Chapter 5: A powerful SUV (on Discovery and Learning).  For most of us who own SUVs, it’s just enough to know we could do something like the commercials if we needed to.  While just knowing we could explore unpaved territory may be okay for literal suburbia, it’s not okay for the landscape of our spiritual lives.  We have a lot of knowledge about God, but are sadly lacking in vibrant experiences with God.  Once very two years or so, I have an encounter with God that makes me fell “saved” all over again.  I fall into a spiritual rut, and then find myself sinking in the quagmire of my own self-preservation.  Those of us who live in spiritual suburbia have become experts on what we don’t experience.  We attend meetings, listen to others, and can critique sermons, services, and sanctity–without ever having to interact with God ourselves:

The short-term mission team and I were performing street dramas, preaching the gospel, and being all-around ethnocentric, upper-middle-class Americans.  Still, God was at work in Budapest, Hungary, and lots of people were committing their lives to Christ and capitalism through us.  As I was wandering a public square, I noticed a weathered and aged man playing a violin that had only three strings.  His knuckles were knobby, and his fingers appeared to be as beaten down as his violin.  As I apprached, he screeched a tune that sounded remarkably like two cats in heat. 
          Clasping my hands together, I pantomimed my question regarding whether I could pray for him.  But as I knelt down, the man extended one of his withered hands to my shoulder and raised the other one up to heaven, and began to pray for me instead.  I felt a tingling rush sweep over my body and then, Wham!, I hit the cement sidewalk, face first and weeping uncontrollably.  I thought, Get a grip, you’re making a scene out here in public!  But my body would not submit to my pride.  Instead, I lay there listening to an old man pray in a language I didn’t understand, hoping no one was noticing me.
          Another tingle went through me, and I found myself sitting at a colossal banquet table that stretched for hundreds of feet and seated hundreds of people.  I was sitting on one end of the table, and Jesus was way, way down on the other side.  I could hear him laughing and talking with those seated around him.  Then I zoomed in on Jesus.  Though we were still at opposite ends of this great expance, Jesus and I were looking eye-to-eye–and he wasn’t happy.  “How many times have I told you that the first shall be last and the least shall be the greatest in my kingdom?  You are kneeling before one of my most holy servants,” he said.
          Then like a hyperspace jump in Star Wars, I was back.  Two Hungarian students who attended the American univeristy told me they had been watching for about ten minutes.  “He was praying, thanking God for sending such a holy man to his city so that many might receive God.  He must think you’re a priest or something.  Then he went on to pray about the poor and needy around the city.”  The students went on to explain how Frank plays his violin every day in order to raise donations so that he can buy bread and distribute it to the poor and addicted who suffer without hope in the backalleys.  If Frank had any bread left over after his rounds, then he’ll eat.  Rumor had it that there had been times when Frank had gone seven or eight  days without eating so that others would have enough food.
          What a world of distance between my Christian suburbia and Frank’s urban wilderness.  Oh sure, I may have been able to dance doctrinal circles around him regarding God’s heart for the poor and broken.  I probably could have helped him set up a more effective and efficient way to collect money and distribute bread to the poor (all in the name of godly stewardship, of course!).  But I wasn’t the expert on ministry to the poor; Frank was.

• How do you connect with God?  Jesus wants to be the master of our lives, and this puts us in the position of becoming his apprentices.  The way to get closer to God is not to study about him, but to participate with him.  “Follow me” surely implied that Jesus was going somewhere.  Reading the Bible for knowledge alone is like going to a restaurant and eating the menu but not the meal.  Now don’t reak out on me.  I’m not about to go all anti-Bible on you.  I know and firmly believe that the best way to know where God is and what he is like is through his holy Word.  However, the meal is in relationship with the person of Jesus Christ, not in simply reading about what he offers.
• In Matthew 6:9-10, Jesus used the Aramaic term Abba.  Abba was a nursery term, and in today’s vernacular it would be “Papa” or “Daddy.”  With this word, Jesus is inviting us to experience the Father’s complete, safe, and radical tenderness toward us.  Our conversations with God need to start with our understanding of God as our Abba.  If we don’t get this, if we don’t let him function in that role, we will always come up short in regard to what he wants for us in prayer.  Has this information changed the way you actually connect with God?  Knowing and actually experiencing and trusting this information are very different things.
• For example, I first ran into Madame Guyon while studing Richard Foster’s Devotional Classics.  She wrote about a profoundly simply way to turn our hearts toward the presence of God (find a Scripture to use to help focus on God, continue to read those words over and over again slowly until you sense God’s presence, shift from the Scripture to conversing with th Lord, then if your mind wanders just go back to the Scripture to get you back on track).  Since then, I’ve gotten pretty good at talking about prayer, but I know God is still waiting….
• Julian of Norwich wrote, “For the highest form of prayer is to to the goodness of God.  God only desires that our soul cling to him with all its strength, in particular that it clings to his goodness.  For of all the things our minds can think about God, it is thinking about his goodness that pleases him most and brings the most profit to our soul.  For we are so preciously loved by God that we cannot even comprehend it.  No created being can ever know how much and how sweetly and tenderly God loves them.”  I could drink from God’s goodness and love all my days, and his well would never run dry, and my thirst would never be quenched.  The invitation goes beyond understanding to truly clinging to the tangible nature of God’s goodness.
• Brother Lawrence wrote, “I imagine myself as the most wretched of all, full of sores and sins, and one who has committed all sorts of crimes against his king.  Feeling a deep sorrow, I confess to him all of my sins, I ask his forgiveness, and I abandon myself into his hands so that he may do with me what he pleases.  This king, full of mercy and goodness, very far from chastening me, embraces me with love, invites me to feast at his table, serves me with his own hands, and gives me the key to his treasures.  He converses with me, and takes delight in me, and treats me as if I were his favorite.  This is how I imagine myself from time to time in his holy presence.”  Let God pour his emotional, reckless, and prodigal love on you.
• While pursuing my PhD (Debt Piled High and Deep), I used to think it was to my advantage to buy used textbooks that already had lots of highlights.  But that was frustrating because previous colleagues didn’t seem to know which things I would think were important.  A couple of times a year, I go back through my selection of books and read the highlights.  I see so many great insights that I wanted to apply to my life.  Some I have, but most remain yellow. 
• Also, most of the highlighting occurs in the front half of the books, with the amount slowly drying to a trickle by the three-quarter mark.  I have a bad habit of not finishing.  I’ve realized I need to apply what I have been learning.  I need to follow through on the commitments I have made, especially the things that Jesus has brought into my life.  Jesus may have been speaking to me through those books, but have the words worked their way into my being (2 Peter 1:3)?
• Escaping suburbia means aligning our behaviors with our beliefs.  The divine power he offers is called grace, God’s empowering presence in our life that helps us turn knowledge into experience (Luke 2:40, 1 Corinthians 15:10, Ephesians 2:8-10).  You get more grace by living it.  The more of God’s grace you allow into and through your day, to work out in and through you, the more he will pour upon you.  We aren’t endued with such power mrely to attend church meetings.  God has equipped us to charge over the gates of hell, to drive straight into the Enemy’s camp, and to live a life that finds itself right smack in the middle of God’s story in the world around us.  Step on the gas, I see a mountain to climb.

Chapter 6: A really big house (on Intimacy with God).  I got to thinking about the types of homes people return to.  Not just the physical structures, mind you, but the relationships behind the brick and mortar walls.  When you live in a large home, you have plenty of room for a variety of activities to be happening at once, but it also means you don’t have to be very close to anyone if you choose not to be.  This book is about the home located inside of you.  As Jesus spoke in Revelation 3:20, he was talking to those who havealready professed to have a relationship with him.  Jesus wants to be invited into deeper, more meaningful relationship than just standing at the door will allow. 

• (1)  Yet, that’s about as intimate as we often get with him, like with the pizza delivery guy.  Secretly, we hope that our plastic Jesus’ head is bobbing up and down. 
• (2)  Or, we plateau at the relatively stable symbiotic business/working relationship where we mutually benefit each other.  We know God by name and commit to working for him because we believe in the vision and values of his organization.  We hold marathon PR meetings to develop plans to sell his product (salvation) to others.  We raise money for the poor.  We get his peace and fire insurance, and he gets our busy bodies.  The temptation to settle in this land is powerful; it is, after all, the Land of Good Things (eg.  it is good to focus on evangelism, it is good to serve others on Sundays). But we can forget to stop and asky why.  Why am I so busy?  Far too many teeter around the edge of burnout.  They signed up because they loved the Boss and grooved with his vision.  The benefits were out of this world and the coworkers were friendly.  Then something began to happen.  Their external busyness dried up the internal goodness.  Once motivated by the Master himself, they are now only motivated by the machine itself; they are simply a cog in the wheel of the business called “churchianity.” 
• That’s what happened to Jonathan.  He grew up street smart and tough, but God grabbed hold of his heart, held it in his nail-pierced hands, and turned this six-foot-four, three-hundred-pound, Hispanic, Hollywood punker into a gentle giant for Jesus.  Early in his walk, his passion often outweighed his wisdom.  He invented the ministry of evandelism.  On other occasions, he’d flatten tires and wait for the owner to return.  He promised to fix their flat for free if they’d listen to his message of God’s love.  He then soon found himself playing the guitar for crowds and leading worship teams.  People gathered around his fire and warmed up in his glowing.  A subtle shift began to happen.  He started playing for the effect of worship and was no longer playing to an audience of One.  Slowly, subtly, and surely, this once radcal, passoinate, no-holds barred, worshipper of Jesus had turned his ministry into a business relationship.  Before he knew it, the goal was to create and perpetuate the sense of God’s presence for others though that presence had long since waned in his own heart.  He found himself growing bitter and resentful.  He realized his worshipping heart had lost its center.  What he’d once done for the love of Jesus, he was now doing for the works of Jesus.
• (3)  The difference between being a servant/business partner and a friend is in the intimacy, not the action.  We are called to do the things that Jesus did.  We can be religious and do these things out of a sense of duty, or we can be intimate and do these things out of a sense of friendship.  I, for one, want to be in a cooperative friendship with Jesus, where he shares with me not only the task at hand, but his heart’s desires and motivations as well.  My team and I were working among the children who were living and working in the desolate and polluted environment of a garbage dump on Bohol Island in the Philippines.  One of the local leaders brought a guitar, and everyone was singing.  Under my breath, I muttered, “God, this song isn’t right.  Look at the deprivation.  How can we be singing you are gracious?”  It was as if Wisdom was standing next to me, for I heard a voice as clearly as if I were talking to my friend Marty, saying, “I sent you, didn’t I?”  It’s hard to explain, but I felt as if god was saying that he was allowing me to be a part of his heart and love for these kids and the Philippines.  I was participating in a cooperative friendship with Jesus, not just a partnership.  And as such it seemed he felt open enough to share with me his heart for those kids and for me.  Conversations like this can turn something hollow to something hallowed.
• (4)  Just as I don’t critique the art my children make for me, neither does God critique our heartfelt worship works for him.  But if we didn’t grow up in such a home, we will often draw a line, buil da fence, and decide to experience Jesus’ love on the cross, but we won’t risk trusting the love that sent him there.  In doing this, we are negating much of the reason Jesus became a man in the first place (John 5:19, John 14:9-11, Luke 11:2).  Jesus came to make God’s love tangible to you and me.  But for many of us, the tainted love of our earthly fathers has poisoned the love we experience from our Father in heaven.
• In Psalm 18:7-15, we wonder what David did to make God that angry.  God was indeed angry, but not at David (5-7).  What really makes God angry is when the Enemy is picking on his kids!  David got brutally honest and cried out to God for help.  God heard and came with the full force of his might to help him.  This same love sent the full force of God’s mercy and forgiveness to the cross to conquer the enemy of our souls, once and for all.  But God doesn’t just love humanity that much, he loves you that much.  I meet people almost weekly whose fathers are terrible representations of what God intended dads to be.  But we must risk believing in a perfect Father’s perfect love.  As we explore God’s love, I believe he begins to restore a sense of wonder, awe, and childlike trust to our desolate spirituality.  Not only does wonder develop intelligence as children grow, i belivee it also helps kids maintain their sense of innocence.  We must ask for it, and then slow down to look for it.
• (5)  When Jesus says John 14:6, I believe he is inviting us to enter into a passionate love relationship with him.  I believe he is telling us that it is possible to know him, and for him to know us like husbands and wives know each other, not sexual or erotic but emotionally intimate and passionate.  God invites us into a relationship of such trust and closeness that we feel completely safe with him, willing to be “naked” in his presence, with nothing to hide, willing to bridge any barrier in order to find complete oneness with him.  To experience this deep level of intimacy with God, we need to risk feeling a little undignified and unruly in the presence of the lover of our soul (Psalm 69:6,9, Matthew 26:7, Joshua 6:7, Matthew 2:9). So step out, do a little dance, and make a little love toward God tonight.
• Worship should declare the joyous celebration of God’s presence in our lives, the awesomeness of his sovereignty over the whole universe, and the tangibleness of a transparent, unashamed, and intimate love–just like God wants expressed through marriage.  The ways that I express my affections for my wife are quite diverse, but my love for her should be evident every day that I celebrate her love in my life.  We should view worship as a lifestyle as well as a part of church meetings.  In both instances, it is choosing to give all honor and thankfulness back to God for his presence in our lives.  Although some contmeporary religious styles often interpret reverence to God as something quiet and somber, scriptural worship is quite diverse.  Biblical worship connotes freedom, ranging from standing, raising hands, or dancing, to kneeling or lying prostrate; from quiet, reflective listening to loud, passionante praise.  Rekindle the romance.
• That’s the beauty of plumbing the depths of the unfathomable.  The adventure never ends.  “When you want God as desperately as you wanted air, you will know him as I do.”  How far can this joureny take us?  Deep…desperately deep.  The devil does not want you going deeper.  If you did, your love for God might become contagious.  Others might become more thirsty and hungry for substance in their relationships with God.  There could actually be revival.  So the Devil work hard tokeep you and me busy.  Just enough so we don’t feel like we are failing.  But many of us are stirring.  Suburbia has lost its appeal.  Our souls are hungry for more of the real presence of God.  We don’t just want him to deliver the pizza to us, we want him to come inside our souls and share the meal with us.

“Without any expectation of it, without ever having the thought in my mind that there was any such thing for me, without any recollection that I had ever heard the thing mentioned by any person in the world, the Holy Ghost descended on me in a manner that seemed to go through me, body and soul. 
          I could feel the impression, like a wave of electricity, going through and through me.  Indeed it seemed to come in waves and waves of liquid love….
          No words can express the wonderful love that was shed abroad in my heart.  I wept aloud with joy and love…. The waves came over me, and over me, one after the other, until I recollect I cried out, ‘I shall die if these waves continue to pass over me.’  I said, ‘Lord, I cannot bear any more;’ yet I had no fear of death” (Charles Finney).

Chapter 7: A perfect lawn (on Brokenness).  Brokenness and pain are not pretty.  They are like a throbbing sore, constantly aching and oozing until we medicate or anesthetize them.  Brokenness causes God’s presence and power to fade like an echo in our soul.  The good news is that it doesn’t have to be that way! The truth is, the area of our deepest pain often has the potential to be the source of our greatest joy and the launching pad of our highest callings.  Indeed, those who have been forgiven much tend to love much.  Suburbia gives us shame in our brokenness; Jesus gives us hope.  The church often says, “How could you?”  The Holy Spirit ays, “I still love you.”  Our culture finds no value in broken things; God finds redemptive value in them. 

• In Mark 14:3-6, almost all placed value on the jar before it was broken.  But Jesus placed value on it after it was broken. This woman was broken before him, and he was pleased.  This is a story of worship that God likes.  The same story he wants us to live today.  He is drawn to people who admit and invite him into their brokenness.  I am convinced that is why the Father had Jesus be born in a manger.  He wanted his Son to be born in the brokenness of poverty.  But even being born in one of the lowest cities of the day was not low enough, for Jesus was born in a stable that housed only animals.  There is no place on earth he will not go to reach us with his love.  But what if God the Father was trying to tell us his life can best be born out in the lowest, most shameful places of humanity?  What if he was not only talking about the physical but the hidden stuff in our souls as well?  When God’s life came and invaded darkness, the world got the blessing and the Father got the glory.  We work so hard to prop up the exterior of our decent Christian living that we fail to attend to the hurts, hang-ups, and decay within.  If we long to escape, we can no longer hide our brokenness.  We must offer it to God as uncharted territory and be willing to explore it with him, beginning with surrender.
• Often brokenness is masked by addiction and addiction is masked by secrets.  Many who struggle with the continuous ache of brokenness first try all kinds of things to anesthetize it: drugs, alcohol, shopping, cyclic relationships.  We may try yoga, yogurt, or Yoda, popularity, power, or porn, dressing up, dressing down, or complete nakedness.  But soon we find that those things only serve to widen the chasm created by brokenness.  So we make a promise.  Sin, repent, commit to change, and round and round the cycle goes.  When we will crash and burn, nobody knows.  But herein lies the problem–commitment.  As long as we are committed to overcoming our brokenness, we won’t be able to do so.  What we need is to surrender (Romans 7:18-25).
• Surrender is not losing the battle; let Him fight for you.  Surrender is not periodically giving in to your hurt and/or brokenness (not to binge and purge).  Surrender is not giving up a part of your life (He knew what he was getting, but did you know what you were giving?).  Look at the desolate territory of our soul and ask him, “Can you redeem this land?”  If he says yes, then surrender it to him.  Give up trying to fix it to impress him or trying to hide it to protect him. 
• One of the hardest areas for me to surrender was my idea that I needed to have it together in front of those I pastor or lead.  You know, the whole “live above reproach” thing.  The problem arises when living above reproach becomes synonymous with hiding behind dishonesty.  During that early season of my walk, God gave me an opportunity to have lunch with Tom Stipe.  During our chat, he said, “There are no Cinderella stories in the kingdom of God.  Every authentic leader bears the scars of brokenness.  If they don’t walk with a limp, they probably aren’t worthy to be followed.”  Walking with a limp is not only an indication of struggle and past brokenness, but also evidence of healing and perseverance.  The Bible tells us that God’s gift and his call are irrevocable (Romans 11:29), but so is the path to get there.  There is no short cuts on the way to holiness and healing.  One way or another, I was going to have to learn to surrender.
• The movement of posers are restricted.  Instead of exploring, posers are forced to keep up the appearance of their glittering images.  Every life needs to look the same so that no difference can be felt or recognized.  “How are you?”  “Fine.”  Or rather, FINE (Freaked out, Insecure, Neurotic, and Emotional).  We must give up our rights, privileges, and personal expectations.  Vertical honesty, and then horizontal honesty.  I see a Wonderbra spirituality.  We use whatever contraption we can to puff up what little substance we atually have to impress others, even if it hurts us in the process.  Then later, they find out we really weren’t as attractive as we made ourselves out to be.  Perhaps the ultimate irony is that by enhancing our weaknesses, we may be distracting others from our strengths.  Psalm 136 says that his love for me has remained consistent, pure, lavish, purposeful, and powerful over all these years.  Vertical honesty doesn’t only mean that I am transparent with God about who I am, but it also means that I’m receptive to who he is in all his love.  Just because I don’t deserve his love doesn’t mean I can’t have it.  It is his gift to give and only my choice to receive.
• Coming clean with a bunch of addicts is amazingly freeing in AA, NA, etc., but when people come clean in the church, the response is often quite different.  After a friend of mine talked about her eating disorder (and the initial under-our-breath gasps), the group piled on her like a school of well-meaning piranhas.  Everyone wanted a piece of “helping” her find the way to healing.  After about a half-hour of counsel and storytelling from the group, she sheepishly piped up again, “I was just asking for prayer.”  The church needs to follow the recovery group model.  The group simply responds, “Thank you for sharing.”  No judgment, no critique, no shaming.  Just genuine thankfulness that someone was…well…honest.  Now no one has to pretend anymore, which is the first step toward healing.  What they do next is up to them, it is their journey, we are just there to help.  The place where honesty on the horizontal and vertical meet looks remarkably like a cross.
• Not long ago, I had the privilege of facilitating a group of twelve spiritually hungry and brutally honest seekers.  I affectionately dubbed our ragamuffin group the “Red Pill Forum,” alluding to the first Matrix movie, and the scene where Neo had to choose either the red pill or the blue pill.  Choosing the red pill meant discovering the truth and following it despite not really knowing just how far that journey would go.  Choosing the blue pill meant erasing the question and going back to pretending everything was FINE.  This group’s version of choosing the “red pill” was swallowing a weekly reading from Brian McLaren’s challenging but noncondescending book Finding Faith.  We had two simple rules and one goal: (1) a commitment to honesty about our own life and (2) a commitment to honor the honesty in each other’s lives.  Our goal was exploring God’s story in Christianity, without manipulation or pressure to convert.  It happened about the seventh week of our weekly gatherings.  I was talking about how Jesus invites us to live from a whole new perspective–one in which life is lived from a “God-ward” orientation and not a “self-ward” orientation.  Then someone said, “That’s one thing I don’t understand.  Christians talk so much about abundant life, but it seems all your decisions are based on fear.  Fear of hell, fear of punishment, fear of displeasing God or others, fear of sharing your faults.”  Ouch.  Indeed, that’s not abundance, that’s avoidance!  She risked honesty bcause she felt safe enough to be honest.  I received her honesty because I felt safe enough not to be defensive. 
• God doesn’t invite us out of suburbia and into the land of brokenness so that we can become fixated on what is wrong in our lives.  He invites us into that dark, unexplored place so that we can see his re-creative power at work.  He doesn’t want us focused on avoiding pain.  He wants us focused on pursuing wholeness.  Maybe it’s time to invest some time, energy, and money on the inside.  After all, that is where we really live. 

Conclusion: Rethinking suburbia.  Most seminaries do a better job of teaching eschatology than they do teaching brokenology.  “The problem with suburbia is that it’s perfectly designed to anesthetize us from pain.  It puts a veneer of wholeness on the outside, and allows hollowness to thrive on the inside.”  But there is no barrier that the power of God cannot overcome when we give him permission–regardless of whether those barriers are from within or from without.

1. Have a clear vision of what you really want out of your relationship with God.  Students with declared majors seldom had many choices between classes.  Their course was mapped out for them on a timetable.  When they graduated, they not only had a degree on a piece of paper, they had a substance to their education.  One student thought that if he just took enough classes, sooner or later he would qualify for a degree and then he would graduate.  He said he liked my sexuality course a lot; he enjoyed various art classes and had taken a number of the fisheries courses.  I told him if he wasn’t careful, he’d end up with a job drawing pictures of fish having sex, and that was a very narrow career field.  If you have a clear vision of where you are going, you’ll seldom get stuck and disappointed with where you’ve been.
2. Give yourself permission to not be perfect.  Sometimes I find myself trying so hard to be something I’m not that I begin to not be something I want.  What I am is God’s beloved.  What if, every day, I just accepted the fact that I’m not going to be perfect in anything I’m trying to accomplish in God’s purpose and plan?  Some might use this as an excuse to be sloppy with their faith, but from where I’m sitting, God’s love deserves my best effort.  I don’t have to earn his love today–I just have to live in it and through it.  Llike when my daughter plays soccer.  She can play her best, and I can expect her to represent her family name well, but I don’t have to expect her to be Mia Hamm.  Living in this reality will release in you new freedom to fail, but fail in a forward direction.  To eternity and beyond.