In the last several years, I've read my share of books that annotate and elucidate C.S. Lewis' work, and this cryptic title from previously-unknown Lewis scholar Michael Ward wins the "best of" trophy hands down.
Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis is fraught with overtones of medieval mystery and hidden meanings, and if you love the writing of Lewis, it reads like a page-turner. It's a testament to Michael Ward's audacity that he presents his findings in such a headlong way, and evidence of his persuasive scholarship that only a chapter or two in, you find yourself nodding in surprised agreement.
What has Ward done? I don't want to spoil Planet Narnia's air of mystery by spilling its secrets in a bullet list--but Ward effectively "cracks the code" of the Narnia books and gives high level insights into the entire corpus of C.S. Lewis' writing. This is an accomplishment, for Lewis-lovers, on par with a physicist unearthing the Unifying Theory of the universe.
We discover what made Lewis tick, at a deep imaginative level, and learn the rhyme and reason at work behind the scenes in Narnia. Lewis' stories--as have often been suggested--are enigmas on the level of authorial inspiration and over-arching theme (What holds the books together?), but Ward has pieced together the clues and discovered the "deep magic" of Lewis' creative ethos.
Michael Ward's gift for uncovering themes, tracing threads, and piecing together clues is unsurpassed. As a scholar, he's brilliant. But the brilliance extends to his writing as well, which contains a brightness, a lyrical buoyancy, and an incisive poeticism.
*** I award this one an enthusiastic three stars--don't miss it. Planet Narnia is a paradigm-shaping book and a high water mark in C.S. Lewis scholarship. I can't recommend it highly enough to the person looking for jaw-dropping insight into Lewis' writing.
Wednesday, May 07, 2008
Planet Narnia by Michael Ward (Book Review)
Sunday, November 04, 2007
Amazon OutMacs iTunes: More Portable Music, Cheaper
I could be wrong, but from where I'm standing, it looks like Amazon just outdid iTunes in terms of their MP3 offerings
Every song and album on Amazon MP3 is 
available exclusively in the MP3 format without digital rights management (DRM) software. This means that Amazon MP3 customers are free to enjoy their music downloads using any hardware device, organize their music using any music management application, and burn songs to CDs.
The upshot: Amazon is offering iPod-style music
you're looking for DRM-free music, you'll end up saving $3-4 an album by going with our planet's biggest media-distribution conglomerate. Just something to keep in mind.
Saturday, October 06, 2007
You Life Cannot Be Explained By Last Week
Sometimes it looks as if the daily junk, the monotonous trials that we batter our way through, are the common factor in life. But the meaning of our lives, let alone their ugly morasses, cannot be explained within the earthly environ.
Earth is just a brackish blip on the radar screen of God's deep wonder, the unfathomable artwork of all created being. It is nebulous to us because we're like dots in a Seurat painting--albeit very valuable, cognizant dots. Or maybe we are fiery points of light, placed against a background that disguises our identities. And this is why we cannot reckon the course of our spiraling lives, our spinning planet, we, the stars who walk alone on earthly streets.
The universe is electric with the power of God, sparking with his expectation like a high voltage wire. The world spins, a foam fleck in the sea of space, the sea of his purposes and plans, and God waits—if God can be said to wait—for earth to run its course, to fulfill her purpose, and the next journey, the greater and truer and unending journey to begin.
The God of unbearable brilliance, whose suns revolve in his palms like fireflies, God of mice and men, of creatures and cosmos—his world is not a dingy world. Knowing that our lives are in the hands of this lovely and terrible Being, how shall we falter? When he asks, Do you trust me, how should our answer, unswervingly, not be YES?
Wednesday, November 01, 2006
Gravity Escape (A Short Story)
Every once in awhile I feel compelled to post a creative piece that is baffling to many readers. Viva la creativity!
::
It was getting harder to avoid being liquified.
When the planet lurched, you felt your bones flex, bend, as if they were about to perform a jumping jack. Then, if you had the presence of mind, you would be running, sprinting with bouncing bones, toward one of the gravity escapes.
The elderly were dying fastest, because their bones were brittle, like dry kindling. They made sad little crackling sounds when they went. Of course, milk sales were way up, but the advantage was mostly mental: milk-drinkers had better morale. The body can't absorb calcium like a sponge. It all came down to that split-second when you turned and dashed skyward.
The best you could do was keep a route of escape in mind and move fast - stay away from crowds. When you felt those familiar, chilling vibrations, you didn't stop to think, you just jumped up and ran. You made survival into a habit, like buying coffee. You learned to climb the gravity escapes without dropping your brief case.
But still, all the time you are thinking, This isn't right. It can't go on. What we need is an Earth Escape, you think. Not a gravity escape. How do we move into orbit, how do we reach the clouds?
Thursday, March 09, 2006
Beautiful Evil People
A Material Problem
If you are a materialist, you should probably not make comments like “Things are not always as they appear.” This would be disingenuous. “What you see is what you get” is a central tenet of the naturalistic worldview.
The problem is how do you (as a die-hard materialist) explain things that you undeniably don’t see—but still get? The ‘mind’ is an obvious and often cited example. But I'm thinking of something a step further down the road. How do we explain lovely, evil people?
We glance at a good-looking person, and our gut feeling is that a loveable, well-developed animal stands before us. Think again. How do some of the planet’s most egocentric, underhanded specimens get off with being so gorgeous?
The obvious answer is to say that those who generated a smiling façade for their treachery fared best in the brute race of natural selection. But then we are confronted by the fact that those who can so countenance their evil are a slim majority. Not only do the beautiful and bad do well, but so do the ugly and bad—not to mention there are more of them, and they progress just as ‘beautifully’ in their badness.
We may as well say that the world should be peopled exclusively by the beautiful by now, since physical appeal is such a conferrer of benefit. But the facts don’t correspond. Evil people pop up everywhere, incarnated as both hunks and slobs, divas and ne’er-look-wells. Likewise the good.
If atoms and quarks are the fundamental reality, the world should be a much more straight-forward place.
Tuesday, March 07, 2006
Life is Complex and Simple
I think most of us have an ongoing vulnerability to people who will tell us that life is more simple than it really is. We like it. It feels good. Consider this popular therapy:
- If you just buy this product and wear it prominently when you hit the town, the girls will line up.
- If you just think about yourself more positively, life will straighten itself out.
- If you just trust Jesus, everything will go well.
- All desire is bad, but stop wanting anything and life is beautiful.
In every act there is a component—call it inclination—that determines whether real work, real good, has been accomplished or whether the exertion was utterly wasted. This means, in a very significant sense, that life is not simple but complex.
There is this dimension of thought-act that can make everything I do futile and invalid. I can make money hand over fist and be living, spiritually, a contradiction. I can win every game I enter and be engaged in self-annihilation. I can volunteer my time and sell my soul.
By the same token, there’s a dimension that can transform the most putrid duty into a glorious engagement with reality, a poetic affirmation of my identity as God’s man. I can pick up trash from the gutter and revel in my creaturehood. I can lie sick in bed, apprehend my disease, and still understand that God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world. I can even die happily.
The ultimate act of self-destruction, for the materialist, may be the greatest act of worship for the Christian. That’s why Christ is either a pitiful laughingstock or a thing of awful beauty. There is a hidden dimension in life, underlying every weekday, turning every act to gold or ashes.
It is because of this spiritual reality that I can say with Paul, “For me to live is Christ (even in prison or when beat up by Jews on jihad), and to die (even painfully) is gain.”
Once this realization dawns, in its distilling brilliance, the shadows of complexity fade into the background and simplicity takes center stage again. As Kierkegaard said, “Purity of heart is to will one thing.” Worship—praying, talking with, and pursuing God—brings a clarity, a center, a refreshing focus.
Life is complex, but worship can trace the unifying strands that weave throughout the bittersweet.
Wednesday, November 02, 2005
An End to Bittersweetness
On days when I have no idea what I’m doing here, I remind myself that not knowing is part of the package. God hasn’t told us everything. Vision is blurry. Knowledge is faulty. I know generally why I’m on planet earth, but not precisely. Life is bittersweet.
And bittersweetness is ok for now, but I’m counting on the fact that it won’t last. One day the veins of melancholy that run through every level of life’s strata will be extracted for good. No more slivers of sadness waiting around the bend. Nothing more but goodness and more goodness, pain-free living and being forever. Even memory, I think, will be changed. Memory now is marked with regret, with loss. In a sense, even to remember something good is to have lost it. This will no longer be the case. Goodness won’t be hidden in the haze of the past. Happiness won’t rest on the hinge of the future. Life will be good—full stop.
I think a lot about bittersweetness, but I can’t wait for it to end.
Tuesday, September 27, 2005
Secret Plans for Greatness
The good news is that we have a cure for movie stars. The bad news is that it kills your average snob as well.
Funny thing about unabashed self-assertion. As much as it may annoy us in others, it seems we are strangely tolerant of it. The hot-head athlete, the glossed-over star, they may tick us off, but they seldom send us through the roof.
Otherwise, how come Hollywood and professional ballers are still in business?
My theory is that we treat human arrogance leniently because we know it’s inherently limited. It’s really all just a game, and however closely we may follow that game, we never really forget it’s just play. Smoke and mirrors. A huge masked ball. Because people get older, or they get dealt to a loser team, they play a stupid role, they get busted with marijuana, or land in a drunken fight… We know it’s only a matter of time until so-and-so’s personal luster wears thin.
There is, however, another reason for our clemency in the face of ego. We each have our own secret aspirations. You see, it would be foolish of me to deride Allen Iverson’s brashness when I hope to send my own NBA planet into orbit next week. Likewise J-Lo and the girl next door. We’re not dumb. Most of us won’t call our competition’s true weakness out too loudly, because that would sabotage our personal plan of attack.
So when I see Jones living like he’s a god, I may snicker, but I probably won’t really call him out. I’m more likely to sneer at his passé style than truly hit him where it hurts. (Hey Jones, you’re gonna die and worms’ll eat ya.) Why my reticence?
Because I know that, at some convenient point in the near future, I’m launching a face campaign of my own. We would all, when it comes down to it, prefer to have the face that launched a thousand ships—better yet, a thousand ESPY previews or People covers. Most of us think we’ve been robbed: If the world had 20/20 vision, it would be beating a path to my door.
The way I see it, the most direct way to demolish stuck-on-myselfness is the one route most of us will never take. In other words, only a really humble person could trash a truly conceited man. Because I must include myself in the remedy.
Our desire for unwarranted stardom, our secret I-wish-that-was-me-ness, prevents us from seeing arrogance with X-ray vision—seeing it as it is: A walking bag of bones draped in too-tight glittery clothing. Laughable, really. But we can’t afford to laugh too uproariously, because the joke is also on us.
I’ll sooner tolerate Jones’ insufferable arrogance—so long as it is mildly entertaining—than stifle my own. This painfully awkward phenomenon is what Jesus hinted at, I think, when he said, I have come in my Father's name, and you do not receive me. If another comes in his own name, you will receive him. How can you believe, when you receive glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the only God? (John 5:43-44 ESV)
Christ pointed up our fundamental disconnect where glory is concerned. We're ready to tolerate almost anyone's self-assertion as long as it means they'll wink at our pretensions in due course. But bring deity, true glory, into the picture, and our homemade grandeur starts looking shabby. Pride screams out and then starts developing rigor mortis. The game's not being played by the house rules anymore and we don't like it.
So while it hurts me to say this, I've got to choke it out. After consideration, this “human glory” thing is for the birds, is what I’m thinking.
Monday, May 02, 2005
Spiritual Journey: In Search of Smallness
How We Look for Humility In All The Wrong Places
Like many people, I believe a sense of smallness in relation to the universe is wise, and can be useful. But unmediated smallness can leave one comatose, hiding under a rock, or locked in a “religious” trance—which is really the same thing. How can we acknowledge our finitude without drowning in it?
Sometimes the problem is one of initial orientation. As the proverbial farmer supposedly said to the disoriented traveler, “If there is where you’re trying to get, here is not the place to start.” We often let the wrong things reduce us.
Repetitive trials often seem the common factor in life. Arguably, life “belittles” us, but there’s a horrible irony in how she does it. It’s the minutia that get us, small details that ruin us by their pure banality. Parking tickets, spilled coffee, petty snubs, network crashes, nervous ticks, messages buried in junk mail… Stacked end to end, life’s trivialities dwarf us. Long commutes home break more people than the waves of the Atlantic. Few people lie in bed whimpering over sunsets.
In reality, the necessary finitude of life is not generated by faulty traffic flow or corporate politics. Nuisances are not ultimately humbling.
When a hundred paltry necessities neutralize us, or we’re smacked down by King Urgent, we may think we are learning “smallness.” In reality, we’re watching traffic zoom by the neck of a dead-end alley. We think we’re approaching humility when in fact “here is not the place to start.” “Today was a bear; therefore I’m humble” is an invalid syllogism.
Suppose we step back. We’ve been trying to document smallness in the wrong environment. Realizing all our camera work has been in vain, we pull down the lights, throw it all in the van, and restart the shoot. On the new set, we open the aperture wide, then pan in. What’s this, a dirty golf ball? Ah, my bad—in the words of the Switchfoot song, “Welcome to the planet, welcome to existence; everyone’s here…” We’re seeking a new context for smallness, and we think we’ve found it: the gigantic universe.
We’re staring into the cosmos, and there’s earth, a small watery sphere wrapped in cloudy gauze. We see the globe, and it’s…little. Little?—it’s infinitesimal. The golf ball idea was more apt than we realized. Here, then, is the setting for humility. The surrounding bigness, not the surrounding pettiness, is the source, correct? And so we stare into the sky after a long day at the office, and muse, like Stephen Spielberg, that we are just little blips of A.I. after all. Or do we?
As we look into the star fields, it strikes us, as it did G.K. Chesterton, that there is nothing inherently better about bigness. As he wrote, “Man was always small compared to the nearest tree.” If we revere the starry nebulae, why not the Grand Canyon? If the Grand Canyon, why not a whale? If a whale, why not our fat uncle? No one argues that, obviously, Oprah is better than Mother Teresa. Bigness is not the key. If painful minutia is a dead end alley, plain magnitude is an empty auditorium.
Where then should we turn in our search for cogent smallness? We’ve ruled out grating nuisances as petty and chaotic. We’ve disqualified the cosmos on the basis of their inexpressive vastness. Somehow, though, we know that “littleness” is desirable—we all long for it in others, however disingenuously we cultivate it ourselves. We sense that a person should have a quietude about her, a willingness to admit limitations. The words “reverence” “awe” and “wonder” may or may not come into play, but they likely represent part of what we think: that wise people are not pretentious. If we come to the point of honesty, we wish to acknowledge our own bounds; some corner of us wants to throw up our hands and bow to something.
After surviving a few firefights, we acknowledge the innate rightness of modesty. We don’t always win at everything. We must be taken with a grain of salt, and most of us know it. But a smallness built on air is ludicrous. No one is pleasingly self-doubting and deferential merely by intending to be so—he must have provocation. And ultimately, because we know a sense of finitude is necessary for every human (not just those who admit it), the provocation must be universal.
We don’t question the reductive ability of our failed alternatives; taken in isolation, they work, but they work to the wrong end: Nagging mishaps may “reduce” us—but the result is an anguished driven-ness. Spatial vastness may dwarf us—but the result is a limpid passivity.
Undeterred, we continue to seek this elusive smallness, this existential modesty we sense is right. And this time our search is rewarded. As we begin to pull our cameras down again, the scene instantly changes—but we haven’t moved. A drama unfolds in front of us, and we didn’t cue it up. The lighting dims, and an altered world appears.
The universe, the part of it surrounding earth at least—flares with light. The light is brighter than stars, and it dances like no radiance we’ve seen before. A divine electricity arcs and gleams with laughter, and for a moment, we get it:
The cosmos are electric with the power of God, sparking with his expectation like a high voltage wire. The world spins—a foam fleck in the sea of space—the sea of God’s purposes and plans, and God waits—if God can be said to wait—for earth to run its course, to fulfill her purpose as the prime jewel in his crown. Christ tends his creation artfully, and it grows, with us inside it. The next journey—the greater and truer and unending journey—will soon begin. We sense, without seeing, the God of unbearable brilliance, whose suns revolve in his palms like fireflies.
This God of mice and men, Ruler of creatures and cosmos—his world is not a dingy world, nor materially insignificant. But “size” transcends mere mass, and in relation to Christ, the galaxies, let alone the earth, are tiny. The world is a speck, a dot, an atom—but it’s an atom that shines like diamonds. The Creator has infused it with life. As the reel runs into blackness, we sense a Presence at our backs. There is an Audience behind the audience; the footage flickers in our retinas.
When the theatre leaves us, it is still daylight, and we rub our eyes. Beneath us, our globe hangs in space, a brackish blip on the canvas of all created being. It keeps turning, but the universe is not huge, and life is not annoyingly monotonous.
We can hardly reckon the course of our spiraling lives, let alone their worth. We do know one thing, though: as we kneel before the Creator, we feel the gravity of a momentous smallness and a terrible beauty. We are smaller and more valuable than stars, we who walk “alone” on earthly streets.
Tuesday, January 18, 2005
So Throw The Book At Me
Lindsay and I were “stuck” at home again today, our expertise as substitute teachers not having been called upon this morning. It's their loss.
Among other things, this interlude gave me a chance to polish off some assigned reading for my recent J-term class. Which, in turn, caused me to reflect on the feast I’ve enjoyed in the last several weeks, Reading What I Want To Read. Since going back to school, this is an experience I haven’t had regularly, and it’s been luxurious.
Now, I realize that listing these titles would not actually qualify as a “post of substance.” More horrible to consider, some might consider it intellectual preening or literary one-upmanship. But it’s really neither. Instead, it’s just me leaning back in my chair for a moment, closing my eyes and smiling…before I’m demolished by a flood of Hebrew syntax, textbook definitions and desperate memorization. Just a brief moment of peace, savoring the days I stole from the specter of cold academic expediency.*
So then, the books I’ve devoured during break:
Out of the Silent Planet – C.S. Lewis
Perelandra – C.S. Lewis
That Hideous Strength – C.S. Lewis
The incredible “Space Trilogy” by Lewis melds metaphysics with story and does it flawlessly. The philosophy is the story. God appears awfully great and I feel small, yet crucially significant. Awe, horror, and romance are invoked; the glory of creation, the banality of evil, the “truth” of myth—for Lewis, nothing is off limits.
Rumors of Another World – Philip Yancey
Yancey’s intentional foray into skepticism attempts to lure seekers toward faith with evocative “rumors” of deity. The resulting book is conversational and thought-provoking, but something less than an intellectual (or spiritual) tour de force. One could level the criticism that Rumors pushes one toward “transcendence” as much as toward Christian faith, as Yancey’s evidences aren’t always singularly Christ-centered.
Reed’s Beach – Bret Lott
Lott tackles pain and loss in this sympathetic story of a grieving couple. Their counterparts (another couple with “scars”), who serve as conduits for healing, are beautifully atypical in their sustaining beliefs. A great story where faith is more seen than heard.
Seeing & Savoring Jesus Christ - John Piper
Classic Piper, focusing on key aspects of Christ’s person. This was a vision-renewing book. The chapter dwelling upon Jesus’ eternal happiness was my favorite.
I have the sinking feeling that I’m forgetting someone—or someone’s book, which is very nearly the same thing. If so, there will be an update. In the meantime, enjoy whatever reading leisure you have to the fullest! And if you have none...eat your heart out. I will be...in about a week.
*This is what you call hyperbole, or dramatic exaggeration. I actually like my classes.
Wednesday, January 05, 2005
Story Bound
Faced with hours of precipitation and forced inactivity, it’s is hard to conceive of a day more gloriously spent than in bookish drowsiness. Yesterday, after an early-morning errand to get the car inspected, banal reality was put on hold as I burned through Out of the Silent Planet, the first book in C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy. (Lewis is one of those authors I feel “homesick” for after longish absences. It’s been since August since I read The Great Divorce.) Today Lindsay and I hoped to work, but a forecasted ice-storm closed down the school district and put an end to that aspiration. Instead, I turned to Perelandra, the second book, and with just pages to go…I take a few moments off to gloat.
Two non-mandatory books in two days. Aaaah. This sure feels good. There's nothing quite like being snow-bound and story-bound at the same time.
Tuesday, December 28, 2004
The Perfect Storm
A Christmas Retrospective
I’m finally breaking my blissful Christmas silence. Three days after the fact, I feel adequately rested and coherent enough to attempt a post. True, our apartment is still formless chaos. Gifts are strewn around, chocolate piled ridiculously high. But as Shakespeare’s Henry V says (with questionable veracity), “All things be ready if our minds be so.” My mind is still harbored in Christmas, but the blogger impulse is tugging at the moorings. And actually, the two motives don’t need to disagree.
On Christmas Eve I discovered that—Surprise!—blogs can actually be relevant to “real” life. I had the opportunity to share a devotional “meditation” at our Christmas Eve service, a chance for us to think deeply about Christmas, and a previous post gave me my theme. I guess this blogging thing isn’t totally unrelated to my waking existence after all.
Christmas Eve became even more unique when Lindsay and I arrived home to a pre-Christmas surprise. If I may offer a variation on some oft-parodied lines:
‘Twas the night before Christmas
and all through the house
scarce an outlet was stirring—
just the ones by the couch.
And so it was. Most of our apartment was without power and we didn’t have heat—Santa had played us a dirty trick. This precipitated* a change in our evening’s plans. After Lindsay phoned the electricity people, she moved her base of wrapping operations into the living room, and I holed up in the study, the only two rooms with light. We put on warm clothing (since it was below zero outside) and waited for the power to come back on, which it did, sometime after midnight. A couple hours later, we had both finished wrapping our presents, doubly grateful for the gifts of Warmth and Light.
In the aftermath of this Christmas, I know that an intent focus on Christ “the Light” is the best way, really the only way, to weather this season. We call it a holiday, but Christmas is bittersweet, a time when expectations are trampled and painful absences become glaring. Christmas reveals an emptiness that no thoughtful gift can fill.
Sometimes we come away realizing that, despite our good intentions, “the world is too much with us,” and “peace on earth” is still only a good idea. Christmas, in truth, is an agent of sobriety. Apart from Christ, this season reveals merely holiday clutter, too many calories, and a billion silent people, wearily lengthening their orbits on a darkened planet. Separated from Jesus, Christmas does no one any real favors. Christ-less Christmas is a season of storms—sadness, irritation, ingratitude, stress and hurry. A cold apartment piled with gift bags but no light or heat.
But with Jesus…the storm of Christmas is Sweet. A hurricane may wreck your house, it may even kill you. And the tsunami of Christ, in a sense, is no different. When he arrived, he brought an ocean of spiritual sea-change, brimming to overflow the world, destroying human pretensions to grandeur. The waves from that arrival are still with us; at Christmas they lap most persistently on the beach of our awareness. If the season is void of Jesus, the flood may leave us cold and shivering. But if we know him, we splash in the waves that reduce us to who and what we really are—human and poor—and leave us ready for a glorious sunrise.
* This word appears in association with the Vocabulary Reclamation Project, which has been revitalized thanks to Norma, who knows a good word when she sees one.
Precipitated: Some may think of rain, snow, hail, etc., and this (precipitation) would not be unrelated. But the thought here is swift causation. Synonyms include “caused,” forced,” “provoked,” with an emphasis on the immediacy of the action. As in, “The former author of BitterSweetLife found that his surprise bestseller precipitated (brought on rapidly) a whole new lifestyle—one involving lots of gourmet coffee…and naps.”
Monday, October 24, 2005
Spiritual Prayer in a Physical World
How Does Prayer Hit the Asphalt?
In Pray Harder! Are We Playing Spiritual Politics? I posed several questions for us all to chew on. Some of them were:
If I don’t get what I ask for, was it my fault?
Does my faith, or the lack thereof, directly regulate God’s answers?
What does it mean to pray “according to God’s will?”
I asked the questions because prayer is an element in our spiritual journey that will never be less than vital.
As I considered my own response, I realized the issue was already becoming denser. The initial question—How does spiritual prayer interact with God’s will?—was beginning to wind off in several related-but-different directions.
I felt, as I sat down to write this, that I could follow one of several trails. 1) A discussion re: faith as an ingredient in answered prayer would be very fitting. But then, I could also talk about the 2) specificity or non-specificity of our prayers—should we pray in general terms, or take aim at explicit outcomes? A hand grenade or a sniper-rifle effect? Then again, the issue of 3) discerning God’s will and then praying “in the center of it” seemed very pertinent.
Where to go? Should I head down trail 1, trail 2, or trail 3? As usual, in these instances, the right answer seemed to be Yes.
This won't be easy, and it may not be pretty, but I’m going to try and meld the three above areas together in my answer.1 So how does spiritual prayer interact with God’s will? Well,
Prayer must be powered by faith, fueled by a free-ranging desire for God’s work to be done, and underlined by the understanding that we don’t see God's mind with x-ray vision.
I like the way that sounds. Very clean, very flowing. I almost want to leave it at that. But I guess I need to break down my topic sentence a little more. So, spiritual prayer must be...
A. Powered by faith...
The faith issue, as highlighted in James 1:6-8 (“Ask boldly, believingly, without a second thought…”) is unavoidable. Prayers can only be launched from the foundation of divine sovereignty, a big-picture trust. Praying to God without relying on his power, love, and compassion has all the effect of Irish luck. It’s humorous superstition, nothing more. I’m about to argue, however, that while dithering prayers lead straight to non-results, the relationship should not be inverted too quickly. Nothing happened when you prayed—because your prayer was weak-in-the-knees. This is too simple.
B. Fueled by a free-ranging desire for God's work to be done...
Praying with God’s will in mind means at least two things. One, we had better not ask God to bless our murder attempt with success or load us with gratuitous bling (limitations on the wish-list). Two, anything that conceivably could lead to God’s honor is fair game.
The second assertion may sound cavalier, but it isn’t. In the Bible, we find God inviting his people to air their personal concerns to him unreservedly: family concerns, money concerns, health concerns. God enjoys responding to his people, showcasing his ability. Elijah prayed for better weather. Paul asked God to remove his crippling disability, his “thorn in the flesh.” Jesus asked his Father to withdraw the necessity of the cross. Does this freedom, this childish initiative, extend to everything? Parking spaces? Locked apartment doors? I think so—with the acknowledgement that motive is central.
C. Underlined by the understanding that we don’t see God's mind with x-ray vision.
This may be the toughest sell. The question is, To what extent can we see, comprehend, assess-with-affirming-“hmmms” God’s specific, absolute will? To an adequate but not overpowering extent, I think. I would suggest that God’s unswerving, non-negotiable will for our lives, in terms of our knowing it, can be found in one place—a book. We could say that God’s will (again, in the absolute, perfect sense) involves our not knowing it completely—and living in light of this fact.
The dilemma is as follows.
- We want to pray according to God’s will.
- God’s will is in the Bible.
- But the Bible doesn’t mention my calculus test.
We want to honor God, want to obey him, but our sight is blurry, and God knows this. He intends it, for now. Therefore, as we pray, we exercise childish initiative—with the acknowledgement that our requests may not be answered as planned. We are free to fail in prayer. We can be assured, however, that God receives our requests and takes them into account. Having foreseen them before he framed up planet earth, he has long since factored their weight into his reckoning.
As followers of Christ, we are free to ask for his help in world-changing, day-changing, heart-changing ways. And in the end, if God answers my prayer for an unlocked door or a defogged mind, it can hardly be a trivial event.
:: end ::
Ironically, the briefer a piece like this is, the more potential there is for causing distress and irritation. I tried to keep this short, so I'll be happy to unpackage any aspect of it. (Then we can discover whether you misunderstood me, or
For those of you still mulling the original question over, I hope you persevere. As easy as it is to let the issue slide, I think the high dividends make the mental wrestling worthwhile. Feel free to append your responses and backlinks to this post or the previous Pray Harder! piece.
1 I realize that the phrase “my answer” is a little ironic, seeing as what I’m trying to do is simply take God at his word. “My answer,” therefore, should be understood simply as the Christ perspective, as related in the Bible—as clearly as I can make it out.
or 
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