Dallas Willard died late last week after a battle with panreatic cancer, and the news was particularly heavy for me, even though I never met him.

I picked up Dallas Willard’s book, The Divine Conspiracy, in seminary at a time when I was beginning to wonder if the church had anything to say that would engage my intellect beyond cliches and overdone figures of speech. I felt that I was living in a bubble where asking questions about the way we said things was almost considered off-limits.

Then I started hearing the heart of a teacher’s in Willard’s words. I know there are plenty of good Christian scholars out there who speak intelligently about our faith, but Willard crossed over into writing in a way that engaged my intellect, but also avoided the tendency to loose the true-to-life implications in the midst of high-level discussion. I’ve always thought of his writing as not so heady that it was impractical, but also not so practical that it was shallow.

I was immediately drawn to his unique way of saying things. Christianity Today reported that his comments after hearing of his cancer diagnosis were that “I think that, when I die, it might be some time until I know it.” Who says things like that? Only Willard.

The Divine Conspiracy was the first book of his that I read, and I went on to also enjoy The Spirit of the Disciplines and Hearing God. The reason I give him partial credit for keeping me in the faith is simple:

His accessible, yet challenging intelligence paired with his passion for showing us eternity, reminded me that Christianity had both intellectual depth and real humanity. Another way to say it is that I was able to see the mind of our faith, but also the flesh and blood of our faith.

You don’t have to read much of Dallas Willard to see that he knew how to translate his astute observations into an accessible writing style. But it was never so pared down that I was bored with it; he knew how to raise the bar at just the right time so that the reader would keep reaching to understand. Also, he had a way of saying things that woke me up to old concepts by giving them new language. This made his writings irresistibly appealing to me.

Another reason I always refer back to Willard is that he consistently challenged the status quo of the Evangelial church mind. For example, throughout his book, The Divine Conspiracy, he confronts the notion that Christianity is exclusively about what happens when we die:

“Does Jesus only enable me to “make the cut” when I die? Or to know what to protest, or how to vote or agitate and organize? It is good to know that when I die all will be well, but is there any good news for life?”

This is what I mean by his way of presenting faith in God as a flesh-and-blood endeavor. Jesus had every intention of ushering in a new age of religion that had bearing on every dimension of our being. We are called out to be a student of Christ and involved in this new Kindom from the soul to the flesh on our bones. This theme is the heartbeat of Willard’s teachings.

He believed that the basic message of the Jesus “presents the resources needed to live human life as we all automatically sense it should be and naturally leads one to become his student, or apprentice in kingdom living.”

And what was Willard’s summary of Jesus’ message? “Rethink your life in the light of the fact that the kingdom of the heavens is now open to all” (Matt. 4:17),

At a time when I was already busy rethinking my life, I welcomed his guidance to do so within God’s kingdom.

I don’t know what direction my life might have taken without this guidance, but I do know that I came upon Dallas Willard at just the right time.

My son is three years old and as three-year olds go, he’s pretty damn great. However, he does display some of the standard toddler behaviors that come along with this age. One hilarious example is when he asks me a question, all the while hoping for a particular answer. If he doesn’t hear that answer, it looks something like this:

MY SON: Are we going to buy the new Lightning McQueen car at the toy store?

ME: I’m sorry, but we haven’t saved up enough coins for that yet so we’ll have to wait.

MY SON: [in a very matter-of-fact tone] No, no, no, don’t say, ‘We’ll have to wait.’

It’s fun to have these exhanges (and frustrating when they develop into a full-blown tantrum), and we get plenty of opportunity to “enjoy” them. Unfortunately, I’m afraid that I may do the same kind of thing when it comes to facing some of the realities of being a parent.

Our baby girl has been sick this week with RSV. A lot of kids under the age of two years old contract RSV and it occasionally requires hospitalization because the infant has a hard time breathing.

Thankfully she showed her first signs of improvement this afternoon after two days of pretty serious symptoms. In the thick of it, as we’ve been sleep deprived and praying and worried for our little girl, I began to think about what parenting is all about.

I realized that I am asking the wrong question over and over again. What I tend to say is, “When am I going to get some time to myself to do the things I want to do?”

Part of that question is healthy because we all need to find time to recharge. But for me, a lot of it is the temptation to go back to a life I don’t have right now, and to skirt the ardouos and demanding responsibilies that come along with being a parent.

So I am asking when I will get what’s coming to me, but I’ve noticed that I’m not getting the answer I want. And what’s toughest to admit is that I keep avoiding the answer that is right in front of me:

Being a parent is about serving, loving, and leading your kids.

When Krista and I decided to step into the world of parenthood, we never envisioned how difficult it would be. As our daughter has labored to breathe properly for the last two days, that difficulty has given me a strong sense of purpose as a parent. It’s the sense of purpose that comes along when you serve someone who is hurting and agonize because of their pain.

My kids didn’t ask to be born, but I did ask to be a parent. And being a parent means you learn to suffer with your kids, and then suffer for them later as they make their own difficult and sometimes bad choices.  Once that burden is accepted, it brings a connection between a parent and a child that will have a profound and lasting effect.

May all parents find the grace to embrace this connection, even with the cost that accompanies it.

When you try your best but you don’t succeed
When you get what you want but not what you need
When you feel so tired but you can’t sleep
Stuck in reverse

~ Coldplay’s song, “Fix You”

$666.51.

That was how much the brand new couch would set me back. I didn’t really have the money, but I was recently divorced and wanted another place to sit down in my small apartment, so I walked into Rooms To Go and picked out a bright red love seat (ironic timing).

The ominous amount on the check should have given it away. It took about a week to realize that the butt on my beige shorts was turning pink and my white T-shirts had a nice pink glow about them on the back as well. Apparently the couch needed to be treated with some sort of chemical to prevent the red dye from bleeding over onto my clothing. So instead of dealing with the problem, I covered it up with a blanket (which would eventually turn pink on one side) and looked the other way.

After 10 years of covering up the couch I am happy to report that we are selling that couch as part of a newfound journey to simplify our life. Over the past 60 days, we’ve been selling furniture, giving things away, and tightening up our budget. I must tell you that it feels great. And just like the red love seat, I look at some things and wonder why I ever bought them.

We are also working on prepping our house to sell. The toughest part of this is that we thought we wanted this house when we bought it. We thought we wanted the neighborhood, the square footage, the big yard, and the all-brick construction. But once we settled in, we quickly became unsettled. We didn’t actually get what we wanted:

Peace and contentment.

There’s nothing wrong with looking for peace and contentment. These are common themes throughout the Christian Scriptures. The problem comes when we look in the wrong place to find these things. While I never would have said out loud that I was buying a house to satiate a spiritual and psychological hunger, somewhere in there I had a subconscious belief that having this kind of house would bring me contentment. So we made a decision, and a very hasty one at that, and borrowed a truck load of money to buy a house.

It didn’t take long to become frustrated. We didn’t really have that much, but there was an unspoken pressure to get more stuff now that we had more space. That feeling of pressure led us into conversation about what we really want, and the true value of the things that we own.

I began to question the cost of everything. how important is it that we have monthly cable TV? Why do I need every one of these gadgets? The obvious answer is that those things are not ultimately important and that I don’t really need them. So the natural follow-up question hit home:

Am I willing to pay the cost to purchase and maintain these unnecessary and unimportant things?

How much is all of it worth to me? Because when I start to add up $60 here and $90 there, the cumulative effect of all that spending is disturbing to me, especially when I consider how long I’m away from my family each week to create the income for these things. Could I be home more during the week if we sacrificed some of our luxury items? What could I have done for the future of my family with all of that money over the past five years? How much more could I have helped a couple of specific families locally who recently needed an extra influx of cash because of an extreme difficulty?

It is so hard to talk about this without coming off as judgmental or condemning toward others in the way that they spend money. But this post is about me and my family. I hope there is some insight for you as you read it, but ultimately this is a cathartic exercise for me; it’s a confession of sorts to get some of this out on the table.

We want to sell our house and have a more simple existence, not because we think we are better than anyone else, but because we know what we want and now it seems that we are closer to the right ways to go after it. Television, movies, video games, and other such trivialities have their place as a moment to separate from everything else and just enjoy a good story. I don’t think there is anything inherently wrong with that, but I do think there is something wrong in my soul when I habitually turn to these things to satisfy unspoken longings.

Entertainment is just one example of an amoral undertaking that doesn’t serve very well as a God. I could fill in other anecdotes, but it seems like entertainment is one of those areas where it’s easy to spend a lot of money. And a lot of time.

So what do I really want? I’ll have to save that for part two. It seemed important to first deconstruct some of the ways I go after what I want. For now, suffice it to say that DirecTV doesn’t have a channel for what I’m looking for.

Oh, and I’ve got a red love seat I’ll sell you for $66.60.

I like to jump off of things, but I’m here to tell you that sometimes that doesn’t turn out well.

As I launched my body over the edge of the twisty slide at our local park late this afternoon, I was easily about seven feet in the air as my left foot caught the edge of the slide. There was a moment in mid-air that I knew this was going to end badly, but that was a very short moment, because it doesn’t take very long to fall seven feet. But, oh my word, the velocity you can reach is astounding!

I landed on my side, with my left arm underneath me, which both cushioned my fall and created more impact on my lungs. At the time, it didn’t matter a whole lot to me that I fell on a soft bed of wood chips and that those freshly spread wood chips probably kept me from more extensive injury. There was only one thought in my mind:

AIR.

If you’ve ever had the wind knocked out of you, it’s a frightening experience. The human body inhales a fresh supply of oxygen and expels carbon dioxide about 900 times every hour without a single conscious thought. With one good shot to the mid-section, I quickly became aware of how much I count on that. Krista saw the entire fall, so to give her some confidence that I was okay, I immediately tried to stand up. I made it to my hands and knees before I decided that I should pass on the tough-guy routine. After gasping for 10 seconds, my breath started to come back. For some reason, the first words to stumble out of my mouth were “Jesus, Joseph and Mary,” which would have made me laugh under different circumstances.

With my first breaths, I started coughing and with that cough came enough blood to make me think I had just bought a ticket to the quality medical care that people enjoy in an emergency room. But I’m never one to rush off to the doctor without massive amounts of indications to do so, so I grabbed my iPhone and started searching for “coughing up blood after fall.” What I discovered was that I now have something in common with skateboarders, since apparently this sort of thing happens to them when they do something similar on pavement. Isn’t that great?

After further examination, I’ve got no broken ribs and no more blood, so I’ll be okay, thankfully.

As I pondered this run-in with gravity, I thought, “Aren’t I getting a little old to be jumping off the top of twisty slides?”

While I don’t like the falls, I am going to keep jumping. Yes, I’m 41 years old. Yes, my knees aren’t what they used to be. But I just can’t give up the joy of movement. I think we were made for it, and I don’t think that ends at a certain age. It’s always sad to hear of someone who has a disability which prevents them from physical movement, but there’s more to movement than just what happens in the legs.

It’s stagnation I’m trying to avoid, and that can seep down into a person’s soul as well as their body.

First of all, he talked about the need we have for faith crisis, when our definitions of goodness become exposed as insufficient. For many of us, our view of the world is seen only through a dualistic lens. It’s simple when you can look at things only as black and white, and you can have some spectacular arguments while taking your stand. However, it’s rare to find much truth in these spectacular clashes of ideas. Truth is best explored in the subtleties of Scripture and the nuances of our lives.

Second, exploring the Enneagram isn’t about developing our consciousness, but about transforming it. Furthermore, you can’t develop until you deconstruct, simply because we are in need of complete transformation, based on entirely new structures. When it comes to the practice and belief of Christian faith, the deconstruction can be the most unnerving part of the journey. When we disassemble a way of thinking that we determine to be faulty, the danger is that we will be left only with a vacuum where a belief that we depended on used to be. I personally think that many who abandon their faith in God do so at this point. They deconstruct everything but never find the wisdom or the tools to create new belief structures without completely denying God’s personal existence.

So the challenge from this first week is to deconstruct with intent to rebuild, not simply to destroy. Unfortunately, blowing things up, even at an intellectual and spiritual level, is a lot more fun to do.

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As an answer to the first question in the video*, “What is required to be fully present in each moment, to notice the now?”, I have a few practical thoughts. These are a few things that I have worked on and found varying levels of success.

I’m able to be more present in the moment when I…

1. Put my eyes on my surroundings. It’s easy to keep my head down, plotting my next few steps, deep in thought about some worry or plan or situation. I don’t have the research to back this up, but I’d guess that something chemical happens in the brain when we look up and notice our surroundings.

2. Put my eyes on the people I am with. I also try to pay attention to how often I look at my friends in the eyes, not to creep them out, but to truly notice them and hear what they are saying to me. It makes a difference when I do that. More importantly, I want to do this with my wife and my son. It’s amazing how I could be home for 30 minutes or an hour and suddenly realize that I haven’t looked at either of their faces.

3. Replace grasping with intentional breathing. In my more chaotic days, when stress levels are at maximum, and the task list is beyond reasonable, I find myself grasping for relief.  Often it’s food that I can most easily access, so I grasp for that unnecessary snack. It isn’t that snacking is inherently wrong, but I know when I’m using it like a chain smoker would use a cigarette. To grasp at something is an almost an act of panic. There is no mindfulness in grasping for a bag of potato chips and eating half of the contents.

This last one is the most difficult for me, but when I get it right it means that I stopped what I was doing and closed my eyes and focused entirely on my breath for 5 minutes or more.  Occasionally I’ve used a short phrase from Scripture that I whisper as I exhale. I would do well to add that element more often. But I’ve discovered that something happens to the chaos within when the moment is simplified to breathing.

I’ll spend the rest of my life learning not to miss out on now and be mindful of the present, knowing that sometimes it is a moment, as Buechner put it, ”that is trying to open up your whole life.”

~

 *I’ve been experimenting with video lately and will be posting all video content at http://lookingforquestions.com.  That blog is primarily focused on the value of questions and learning to ask the right ones and will serve as a repository for any video I create, even if I don’t post it here. I actually owned lookingforquestions.com a few years ago and originally wanted to do this with it, so I’m looking forward to what develops!

Last week, I was reading Richard Rohr’s book, On the Threshold of Transformation: Daily Meditations for Men, and came across something that has been a theme in my life, though not one I’ve always allowed to play out:

Every man wants to discover something, to find what is missing here by journeying to a new place. We forget that we take the same old self to the new place

Sometimes we refer to this as the geographical solution, the idea that we can solve our problems through an experience far from home. Encounters with the unfamiliar can indeed open new possibilities and perspectives-but only if they break through our filters and actually change us. New experiences are more often diversionary tactics.

For a long time now, I’ve wanted to move to Oregon.  My wife and I visited there on a vacation a few years ago, and I’ve never been able to get the scent of the Oregon air out of my psyche.*  What’s interesting is that whenever times get especially stressful, the state of Oregon comes up at some point, even if it’s in jest.  ”Let’s just pack up and move to Oregon,” we’ll say.

Lately, we’ve struggled with our church attendance at St. Bartholomew’s.  We love St. B’s (as it’s affectionately known), but have found ourselves talking about looking for a new church home because of some challenges that have made it difficult to get to church.  But once we thought through it, we realized that those same challenges would exist no matter where we go.

Wow.  It appears that I am the problem.

Whether it be a reliance on new experiences or the hope for a change in location, we take our baggage with us wherever we go.  Trying to find a new geographical location to live out our neurosis usually only gives us a different backdrop for the script to play out.

Along with some other emphases for Lent, I’m inviting God’s change in me while I stay where I am.  Instead of looking for new experiences and a change of scenery, I am looking for God in the scenery right before my eyes.

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*The premiere of the new television show, Portlandia, hasn’t changed this.  However, I can’t stop watching that show.  It’s like a train wreck I can’t look away from, but in this case the train was filled with kittens and puppies.

Sleep, sleep tonight
And may your dreams be realized.
If the thunder cloud passes rain
So let it rain, rain down on him.
So let it be.
So let it be.

Sleep, sleep tonight
And may your dreams be realized.
If the thunder cloud passes rain
So let it rain, let it rain
Rain down on him.

Lyrics by U2

I’m having one of those moments when I keep hearing or reading the same theme repeatedly, then at some point I snap out of my stupor and acknowledge the pattern.

On Epiphany Sunday last week, Father Jerry asked a question that has followed me around this week:

“What if you asked a trustworthy friend to follow you around for 24 hours and give you an assessment of your receptiveness to God during an ordinary day?”

I would not be able to pull that off, because I would end up sabotaging the whole thing by putting my best foot forward. However, it has me thinking about these ordinary times and asking myself whether or not I have created more compartments in my life where I may or may not be living the life of a follower of Jesus.

Then, today’s message by Dixon forced us to consider the implications of our bodies as the temple of God. Does it not mean that we are Christ-ones first, before any other label or title? Our identity as Christians is an ultimate stamp of identity. All other titles and labels must be filtered through through that one; it’s not just one of many designations for who we are.

God is at work to remove the disconnect between our “Sunday morning lives” and our “Monday-Saturday” lives. This is his work of creating wholeness in us. Those dividers that we create to compartmentalize our lives work against that divine purpose.

The point where this ceases to be a nice theological theory is in the ways we create daily practice. For without the difficult work of creating an ongoing ordinary-life liturgy, we are actually creating an ongoing cycle of disappointment and internal division.

Epiphany celebrates the revelation of God in the form of his Son, Jesus. What better time to recognize that God is revealing himself, not just in the religious moments of our life, but in the ordinary ones, too.

I feel blue.

I have a cold.

I need to fix the ceiling fan.

I’m almost done with the 4th season of Lost.

The computer crashed.

I’m tired.

I’m just not feelin’ it right now.

I’d like one quick game of Halo.

I can’t decide which writing software to use.

My writing environment is not ideal.

These reasons not to write have been incredibly valuable to me lately as I’ve been in a writer’s slump (I’d call it writer’s block, but that imply that I sat down to write at some point since my last post).  But the real reason for this post is to determine if I actually WANT to write.  Apparently, I do. I’m glad I passed the test, because writing a blog post about reasons not to write is to risk never having the gumption to write again, because if I can’t pull this off, then I might as well close shop!

Whew!