errands together with the children and ended up at our favorite burger bar. We ordered and ate in the company of children, alcoholics, and televised sports, and then we played a little corn hole with the kids. After this extravaganza of excitement, we drove home and split up to home-school our respective kids. After that we put them to bed and watched some TV before going to bed ourselves. Sound special? The sort of thing you read about in those ridiculously long British and Russian novels in literature classes? Perhaps not.

Then again, considering that neither my wife nor I care much about gifts, cards, or spending lots of money on anything, it was actually quite nice. We were full, happy, and grateful to God for a decent life with each other. And that’s pretty much the most important thing you have to know about your own marriage: what works for you.

See, a lot of relationship books and experts will give you a whole long list of “the right things” to do to make a marriage work. And many of them are quite useful. But the problem with reading such books is that it can make you think you’ve done what you’re “supposed” to do, hence you’re good. But it doesn’t matter if you do all the things you’re “supposed” to do in a hundred books if your own spouse doesn’t care about any of that stuff or needs something different (whether more or less) from you personally.

Today made me happy. Today made my wife happy. And just the fact that after fourteen years, we know each other well enough to know exactly this about us both is one of the greatest thrills of being married for a little while. Perhaps it sounds far less glamorous than the ads encourage you to imagine, but let me assure you that glamour isn’t nearly everything it’s cracked up to be. Especially when you compare it with the simplicity of sharing a life with someone you love, a rather mundanely exotic thing that I worry far too many people think somehow inadequate because it fails to live up to all their ludicrously epic expectations.

Don’t underestimate the value of a good sedan. There’s a reason it’s the kind of car most people wind up buying…and being satisfied with.

God's view

Whom does God love more: me or Tom Brown? God allowed my show to get cancelled and my only real source of income to go away. But God also allowed Tom to move away from doing a task he doesn’t excel at into doing something he really loves as a talk show host. So when I lost my show, was God blessing His children?

Whom does God love more: me or Chris X? God allowed me to purchase two All-Star Game tickets for $1000 in the hopes of reselling them for a profit. In the end, I sold them for a loss of about $500 the week before the game. The stranger who bought them from me, Chris, used them as a surprise for his wife. They went to the game and the Home Run Derby, sitting in the much better seats than I even enjoyed with my other personal ticket. They were happy to buy them before hand and thrilled to have used them after the fact. So when I lost $500 on a dumb investment to make this possible for them, was God blessing His children?

Whom does God love more: us or the Blanks? All these years, my wife and I have held onto the house we dearly love in St. Louis, believing we would eventually return there as we both desire. In particular, this was always our back-up plan if I ever lost my radio show, which happens unexpectedly in my industry. Just three months ago, He told us to sell it, and it looks like we have a buyer. Now that I have lost the show, we’re suddenly semi-marooned in Phoenix, having no real idea what the future holds or where it lies. So we’re probably selling a house we love near Dani’s mom that was always our safety valve and in which we started our family. But we’re selling it to people who seem to love it, too, perhaps even more than we do. The husband and his friend have already been planning how to finish the lower level which we never did in 13 years. So when we sell it to them (assuming it goes through), was God blessing His children?

When we say that God does things to bless His children, why do we tend to think that means they need to bless us more than others? Doesn’t it make at least as much sense that He might be interested in blessing them rather than us? Isn’t the real question whether I can be as happy to see others blessed (even at my own expense or misfortune) as I am to see myself prosper? Because until I am, can I really yet say I’m seeing things through God’s eyes? And shouldn’t I find the great honor of being such a nifty part of God’s grand plan worth so much more than any of the small things I seem to have lost in the process?

Just to be clear, there is only one correct answer to these questions. And it’s an inexpressibly wonderful joy to be in a position to give it.

How do I get to hell?

If I speak properly, then I am a good person, which is why it is ever so important to show people who do not speak properly their grammatical flaws, because I love them and want them to be better people…like me. Failing this, I must at least be certain others know the difference so they can recognize my goodness for what it is. Thus, I will be sure to publicly criticize those who speak poorly.

If I drive correctly, then I am a good person, which is why it is so vital that bad drivers visibly receive my love-filled gestures of indignation. How else will they know they have driven badly and learn from their mistakes, eventually becoming good drivers and therefore good people…like me. Regardless, I should at least tell my friends about the bad drivers I encountered today so they can honor my skill for what it is. This way we can all be good people together, unlike those other sorts.

If I obey the Bible properly, then I am a good person, which is why it is so essential that immoral people be taught the error of their ways. Besides, God tells me to love them, and what better way to do so than to actively facilitate their moral education? Unable to virtuefy them, I will of course need to exclude them from my closely guarded circle of self-congratulation. After all, if I and people like me to not regularly practice our God-given gift of condemnation, how will we reinforce our holiness and maintain our moral prestige with others?

What's off the menu?

Among theological conservatives, it is common to hear complaints about innovative approaches to evangelism and non-traditional methods of enticing people toward Christianity. The general criticism is that people using these newer styles of Christian outreach are resorting to worldly forms of persuasion and rhetoric instead of relying upon God and God’s message to draw people. This is certainly a concern worth taking seriously.

But the difficulty is that when someone employing one style of presentation looks at someone employing another style, it is easy to mistake different for inferior. And when such rhetorical xenophobia starts wrapping itself in the sanctimonious garb of tradition, we should pause to consider some possible categories for differentiating otherspeak:

1. Rhetoric which is truly incompetent or unclear.

2. Rhetoric which only appears competent because I am familiar with its particular form of incompetence.

3. Rhetoric which is far more persuasive than my own and of which I am therefore suspicious in part because it threatens to reclassify my own as inferior by comparison.

4. Rhetoric which is very innovative and different from my own and therefore tastes a bit strange to me, but which expect from the embodied diversity of God’s creative nature.

5. Rhetoric which is innovative and different in a way which really deviates from the core idea that people come to God because of God rather than coming merely to the projection of their own desires found in enticement predicated upon such an idolatrous appeal.

It's ever so easy to find a pretext for rejecting any approach which is different from my own (or that of my tradition) and then mislabel that rejection of style as doctrinal superiority. But just as we must not remake God in our own image, we must also not try to remake His other children according to the pattern birthed in us. Just because God has truly given me my flavor of Christian outreach, that does not mean every other combination of speech spices is an unsavory defilement of God’s cuisine.