What is God challenging you to do?

This post is part of a synchroblog, a bunch of different Christian bloggers reacting to a common topic. Wanna get in on it? Visit the synchroblog blog.

This month’s synchroblog topic is “Calling us out of numbness,” and uses at its starting point some questions that we Christians need to ask ourselves on a regular basis. I realize the point of the synchroblog is for me to answer these questions, but I’m gonna start by challenging my readers to answer these questions for themselves.

• What’s stirring up in you?
• What’s God challenging you to consider?
• How does it intersect with your faith and practical experience?

Devilish misinformation.

“All war is based on deception,” begins Sunzi’s famous treatise The Art of War, and that’s likewise true of spiritual war. It’s to the devil’s advantage that people don’t know what it is. Nor what power it commands, or doesn’t. Previously I explained what it is and isn’t. This time around, my emphasis is on why we’re willing to believe—and perpetuate—the myths about the devil.

The most obvious reason is the one I hear immediately after I rebuke one of the devil myths. Essentially it’s, “You underestimate the devil.”

Undoing the subordination of women.

Women are unequal to men.

This is the biological reality, anyway: Women are physically different from men. Different hormones, different physical characteristics and limitations, different organs, different “plumbing” (as one of my former pastors liked to put it), and different roles in the family unit when it comes to bearing and nursing children. Whether these physical differences are the causes of our cultural differences, is debatable. But there they are.

Human cultures have singled out these differences, and used them as justification for treating women different than men. Usually as inferiors: They’re determined to be physically weaker, emotionally weaker, or intellectually weaker. As a result they’re not entrusted with certain jobs or responsibilities or rights. In some cultures women have no rights: They’re the property of the men of their family. They’re born into slavery.

How does God feel about this issue?

Wealth, Christians, and justice.

This post is part of a synchroblog, a bunch of different Christian bloggers reacting to a common topic. Wanna get in on it? Visit the synchroblog blog.

I’ve been asked, and not just by the Synchroblog leaders, about what Christians ought to think about economic inequality—the fact that the rich in our country have considerably more wealth, and considerably more influence over our society and government, than do the poor. Certainly many protesters don’t think this is right; and certainly many rich people (or people who want to be rich, and hope to someday take advantage of these advantages) don’t want the status quo to change. What does God think of this? What ought Christians think of this?

Sharing from the invisible knapsack.

This month’s synchroblog subject is on the “invisible knapsack.” Anti-racist activist Peggy McIntosh coined the term to refer to the privileges she, as a white person, experiences, didn’t earn, doesn’t necessarily merit, and doesn’t necessarily think about; they’re just resources she has that others don’t. “White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack,” she wrote, “of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks.”

Ironically, you can’t really talk about the experience of wearing the invisible knapsack unless you are the beneficiary of white privilege—i.e. you’re white, or pass for white. So I suppose that’s another thing we can tuck into the knapsack, as all the non-white synchrobloggers try to figure out how on earth they’re gonna tackle this subject without coming across as frustrated with clueless white people.

Well, I’m white, so I can talk about my experience at least, and then—since this blog is about following Jesus, after all—tie it together with how any of these revelations might help all of us, white and nonwhite, follow him better.

Sin kills. God brings new life.

People are weirded out by death. We avoid talking or thinking about it. Unrealistically, a lot of us don’t make plans for our own deaths, or for the deaths of anyone we know and love. We freak out when our loved ones do die. Heck, we freak out when strangers die in front of us.

That’s because, deep down, everyone knows that human death isn’t normal. We’re not meant to die. Plants and animals die, and that’s just part of the natural circle of life. But we innately understand human death is different. We have to psyche ourselves into believing it’s natural. But our instinctive reaction is closer to the truth: It’s not natural. We shouldn’t die. It’s just wrong. We should keep living, forever. Right?

Right.

When Jesus made a funny.

In the gospel of John, the idea that Jesus’s “time has not yet come” repeats a few times. It’s John (and Jesus’s) way of saying the end hasn’t arrived yet: He went to Jerusalem late for Sukkot because it wasn’t yet time, and people couldn’t arrest him when they wished because it wasn’t yet time. When it was time, of course, he’d be arrested and crucified. But not yet.

There’s one other instance of this turn of phrase: When Jesus was at a wedding in Cana, and his mom came to him to tell him they were out of wine. His response? “Dear woman, that’s not our problem. My time has not yet come.”

Sharing one’s heart.

This month the synchrobloggers are discussing “ordinary courage,” a concept described by Brené Brown in this way.

Courage originally meant “to speak one’s mind by telling all one’s heart.” Over time, this definition has changed, and, today, courage is more synonymous with being heroic. Heroics are important and we certainly need heroes, but I think we’ve lost touch with the idea that speaking honestly and openly about who we are, about what we’re feeling, and about our experiences (good and bad) is the definition of courage. Heroics are often about putting our life on the line. Ordinary courage is about putting our vulnerability on the line.

—Brené Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection, pp. 12-13

I’ve heard people describe this sort of thing using the Christianese term “share one’s heart,” as in “I’d like to share my heart on this subject.”

Yeah, Christians use the term, like “my spirit,” to make something sound more spiritual than it actually is. Half the time they just want to vent their spleen. But they want to sound Christian about it.