We say yes to all of the activities the “church” has planned because we think we should. Should is motivated by guilt, or what our leaders will think of us if we don’t do what they would like us to do. Should assumes that God will be more happy with us if we do things we don’t want to do. Doing the should stuff makes us feels like the martyr and fosters a spiritual pride, which is the most dangerous form of pride I’ve seen. Saying yes based on the M.O. of “shoulds” mostly just makes us busy and empty, not effective and fulfilled.  

And then there are the shouldn’ts. I think we spend far too much time trying to get people to want to sin less. And I think we spend far too much time trying to sell people on the idea of wanting to be more committed to their faith and living it out. Even the very word “religion” is thick with a proscribed lifestyle.

The shoulds of religion isn’t what Jesus came for. We don’t need the shoulds of religion to earn our way into the good book of God. I strongly believe that shoulds don’t have to factor into our decision making. Jesus didn’t come to show us a better way that we should live. Focusing on the shoulds and the shouldn’ts of religion displays a complete lack of trust in the indwelling Holy Spirit to guide us into what He wants us to say yes or no too. It causes us to look for a formula for our faith and not at the relationship with Jesus.

I believe that it’s possible to live in such a relationship with Jesus, such intimacy, that we could actually choose what we want the most at any given moment, knowing that He placed those desires in our hearts, and that we are choosing what He most wants for us. I also believe that we can live in such an intimacy with Jesus that he places His desires in our hearts and we don’t have to worry about what we shouldn’t do, because we won’t even want that stuff.

No matter how hard we try to fulfill people’s expectations of us (realistic or not), we never seem to do enough to make people happy. It’s so easy to frustrate, annoy, aggravate, bruise, or let someone down. We haven’t done something fast enough or slow enough, we’ve either been far too detailed or far too careless, we’ve ignored something or spent too much time on something else, we’ve under prioritized something or over prioritized something else.

And as leaders, the magnitude of people’s unmet expectations is…magnified. I’ve heard for years that you can’t make everyone happy…that is nothing new to me and certainly not a surprise after 25 years of leadership. What I have recently resigned is that relationship doesn’t stem the tide of people’s response to unmet expectations. I’ve held the idea that the better someone knows me the more grace they extend. The benefit of the doubt doesn’t seem to be an asset in relationship. Relationship may buy a little longsuffering sometimes, but it’s often those that we know the best that become frustrated with us the quickest. Familiarity is the environment in which we take the most advantage of people.

It’s in this exhaustion that God is more and more safe, attractive, and the Place to park my heart. Reading recently that I don’t have to impress Him, I don’t have to work for His favor, I don’t annoy Him, He doesn’t get frustrated with me when I don’t “get it”, He is patient, He is kind, He doesn’t punish with a pissy exhaustion with my failings and short-comings. He doesn’t remind me with the one thing that I didn’t do right. He doesn’t take delight in proving to me that He’s right and I’m not. Even the best that this world has to offer is eclipsed by what we already have as a child of God.   

And it’s because of that standing I am motivated to reciprocate by honoring that perfect safety by living a life that projects that same love to people. The more I understand that standing I have already have with Him, the easier it is worship Him and reflect that amazing love to a home, work place, community, church and world that so desperately needs to experience it.

As warm and fuzzy as the concept of Santa congers up, his is a terrible leadership style! The idea that there is one main man (or person) at the top, with hundreds of little helpers making him look good would be considered bad leadership even by bad leaders. Santa is a larger than life person. Everyone knows his name and he’s the one who gets the credit and the adulation by people all over the world. He rides in with a slick suit and everyone thinks it’s because of him that children everyone get toys at Christmas. We never hear anything about an executive team, or structure, or succession plan; all the hallmarks of bad leadership.

A coach on the other hand…is a totally different leader. It’s the players that are seen as the stars by everyone. The coach stays on the bench or in the dugout. The coach’s job is mostly done out of the sight of the crowds and the fans. Not too many people even know the coach’s name because his job is to make the players known. A coach is behind the scenes or on the side and rarely in the spot light. The players are actually better at playing the game than the coach is. The point of the organization is the team and not the individual.

While every leader would probably agree that being like a coach is better than being like Santa, it is a lot harder to actually live and lead like that. We have to fight our self-focused nature to take Santa-like credit and spot light in our conversations and leadership. We like the idea of empowerment, delegation, and servanthood, but we like the feeling of the spotlight, the credit and the kudos.

Being like a coach or like Santa is not a onetime leadership decision. It is likely a decision we need to make multiple times a day when we examine the motives of our seemingly small decisions and actions. Let’s put on the filter that asks ourselves the question, “In this action, decision, or statement, am I trying to act like the big man in the red suit, or the one on the sideline wearing the same uniform as everyone else on the field?”

 And I think we still do.

Why do so many people get so much joy out of pointing out when you’ve made a mistake? (The “I told you so’s” of our lives just can’t help themselves.) Some get so much joy letting people know that they were right and we were wrong. We get puffed up when we can point out what we know that someone else doesn’t. We feel included by knowing rumors, empowered by knowing more information, self-righteous by being right, and big by making someone else feel or look small in front of others.

That’s it! We make ourselves feel bigger by making other people sound smaller. It’s when people feel small themselves that they feel the need to make other people feel small-er. Those who make others feel small are themselves the most insecure. 

Jesus lifted up those who needed it and he humbled those who needed it. He humbled the religiously proud; who thought it was their job to use religion to make people feel small. But He also lifted up those who were made small by religion or the users of this world. I think that most people felt bigger around Jesus, not smaller. 

Do people feel bigger or smaller around me? Do I make people feel smaller because of their weakness and failures? Or do I use my strengths to leave people feeling great about who they are after they have been with me? Do I draw greatness out of people or do I leave them feeling less about who they are? 

It’s really not that hard to do. Here is the secret. If you’re tempted to speak words of criticism, reminding people of their failures; shut up! I’ve rarely ever met someone who doesn’t know what they’re not good at or who doesn’t know when they have failed. They don’t need your help to feel worse about themselves. Instead, speak words of encouragement. Tell people what they are good at. Remind them of why they are valuable. Help them with what they have failed at without sneaking in a  reminder that you’re better. (And if you have to confront someone with what appears to be a failure to you…make sure you have tons of affirmation credit with them first.) Tell them what they are better at than you are. Speak words of life and affirmation. Speak words that make people feel big and not small. 

Can you imagine what it would be like to live in that kind of home, work in that kind of environment, worship in that kind of church, or live in that kind of community?

The better we know people, the more freedom we feel to be critical of them or mistreat them. It’s sad that the better we are known the harsher we are judged. Why is it that we are often nicer to the drive-through attendant than we are to our children in our car? Why do we have more patience for the person behind us at the check-out line than we do for the people we work with every day? Why is it that we save our nice voice for people that we will likely only ever see once…and those we see all the time get our not-so-nice voice so often and freely?

I don’t know the answers to those questions. But I do know it’s not so with Jesus. The truth is that we couldn’t be known more and yet loved more. The more familiar we are with Jesus the more loved we are by Him. Read this…

“O LORD, you have examined my heart and know everything about me. You know when I sit down or stand up. You know my thoughts even when I’m far away. You see me when I travel and when I rest at home. You know everything I do. You know what I am going to say even before I say it, LORD. You go before me and follow me. You place your hand of blessing on my head. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too great for me to understand! I can never escape from your Spirit! I can never get away from your presence!

If I go up to heaven, you are there; if I go down to the grave, you are there. If I ride the wings of the morning, if I dwell by the farthest oceans, even there your hand will guide me, and your strength will support me. I could ask the darkness to hide me and the light around me to become night—but even in darkness I cannot hide from you. To you the night shines as bright as day. Darkness and light are the same to you.

You made all the delicate, inner parts of my body and knit me together in my mother’s womb. Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex! Your workmanship is marvelous—how well I know it. You watched me as I was being formed in utter seclusion, as I was woven together in the dark of the womb. You saw me before I was born. Every day of my life was recorded in your book. Every moment was laid out before a single day had passed.

How precious are your thoughts about me, O God. They cannot be numbered! I can’t even count them; they outnumber the grains of sand! And when I wake up, you are still with me!” (Ps 139)

It’s pretty clear and amazingly wonderful that the One that knows us the best will also love us the most. We will always be the safest in His presence; because, as Brennan Manning is known for saying, “Jesus loves us as we are and not as we should be, and we will never be as we should be.”

First of all, I was expectantly disappointed that so many in the international compassion “industry” would immediately criticize the video and those who created it. I’m critical of the critics. (What is it that causes us to be critical of what’s popular? That’s for another blog post.)

I thought the video was brilliant from an advocacy and awareness perspective; because advocacy and awareness was obviously their goal. With 75 million views just on YouTube (as of today)…of a video that 30 minutes long (not a 40 second funny)…this was a complete success from a cost / benefit perspective. I think that the leaders are being gentle and generous in the media when they are being criticized for not doing something that they never stated was their main goal. To judge them for only sending 30% of their money to programs in Uganda is completely uninformed. Programs in Uganda are only 1/3 of what this organization does. So…lets back off of the 30% issue and applaud them for nailing their target from an awareness perspective.

What I question is whether getting rid of Kony will really get rid of the problem of child soldiers in central Africa. Kony’s cronies would be there to take over and the environment that leaves children vulnerable would still exist if he was gone. I think the issue and causes and solutions are more complicated than the video suggests. Getting rid of Kony would feel good and be a huge moral win, just as it was with Bin Laden. But just as it is with Bin Laden, there will be others who are fueled by the same evil ideology. We want to have someone to blame for the world problems and it sure feels good to blame someone as evil as Joseph Kony.

But the global issues that contribute to the extreme poverty that leaves young girls and boys vulnerable need to be addressed. If families could provide for themselves, keep their children fed, safe under their roofs, in schools, and healthy, then the environment that leaves children vulnerable would change. And when it comes to creating an environment without extreme poverty, we have to look at ourselves and be confronted by the fact that we and our consumer culture are part of the problem that leaves children vulnerable to Joseph Kony. It doesn’t feel as good to realize we are partly to blame.

Just as evil as 30,000 child soldiers and sex slaves in Kony’s army…30,000 children died today from hunger and hunger related issues. And frankly, hunger and hunger related issues are a whole lot easier for us all to do something about.

And in the meantime…my hat is off and I’m giving a standing ovation to Invisible Children for making these 30,000 children very visible to the world.

It’s the difference between arrogance and humility. Self-centeredness and other-centeredness. It’s really remarkable how many people make themselves the orientation of knowledge or experience.

Just stop and listen to yourself when you are talking about other people or groups and see how many times your comments are black and white judgments. It usually happens when we are angry, gossiping, or venting (often a sterile name for gossip or slander). We make ourselves and our knowledge and values the expected norm for everyone else and the filter through which we judge people.

We prejudge the motives or intensions of others. We make broad oversimplified stereotypes in order to make sense of people who aren’t like us. This tendency in all of us has given rise to common daily conflict in marriages and work places to the horrors racism, ethnocentrism, sexism, and even war. I believe that the inability to put ourselves in the shoes of other people, the inability to empathize or understand why people do what they do is the seed that grows the fruit of division and unhealthy conflict.

Granted…empathy is easier for some than others…but everyone can stop and first say “Help me to understand why…”

 I wish THE Church was more like the food court.

 The five different places in the food court aren’t arguing which place to eat is better. The manager at Pizza Hut isn’t standing out front preaching that the food served there is the only REAL food. The manager at the Italian place isn’t wandering over to those in line at Burger King subtly telling them that their food is more relevant. The young guitar playing Starbucks manager isn’t out front saying that they serve lattes and the other places only serve average church coffee. In fact all of these places are sharing the resources they can. They are sharing seats, garbage cans, cleaning staff, bathrooms and parking lots. Why duplicate the resources they can share? That way more money, time and people can be spent on serving hungry people. The end goal is the same. The people are getting fed before they wing off to wherever they are going. The process of getting fed is only about preference.

 The parallel is hopefully obvious. Sunday school or kids clubs, music style, programing, staffing, sermons, curriculum, and youth groups are all preferences of the process of getting fed. But far too often we make our particular preferences sacred and say to everyone else that the way we do things is THE most right; that our way of feeding is THE most right way to feed people. It drives me crazy and I catch myself far too often in that same thinking. We make our normal the most right, and while we wouldn’t outright say it; we walk around like the other places to eat just aren’t quite as good as ours. Wow is that arrogant and it makes God so incredibly small.

 I think that the food court has a lot to teach the church.

While the topics of heaven, hell, salvation and eternal destiny carry with them the most sacred of treatment, I also think that, as usual, we Christians have spent lots of time and emotional energy looking for black and white. And while I have some very strongly held convictions on the topics, as I get older, I think that there is a lot more grey than there is black or white…and I think that God is ok with that. He’s big and convincing enough that if He wanted this stuff more clear…He would have made it unquestioningly so.

Another pre-thought for me before I go onto comment; I am pretty squarely in the election and predestination camp when it comes to who goes to heaven and who goes to hell. I don’t think we have a choice in the matter. Both of these books assume a traditional evangelical approach to how someone ends up in heaven or hell; that it’s an individual’s choice to choose to follow Christ or not…that our regeneration is conditional on our believing.  Because I don’t believe that, I found myself able to avoid some of the emotional allergies that other evangelicals have when reading these books. (It also made me love the fact that Chan dealt with Romans 9!)

Just comparing the style of the two authors, I really warmed to Chan’s humility and reflective feel. He seemed to write with a much more soft and self-examining tone. He left room for interpretation where there was room…but didn’t shy away from being bold. I felt that Erasing Hell was a great conversation I was having with Francis.

What I liked about Love Wins was Bells ability to help me reflect on how much of my understanding of basic theology is based on scripture or based on church tradition or the arts. I found myself uncomfortably admitting that many of my thoughts, bias’s, convictions are founded upon others mental images, cultural interpretations, and artistic licenses.

But on the core issues of these books, and the debates about them, I parked on something that Chan articulated so well. I believe that our evangelical roots and methods have led us down a path of, albeit subtly at first, refashioning God in our image. To make God more attractive and palatable, we have painted a picture of His love, compassion, grace, forgiveness, and patience. And while He is all that, He is not only that. I also find myself apologetic for scriptures and stories that I think would tarnish God’s image or cause people to say, “WHAT! You believe in a God who said, or did or allowed THAT?” Fashioning a “better” image for God is still idolatry. He doesn’t need me to make Him more attractive. In fact, I really just need to pay attention that my life doesn’t give people a reason not to want to follow Christ.

 I believe that heaven and hell are real places. I don’t know what either will be like completely. I do know that heaven is in the presence of God and hell is absent of the presence of God. I know that heaven is better than I can imagine (and definitely better than this world), and hell is worse than I can imagine (and I don’t want anyone to go there either). I also know it’s not my responsibility to get people to heaven, but it is my responsibility to be like Christ, and then let Him do what He wills with people’s eternal destiny. I just need to be a good representative. I also believe that God is doing nothing wrong by sending people to hell and some to heaven. He’s the potter. He’s God and I’m not. I don’t understanding it and I don’t even like it sometimes.

 But I am glad that I worship a God that is bigger than my ability to understand.

“Oh, I’m not too bad. I’m taking a few classes, working two jobs, volunteering at church and on the side I’m writing a novel. I hardly sleep and practically live on coffee, but it’s great. What have you been up to?”

“Me? Just work I guess.”

“That must be nice.” [thinks: slacker]

Have you ever had that conversation? I have many times, and over the years I have found myself playing both roles.

We take this sort of talk for granted, but if we step back and get a bit of perspective, it is a fascinating social construct with massive—and frightening—implications.

Those short conversations give us a glimpse of the way people view the world, because it is often the little day to day practices that reveal our deepest values.

You can see it play out every Monday at the office, and every Sunday in church lobbies around the world. People who have not seen each other in a few days or weeks start to catch up, and the talk quickly turns toward comparing notes on how terribly busy we all are. Volunteer positions, family commitments and work loads are listed, as each of us demonstrates just how much we are trying to juggle.

The sad thing is, we are quite proud of it.

And not very secretly proud either.

Oh sure, we complain about how we have not had a real day off in weeks, or how much work it all is. But somehow all our complaining sounds rather like bragging. It’s just backhanded bragging, like complaining that you didn’t expect learning Spanish to be so much work after you had such high scores in French, German and fifth-century Latin.

You can hear it in the voices of those recounting their busy schedules, and the guilt with which many of us have learned to speak of having free time. We’ve bought into the gospel of busyness. We’ve accepted the narrative we are constantly sold by our society—that our value rests in what we can produce, that we are loved for what we can accomplish. Full calendars become a badge of honor.

Lee, a pastor I knew quite well, was a perfect example. The only pastor at a small rural church, he worked constantly. In his mind, the success or failure of the church was on his shoulders, completely dependent on his level of activity. Between studying, hospital visits, preaching and leading worship on Sunday, teaching a few additional times each week and being constantly on call for everyone in his church, he hardly had a free moment all week. And you could tell. He was chronically tired and often dealt with long periods of discouragement. But he loved his church, he wanted to do right by them and the only way he could see to be a “successful” pastor was to work even harder despite his declining physical and emotional health. Because to Lee, like so many of us, work had become the way he measured his value.

So we push ourselves harder and harder. We sleep less, we work more and we do indeed accomplish a great deal.

But in the process we begin to forget how to sit,

and think,

and breathe,

and pray,

and read for pleasure,

and have a real conversation with a friend, or family member or spouse

and savor a drink for its flavors and complexities, not its ability to chemically induce either wakefulness or sleep.

Here’s the dirty little secret of the gospel of busyness: It promises us a full and satisfying life, but, in the end, it makes our lives emptier. It uses us for what we can contribute, and in the process we live less, feel less, even love less.

Instead of a life filled with the satisfaction of endless accomplishments, we’ve gotten ourselves a generation of chronic exhaustion, absent workaholic parents and kids who have been not-so-subtly taught that the only way to earn the attention and love of others is with grades, paychecks or championships.

But your value is not determined by what you produce. Your loveliness is not based on what you accomplish or how full your calendar is.

Work is good—it’s part of the way God designed His image-bearers—but it is not the only thing we were made for. He created us to have a balance in life, going so far as to incorporate a cycle of work and rest into the very fabric of the created order. There is a time for work in that cycle, but there is also a time for rest and community and quiet contemplation.

A life of constant overcommitment is not a sign of success, or something to be bragged about. It is a sign of imbalance, a sign we have put our faith in the gospel of busyness instead of in a God who dares us to trust Him and be willing to rest.

There is hope for the overcommitted, though; we don’t have to live this way. We can balance good hard work with rest and play; in fact we were created to live in that balance. And the sooner we realize that, the sooner we can all stop playing the game of bragging that we are so very busy.

So the next time you catch up with a friend, refrain from contributing to the cycle. Refuse to brag about busyness as if it were a virtue, refuse to act like making time to rest is a mark of shame. If the very God who designed us thought that balancing work with rest was worthwhile, perhaps we should give it a try.