What Are We to Make of Suffering?

A Lenten Reflection

When we are struck by illness, disappointment, depression, or when we are sinned against by violence or injustice, we can struggle to believe God, trust God, or feel God’s love.

Philosophers and theologians have done little better in the face of such pain and sometimes horrific evil. Yes, we can “explain” it by reference to free will. That is, we can’t truly love God or truly be in his image if we don’t have free will—which also opens the option of rejecting God, rejecting love, and choosing what is wrong. And I believe in free will and this line of thought.

Nonetheless, I still wonder: Is all the pain and suffering worth that? Can it justify the good? Does the possibility of love balance out the scales of senseless torture, murder, violence? I have a hard time seeing how we could say yes. Ultimately, I wonder, Wouldn’t it have better for God to not create at all rather than create a world with the horrific and sometimes massive amount of cruelty and death?

One thing that ironically gives me a glimmer of comfort is that the Bible doesn’t attempt to answer those sorts of questions the way so many try. When Job made such a challenge to God, God did not respond with the kind of answers we or Job might want. Instead he says to Job, my wisdom is seen in how I made the immensities and intricacies of the heavens and earth. Can you trust my wisdom for everything you don’t see?

In the New Testament, we don’t find answers either as we might want. But God does respond. He enters into the evil, sin, and death, of the world. He experiences the worst his own world can throw at him. At least, then, he knows what we have gone through. But in addition to that he responds to evil by fighting it, and he calls us to do the same.

We find in the Bible no superficial, “Oh, there’s a reason for everything,” or a flippant, “The good makes up for all the suffering.” Such responses would be insulting to anyone who has experienced deep pain. God takes evil much more seriously than that.

What we find is much more profound. During Lent, therefore, I consider that when it comes to evil God didn’t answer–he acted. In the cross is God’s fullest response in the battle against Evil and the Evil One. There he deals a death blow to Death. And in that I find hope as we look to the day when he will wipe away every tear and set all things right.

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photo credit: joaogbjunior Pixabay

Setting Things Right

A Lenten Reflection

In typography, when we straighten lines on both sides of a column of text we say it is justified. This gives a clean appearance so readers are not distracted by jagged edges. Readers can then focus on the words, not on how they look.

Jagged edges appear elsewhere too. A family member gets ill. We feel betrayed by a friend. Someone rear ends us. These and more pile up till we snap back harshly at those we love most. We fail to live up to our own standards of honesty, loyalty, charity.

We also need to be justified. Our lives need to be straightened and aligned with God. As Fleming Rutledge notes in The Crucifixion, the English words justify, justification, righteous, righteousness are all from the same word group in Greek.

    “Righteousness” does not mean moral perfection. It is not a distant, forbidding characteristic of God that humans are supposed to try to emulate or imitate; there is no good news in that. Instead, the righteousness of God is God’s powerful activity of making right what is wrong in the world. (author’s emphasis)

This activity involves our individual lives but also much more. Our broken world needs to be justified as well, a world in which justice is too often perverted.

    When we read, in both Old and New Testaments, that God is righteous, we are to understand that God is at work in his creation doing right. He is overcoming evil, delivering the oppressed, raising the poor from the dust, vindicating the voiceless victims who have had no one to defend them. (328)

The verb Rutledge frequently uses in her book to convey this action which justifies and makes righteous is to rectify. The world and all of us in it need to be rectified, to be set right.

As we enter Lent this Ash Wednesday, we remember that while we have been rectified in Christ, we are also still in the process of being rectified. We live in the already of Christ’s finished work, knowing that sin in ourselves and our world show that his blessings have not yet flowed as far the curse is found.

As he rectifies us now, we hold in that grace the hope that one day all will be set right.

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Image credit: Free-Photos Pixabay (woodtype); 41joseatortosa Pixabay (hillside)

Don’t Start Here

When we write, starting with an outline is almost impossible.

That’s the case I make in Write Better (chapter 3, if you are interested). First comes observing, thinking, questioning, reading, researching, discussing, jotting notes, and maybe drafting paragraphs. Somewhere in the middle we start organizing our ideas.

New York Times columnist David Brooks describes how he does exactly this.

    I am always collecting strings on about seven or eight columns. I’ve got piles of paper for gun control, immigration – whatever the issue of the day is – and then some intellectual things or cultural things. I’m collecting that string and I have a column due every three and a half days. . . . Based on what happens on the day before it’s due or the day it’s due, I’ll decide “Okay, I’m gonna do this one.” I have all this paper, documentation, notes I’ve taken from interviews, and I think geographically.
    I lay it out on the floor of my office in piles of paper. Every pile is a paragraph. I pick up a pile. Write that paragraph. Throw that pile of paper in the garbage. And then repeat for all the piles. By the time I start writing, the column is already 80 percent done. It’s the organizing of the piles that’s the key process.

That’s how I wrote Write Better. My research and doodling consisted of forty years of editing and speaking about writing, and twelve years of blogging about writing and editing. Those were my rough notes and research. Then I took those “piles” of material and started sorting.

I initially had at thirty or forty groups which I consolidated into about twenty. As I did so, I noticed they fell into four large categories—the craft, the art, and the spirituality of writing plus practical things writers need to know about publishing.

When I started seriously drafting the book, I continued to rework the arrangement of chapters. Then I got input from a dozen readers on my full draft who gave many suggestions for more reorganization. Once more I shifted chapters around.

Order and structure are essential in helping readers understand what we have to communicate. As I say in Write Better, we shouldn’t try to start with an outline. But we had better end with one.

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paper image credit: Pixabay myrfa

The Day I Flunked English

When I was in elementary school, I struggled to read.

I remember one particularly embarrassing episode when I was required to make a oral book report in third grade. I chose Winnie-The-Pooh, thinking it would be relatively easy to get through.

Whether due to lack of discipline, lack of focus, or lack of confidence, I only managed to struggle through one chapter. I still remember the look on my teacher’s face and the question when I finished my much truncated report: “Is that all?” Yes, I had to admit, head hung low, that was all.

Then there was the F in English I got in seventh grade. That called for a family meeting, with me at the center. I couldn’t figure out then and I still don’t know how that happened. I thought I was doing fine. I didn’t remember getting low scores in tests or failing to turn in papers. But there it was. I had flunked.

Yet one year later, in the summer before high school. I thought it would be a good goal to read Moby-Dick. And I did.

What changed? What transformed me into not just a good English student but someone who loved to read and loved to write?

I am sure part of it was just taking time for my brain to mature. Part of it might have been simply needing years of practice till the disciplines of study finally became second nature.

One important factor, though, that I still remember is the influence of my older brother and sister. I always saw them reading. They had books on their shelves and belonged to a book club. Seeing those arrive in the mail every so often was always exciting. Since I wanted to be as smart as they were, I thought I needed to read.

Do you want your younger siblings, your children, your grandchildren to become readers? By all means, read to them. But let them catch you reading too.

How Has the Internet Changed Reading and Writing?

Recently I was interviewed by Melissa Wuske in Foreword Reviews, which has focused on independent book publishing since its inception. To whet your appetite, here’s an excerpt below. You can find the whole interview here.

Accessibility has been a huge boon to writers and editors. With so much information digitized, in a few keystrokes we can track down books, articles, quotes, and facts that forty years ago could take days and weeks to research. Information is truly democratized.

All is not paradise, however. We have tradeoffs. Today as readers and citizens we are drowning in data yet are in desperate need of wisdom. We have accelerated life (including our reading) to such a pace that it is hard to take time to stop and reflect. Even our habits of reading short snippets make long-form writing a challenge. Yet in such a complex world, we are kidding ourselves if we think we can live by sound-bytes alone.

One way I have tried to deal with this is by focusing my reading in books. I tend to stay away from magazines and newspapers (print or digital) as well as radio, TV, and social media to keep up with the news, though all these media have value. Obviously I believe in the importance of the open flow of information (and I hear about significant events anyway and can follow up if I wish), but what is reported on today will almost never be remembered or have much significance next week.

Books can take a longer and more measured view on what mattered in the past, what matters now, and what will matter in a year or a decade. Books also help strengthen our ability to think through issues in a more sustained, reasoned way that fights against the sometimes trifling and impulsive urgency of the moment.

What books have you read recently that has been helpful in this way?

One of the most important and fascinating is Factfulness by Hans Rosling. He details with data and stories how the world is much better than we think in many realms, even though much work remains. Another excellent volume is Them: Why We Hate Each Other—And How to Heal by Ben Sasse. He gets us outside the most recent news cycle to see deeper issues. Two others are A History of Western Philosophy by C. Stephen Evans and The Myth of Equality: Uncovering the Roots of Injustice and Privilege by Ken Wytsma.

The Problem with Writers

One of the main problems writers have is that we keep getting in the way of our own work. We fret if our ideas are any good, if our writing is stale, if anyone will enjoy it or be moved by it. Thinking about ourselves in this way can bring our work to full stop.

How do we overcome this? Instead of treating our writing as an avenue of self-expression or a channel for our unique creative impulse, we treat it like a job. We take the self-focused emotion out of the equation. As Steven Pressman says in The War of Art, we act like professionals. “The professional loves her work. She is invested wholeheartedly. But she does not forget that the work is not her.” (p. 88)

Our focus is not on ourselves but on production, on the words, on the craft. As professionals we commit to producing so many words per day or per week, and then we write them. We schedule deadlines for ourselves and meet them. If what we write is bad, we work at it more. If it is good, we improve it still further.

Yes, art matters. But it doesn’t arise by aiming at it. “The professional dedicates himself to mastering technique,” says Pressman, “not because he believes technique is a substitute for inspiration but because he wants to be in possession of the full arsenal of skills when inspiration does come.” (p. 84) Professionals engage in deliberate practice.

Writing as a form of therapy has its place. Journaling can help us work out a problem or deal with our past. But if our goal is to write something for other people to read, we have to forget about ourselves, be cold blooded and objective. We must listen to criticism as if it were about someone else’s work. Writing can’t be about us. It has to be about the writing.

Want to beat writer’s block? Act like a professional.

Want to Know Jesus Better?

The Old Testament has taken a lot of hits in recent years. And it’s understandable when all people see are harsh rules and religious wars. It can seem so unenlightened if not downright wrong.

Let’s admit it. The Old Testament is a foreign country. Even when translated it can seem like it’s in a different language. We also find strange customs that often don’t make sense, and odd names that are hard to keep straight.

The solution, of course, is not to dump the Old Testament but to work to understand it, to learn more about those customs, that ancient history, how their literary genres are different from ours. But why? Why is it worth all that effort?

Because rooted in the Old Testament is our Christian understanding of mercy, justice, compassion, peace, faithfulness, forgiveness, creation, holiness, truth, and more. Without all that, our Christian faith is gutted.

More to the point, if we don’t understand the Old Testament, we can’t understand Jesus.

Fleming Rutledge quotes a radio preacher who said, “If you want to know what went on in Jesus’ mind, read the Old Testament.” And then she goes on to say, “There are many things that we do not know about Jesus, but of this we can be sure: his mind and heart were shaped by intimate, continuous interaction with the Scriptures. If we are to have ‘the mind of Christ’ (1 Cor 2:16), we need to know the Old Testament.”*

Did Jesus say we should avoid the Old Testament? Minimize it? Take scissors and paste to it? What he said was this:

  • The Old Testament is about him (John 5:39).
  • We can avoid error by knowing the Old Testament (Mark 12:24).
  • Through the Old Testament we know why the Messiah had to suffer and then enter his glory (Luke 24:26)

It’s simple, though it is not easy. It takes some work. That’s one reason I wrote Mark Through Old Testament Eyes. We need to immerse ourselves in the Old Testament for its own sake, just as Jesus did. But it is also true that if we want to know Jesus better, we have to know his Bible.

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*Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2015), p. 107.

When Persuasion Dies

Eighty years ago, as World War II was erupting, the president of the University of Chicago, Robert Maynard Hutchins, made a speech which sounds like it could have been given today.

He leads with a strong assertion. “Democracy is not merely a good form of government; it is the best.” His reason for this is interesting. “It is,” he said, “the only form of government that can combine three characteristics: law, equality, and justice.”

But, Hutchins asks, how can we know these three make a valid foundation? Because, he says, this basis for democracy is moral. “Its end is the good for man. Only democracy has this basis. Only democracy has this end. If we do not believe in this basis or this end, we do not believe in democracy. These are the principles which we must defend if we are to defend democracy.”

Here we come upon a problem, however. How can we know these characteristics are moral? How can we know anything is moral? It’s a problem because “for forty years and more” (and again, he was speaking in 1940) “our intellectual leaders have been telling us they are not true. They have been telling us in fact that nothing is true which cannot be subjected to experimental verification. In the whole realm of social thought there can therefore be nothing but opinion. . . . There is no difference between good and bad; there is only the difference between expediency and inexpediency. We cannot even talk about good and bad states or good and bad men. There are no morals; there are only the folkways. The test of action is its success, and even success is a matter of opinion. . . .”

Who is to say what is moral and what isn’t? If everyone is doing it, why not me or you? Who’s to say who is a moral person and who isn’t? I can justify anything I do as long as I can avoid the consequences of the law.

But an even more sinister consequence of this line of thinking awaits. If everyone’s opinion is equal, if there is no real way to convince someone that I am right and you are wrong, then we are left with yelling at each other. And if yelling doesn’t resolve disputes, the only option remaining is coercion. As Hutchins said, “If everything is a matter of opinion, . . . force becomes the only way of settling differences of opinion.”

What can we do in the face of all this? This is a huge question which requires a multifaceted response. Allow me, however, to mention just one simple step we can all take.

We can stop listening to people who yell, and start listening to people who are trying to make a rational argument. We can stop listening to those who are trying to manipulate, name call, or overwhelm us with hot rhetoric. As I’ve noted in my chapters on persuasion in Write Better, instead we should listen to those trying to persuade fairly, speak calmly, and appeal to the common good. We can also choose to listen to these who present different sides of an issue (not just one) while exercising this sort of principled persuasion.

Listening to or reading such persuasive arguments is harder than it may seem because it takes effort to follow such reasoning. It is also hard because doing so opens us up to the possibility of finding out we are wrong. And we don’t like to hear reasons or information that disagrees with conclusions we’ve already come to.

Being open and willing to learn is difficult but necessary because if we won’t practice principled persuasion or allow ourselves to be persuaded, force is all we have left.

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Image credits: Dr. Robert Hutchins becomes Chancellor of University of Chicago, 1945. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/91481464/; Faces–Pixabay, Clipart-Vectors

12 Rules for Life

“Be an adult. Quit your whining. Grow up.”

Jordan Peterson is the crusty, old coach who does not tolerate excuses, lack of effort, or stupid choices. He expects the best from you and won’t settle for anything less—not because he needs another victory but because he wants the best for you.

Listening to him read his book, 12 Rules for Life, you hear how he’s fed up with parents who coddle and refuse to correct their children, with people who won’t take care of their own health, with those who expect only good things in life and are surprised when bad things happen.

Judging by the sales of his books and views on YouTube, people seem to love his no-nonsense lectures—even when he’s shaking a finger at them. In an age when no one seems to know what’s right or wrong (or doesn’t believe in such things), how reassuring it is to hear from someone who confidently tells us exactly what to do.

Fortunately, Peterson has much wisdom to offer—yes, common sense.

  • If friends are having a bad influence on you, break the relationship. Instead, find people who will help you in life.
  • Tell the truth, even when it is hard, because if you don’t, the prevarication will come back to bite you.
  • Listen, really listen, to other people. You might learn something.

Peterson illustrates his principles with compelling stories from his own life, and backs his thinking with research from psychology, brain science, evolutionary science, and religion. He takes the Bible seriously, viewing it through the lens of his Jungian perspective on myth. That is, he sees the Bible as a valuable source of truth about human nature and how life works, leaving aside whatever spiritual realities it might contain.

I don’t agree with everything the old coach says, but there is so much of value here that it well deserves five stars and the wide reading it is getting.

Where I Didn’t Expect Gratitude to Take Me

We say thank you almost as much as we say hello. It’s common courtesy, acknowledging the value of a comment, a gesture, a favor, and of the worth of those around us. It binds us to our fellow humans, even if we do it somewhat mechanically.

In recent years I’ve been thinking about a deeper level of gratitude. David Brooks highlighted this for me in a column he wrote several years ago called “The Credit Illusion.” When we are in our twenties we are very impressed with our own talents and accomplishments. But by the time we are in our fifties, certainly by seventy, we recognize how much our life owes its shape to others.

Yes, I succeeded in college but I could only go because my parents valued it, could afford it, and sent me. And that was possible only because in the last two hundred years their parents or great grandparents journeyed from Western and Eastern Europe to a country where college was possible for and valued by people like them. They avoided two major wars that ravaged their populations and came to a country that was expanding economically.

My parents provided a stable home. They provided the foundations of my faith. Yes, I took advantage of the opportunities presented to me—educationally, economically, relationally. But I didn’t create the opportunities. Others made them possible. And I have been moved to give thanks for them and their parents more and to congratulate myself less.

Practicing this type of reflection and gratitude can lead to what I call confident humility. The humility comes from recognizing that so much (most?) of who I am is not my own doing. At the same time in gratitude I am saying what I have received is good, perhaps very good, and that produces confidence.

Confident humility, in turn, gives me the freedom to listen to others. I don’t have to lead with criticism of others to show how smart I am. Whether it is about church, politics, diets, family, or how bad the Chicago Bears are, I can open myself to learn from others who have different ideas than I do.

I don’t have to be threatened by new viewpoints or people who disagree with me because I know most of who I am came from others to begin with. Surprisingly, gratitude has thus taken me on a journey of listening and of learning new things—yes, of even learning I was wrong.

The end of a year and the end of a decade are good times to reflect and to be grateful. They are times to listen for the good, for the true, and for the beautiful regardless of the source.

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photo credits: Pixabay 1778011 (University of Arizona); SecularEthos (thank you)