Spring break reading...

Last year at one of my lovely annual check-ups, I sat in the office of my WHNP during the debriefing segment of the appointment. You know you have a great WHNP when you spend 1.5 minutes talking about the exam and 23.5 minutes talking about the gospel. She rocks.

She had just read a book by David Platt and was telling me that it had pretty much turned her world upside down. Mind you, she didn't really follow tradition to begin with, so seeing her get more radical was truly radical indeed.

I put Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream on my reading list and figured I'd get around to it within a year or so. Believe it or not, teaching English isn't too conducive to keeping up with my personal reading list. I have to be all literary and stuff.

Spring break rolled around, and I had, in unprecedented fashion, finished all my lesson plans and grading before the end of the last day before break. I decided to go ahead and start Radical. It is very good. Very solid. I think more than anything, I appreciate the humility in which Platt writes. Second to that, I appreciate his putting a proverbial finger on the reason why I've been so discontent in my own mundane walk with the Lord, as well as in my engagement (or lack thereof) in church for the past few years. I won't give away everything here -- it is well worth finding a copy online and ordering it yourself.

I do want to share a couple of paragraphs that I found especially meaningful, though. They had to be meaningful; I underlined the whole page.

... In our Christian version of the American dream, our plan ends up disinfecting Christians from the world more than discipling Christians in the world. Let me explain the difference.


Disinfecting Christians from the world involved isolating followers of Christ in a spiritual safe-deposit box called the church building and teaching them to be good. In this strategy, success in the church is defined by how big a building you have to house all the Christians, and the goal is to gather as many people as possible for a couple of hours each week in that place where we are isolated and insulated from the realities of the world aound us. When someone asks, "Where is your church?" we point them to a building or give them an address, and everything centers around what happens at that location.

When we gather at the building, we learn to be good. Being good is defined by what we avoid in the world. We are holy because of what we don't participate in (and at this point we may be the only organization in the world defining success by what we don't do.) We live decent lives in decent homes with decent jobs and decent families as decent citizens. We are decent church members with little more impact on the world than we had before we were saved. Though thousands may join us, ultimately we have turned a deaf ear to billions who haven't even heard his name.

Discipling is much different.

Whereas disinfecting Christians involved isolating them and teaching them to be good, discipling Christians involves propelling Christians into the world to risk their lives for the sake of others. Now the world is our focus, and we gauge success in the church not on the hundreds or thousands whom we can get into our buildings but on the hundreds or thousands who are leaving our building to take on the world with the disciples they are making. In this case, we would never think that the disciple-making plan of Jesus would take place in one service a week at one location led by one or two teachers. Disciple making takes place multiple times every week in multiple locations by an army of men and women sharing, showing, and teaching the Word of Christ and together serving a world in need of Christ. (Chapter 5: The Multiplying Community, 104-105)

Our family recently hit a rough patch that necessitated our stepping out from our disinfected world. Although from the outside it seemed like a decidedly fallen-world situation, we have seen the Lord already working out a plan that is far greater than we could have imagined. He has disciplined us, chastened us, stretched us, challenged us, undergirded us, gone before us, and blessed us. Only God could work all that into one situation.

As a result, we find our focus shifting a little from our disinfected culture to the world where we can actually share Jesus with others. It's a baby-step radical, but I think it's the beginning of something pretty special.

And they all lived happily ever after...

Table Prama...

Shhh... pretend that this actually posted on the date it says it posted. 'Kay?  Thanks!

Do you remember middle school/junior high school? Yes, I am old; we had junior high school instead of middle school. We also had sixth-grade centers because evidently sixth-graders are academically and socially on a whole 'nother level from the rest of the age spectrum.

But I digress... and use cliche not-so-masterfully also...

I hated lunch in junior high. It wasn't the food. Actually, I rarely ate the food. My dad owned his own business, and we were coming out of a recession, so in a brilliant plan to acquire more Izod [by] Lacoste shirts, I took the dollar my dad gave me for lunch each day, bought a  ten-cent ice cream sandwich and a ten-cent milk for lunch, and I saved the rest. The Monday dollar went for food. Tuesday-Friday dollars went into the clothing fund. I made $4.00 each week not eating what I was supposed to eat for lunch, mostly in eighth and ninth grades.

But the junior high cafeteria was brutal. It wasn't until I took sociology at UNC that I realized why it was so brutal. The junior high cafeteria is a microcosm of social stratification. It's the social version of the food chain, with the popular girls at the top. I was shy, I didn't have the coolest clothes, and instead of being a brilliant athlete, I was a mediocre arts student.  Junior high was a little rough, largely because of the cafeteria.

The popular table, which had six seats actually, hosted twelve girls who sat tightly packed around their designer lunch boxes, talking about their latest clothing purchases or boy quests. At my table we spent most of lunch figuring out how we could make a move closer to the popular table.


Fast forward... a lotta years... and in the prama season, it's time to select a set of eight people to sit at a table together for the prom. Immediately the tables are labeled: popular girls and dates; jocks and dates; theatre people; band kids with dates; band kids without dates; student leaders; rebels; and....*shudder* (yes, I did actually hear someone call it this out loud) losers.


Our school officially has a Junior/Senior banquet. Dancing's not included, as there is way too much disagreement amongst us Christian-types about what sorts of dancing and music are acceptable in a social setting, if any at all. I get it. I'm fine with it. It is not an issue with our family one way or another. But the banquet is the big thing at our school. I could even capitalize it and say it's the Banquet.

For weeks there were closed-door negotiations about who was sitting with whom for the Banquet. It was big stuff. After more than a month of  positioning and planning, the sign-up sheets went up. And there was PRAMA. People literally raced to the bulletin board. They marked out names and added other names. It looked like a mini ink battle had broken out on the wall.

There was weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth as names went under invisible labels in groups of eight.

When the ink well finally ran dry, after a few days of the sign-up sheets hanging for the whole world to see, the signs came down. The coordinator had to call students to the office to decipher the cryptic markings on the sheets. I'm not sure anyone escaped table prama unscathed. There was a lot of fallen-worldness.

My solution for this problem was simple: assigned seats. We could use something highly creative like alphabetical order. Or we could get sophisticated, using a special algorithm that determines the best mixture of students based on transcript, extracurricular activities, and number of boxes of World's Finest chocolate sold.

But God had a bigger plan. The lesson in all this table prama for the kids who had ears to hear was that love covers a multitude of ink. In the end, students realigned their hearts and their tables. It was [almost] all good.

Do you ever have one of those days...

when you really want to blog about it, but you know you can't because you don't really need to go airing the dirty laundry for the neighbors to see?

That's pretty much how our Sunday morning went.

So, forgive the cryptic post, but it would be totally cool to see how all this is going to fit together someday. Right now, it's just painful to watch.