Category: God (Page 5 of 14)

Why I Quit Math

August 29, 2015 / Michele Minehart

When my oldest was born, we had a brief (largely unnecessary, IMHO) stay at the NICU. When he was cleared of his most pressing concern, it took us a while to get out of the hospital. The nurses and doctors were measuring every diaper and what filled it. They were weighing him hourly (he was born a healthy weight). While the nurses could tell me that he wasn’t hungry because he was content, sleeping, not fussing, the protocol said to measure, measure, measure. I left convinced that the hospital community would measure anything that could be attached to a number.

I’m not saying all metrics are a bad thing – far from it. My friend E has convinced me that there is a level of accountability available through our number games that must exist for the well-being of all people. But take a quick look at our society and you see us math-ing all the time. Calories burned & consumed. Test scores. Profit margin. Miles logged.

Not long ago a professional athlete posted his disdain for participation trophies. While I also think paying for little trinkets of shiny plastic is a tad silly (another post, another time), his comments revealed the ethos of our culture: We’re addicted to outcomes. We need to know how we measure up. Where do we fall in the bell curve? If I’m not Top Dog, how close am I and did enough people fall below me that I’m still in the upper tier?

If you’re running a business or a professional sports team, this is perhaps a helpful inquiry. But do you know where it doesn’t compute?

Worthiness.

Let me be clear my friends: in all my study, all my understanding of Scripture, all my time pondering the ways of God, it has never once come up that God takes all of humankind, lines them up according to salary, athletic prowess, months they successfully breastfed, BMI, or GPA. And if He did decide to rank us according to an asinine category, he certainly wouldn’t take only the top third with him to the pearly gates.

God doesn’t parcel out his love to the top performers. He does not hold a draft and there are no tryouts. If you want in, you’re in. If you want a fun little weekend project, read the gospels (or pick your favorite) and start counting the number of times the failures, the not-enoughs make it into Jesus’ roster. This isn’t just Good News that your imperfections don’t count against you – it’s Good News that you can stop comparing your best efforts to everyone else’s.

You don’t have to watch what everyone else is doing to know you’re worthy of love.

If you’d like another fun little reading project, start digging into the New Testament and make tally marks when you come across phrases like “what matters is something far more interior: faith expressed in love.” (Ephesians 5:6, MSG) or “Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.” (I John 4:16).

So just stop. Stop adding. Stop averaging. If you want to become better at something because it makes your life better, than by all means – do it. Live life fully and stop half-assing what is important to you. The girl that keeps a Life Plan with 100 Year Goals will tell you there’s nothing wrong from wanting to extract every opportunity from this one blessed lifetime. But don’t use your improvement metrics as an argument to why you are loved, by others or by God. God doesn’t do a lot of math.

True love is attached to who you are, not what you’ve achieved. If you try to put love on a curve, remember that no one aced the test and we’re all getting a little boost in our performance. You cannot line up love from greatest to smallest, but if you try, remember that God is always partial to the least and last.

So may you stop adding and averaging your accomplishments as a means to feel worthy. May you sink your efforts and energies into loving and living well.

“Since this is the kind of life we have chose, the life of the Spirit, let us make sure that we do not just hold it as an idea in our heads or a sentiment in our hearts, but work out its implications in every detail of our lives. That means we will not compare ourselves with each other as if one of us were better and another worse. We have far more interesting things to do with our lives. Each of us is an original.”

-Galatians 6:25-26

*This post was strongly influenced by Brene Brown’s book Daring Greatly and the chapter on Scarcity. Read it.

Spread the jam

August 5, 2015 / Michele Minehart

Yesterday was pancake morning in our home. We offer a variety of ways to top your ‘cake around here – with or without almond butter, with or without blueberries, and with either jam or syrup. (We have dunking cups for the syrup – no dousers allowed.) With such a smorgasboard, kids have to do a little of the pancake-topping work.

I noticed one particular pancake with a large glob of jam and its owner getting ready to scoop more. I warned her to stop and she protested, “but there’s none on the edges!” I explained, we don’t need more. We just have to put it in the right places.

That’ll preach.

Moving, buying a house, leaving the work in which I had been engaged, allowing our primary salary to land on a scale considerably less than our former potential… all of this adds up to a bit of money stress. Of course, we willingly took it on, we weren’t blinded. And we’re no different than any other family. No matter the income level, my friends are typically trying to stretch their dollars.

Then one day, I stumbled into a little passage in Deuteronomy 29. “I have led you forty years in the wilderness; your clothes have not worn out on you, and your sandal has not worn out on your foot.”

In the Christian circles, “God will provide” is common language. And he does. I love the stories of the groceries arriving on the doorstep on the exact day or the check appearing in the exact amount. These things happen. The ways in which God is faithful to provide can often be found when we’re stretched to the point of need, rather than want.

This passage, however, tells us of another way that “God provides.” He simply takes away the need. God, being the Creator of the Universe, could have created Shoe Valley, in which the Israelites stumbled into a land of Nikes. (But probably not, because they’re not fair trade, and we know God is not into child labor.) This take on provision would’ve made a killer climax in the Exodus story. People would remember a land full of shoes.

But he didn’t. He simply made last what the people already had. They didn’t get new shoes because he made it possible to not need new shoes.

I have to wonder, especially in our current context, if the long-lasting shoe version of provision might be more applicable than the miraculous appearance provision we often anticipate. God could, indeed, drop a check in my lap. Or an opportunity to make more money. Or a really great sale on back-to-school supplies.

Or I could find that he has allowed our dollars to [miraculously] stretch. We could see God as the source of a smaller income that still pays all the same bills. We might discover the blessing of needing less.

There are times when the jam doesn’t reach the edge of the pancake. Right now, I’m making sure the jam might not need spread out a bit.

Image via CC by Weinstock: https://pixabay.com/p-92596/?no_redirect

Poison

July 5, 2015 / Michele Minehart

Yes, dear children. That man was sick. That stinky pile over there, where the bugs swarm and the dogs sniff, remains evidence of his sickness.

No, young twenty-something. There’s no need to lie or cover up. He didn’t have the flu.

The simple truth is this: too much of anything in this world will poison you.

Last night, for this man, it was drink. It probably happened to many people, with the holiday and all. But it’s easy to point out someone else’s poison and label it bad, wrong, evil. But abstaining from alcohol won’t help you if your poison tends to be carbs, shoes or a growing Swiss bank account. You can give yourself a little pat on the back for shying away from the brown bottle, but it won’t heal your soul of its own tendencies to self-medicate.

Honestly, our numbing agents are relatively powerless until they’re mixed in to our souls. In and of themselves, the contents of a bottle, a shopping bag or a wallet have a neutral effect. They simply are. Until your soul attaches meaning to them, gropes for them in the midst of heartache or jealousy or hatred. Then those potions become poisons.

First it affects your body. Your body is the first line of defense. It’s where we feel, where we experience, where we synthesize what is happening in the world. And when you let in too much of anything, your body is the first part of you to tell you it’s too much. Listen to your body.

The poison will also begin to effect your mind. Your thoughts go toward it in the light of day and in the deep of night. Beware, sweet child. When you find your mind saying, “if I could just have one more…” then you’re probably being poisoned by your own hand.

Sadly, it will settle in your soul. It doesn’t make you an evil person. Our society tends to believe that a poisoned soul is the result of poor decisions and a lack of fortitude. No self-control, self-sufficiency, self-respect. I have trouble believing the exaggerated versions of our own struggles can be so other.

Fear not, my children. For every poison there is a remedy. Our sicknesses of self can be healed. The most common antidote is freely available and widely popular: love. Love for self, love for others, love for God, love for the created order.

Many old farm houses came equipped with 2 water sources: a cistern and a well. I imagine we all have within our souls two deep reservoirs. One is more like a cistern, catching whatever comes in. When it goes sour, it takes some work to return it to health. We use this kind of water for flushing and rinsing, maybe watering the garden. Another place in your soul is rather like a deep well. The water there is pure, good for drinking. Incredibly, it can meet the thirsts of others. The key to a good well is to dig deep.

You can spend your days trying to fill the cistern. Or you can put your energy into digging the well deeper. With every loving action and every generous intention, we drill another meter closer to the source. God put a well of love in you, an unlimited supply from which you may draw forever. If you find it running dry, perhaps it’s because you’ve been going to the cistern instead of the well.

When you start seeing evidence of poison, it’s not because the well went bad. You’re simply living off of what you put into the cistern. Get to the well, my children and keep digging until you drink clean water.

Category: God (Page 5 of 14)

Why I Quit Math

Spread the jam

Poison

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