Tag Archives: Encore Exploration

Disruptive Faith

How God Disrupted My Life

“Aslan is a lion- the Lion, the great Lion.” “Ooh” said Susan. “I’d thought he was a man. Is he-quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion”…”Safe?” said Mr Beaver …”Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe 

“Ha!  You Christians think you’re so perfect, but you can’t even change your stupid sign.” 

This was the thought that ran through my mind as I sped passed the church.  It was just off the highway I drove every day to and from work. You know the type — a billboard with a Christian slogan or scripture verse.  I supposed it was the Church attempting to attract people to visit.

Normally, it changed weekly, but I was making fun of them because it had been seven weeks since they had changed it.   I now can think of a dozen reasons it might make sense to leave a scripture on a billboard for an extended time.  At that moment, I guess I assumed it was a dereliction of their duty – a failure.

This childish glee continued for another week as I yoyoed between work and home while the sign remained unchanged.  Then I became bored with that mental game and started another.

As I began to actually comprehend the text, I fixated on the first four words – “And be not conformed”, I doubled down in a new condemnation: “What do you guys know about non-conformity anyway?  You’re all about conformity.  I’m a true non-conformist.  You’re just about the status quo, you conforming little sheep.”

I had always been an outcast and unaccepted – at least in my mind.   I did not attend a single school for two years in a row until high school, so I learned to go it alone and not get too attached.   In high school, I found I did not fit in with any of the cliques.  I spent most of my time with the drama group who seemed like a diverse mix from the island of misfit toys to me.  Even here, I felt like an outsider. 

I found some weird type of safety in seeing my identity as a non-conformist – even to the non-conformist.  Certainly, this church was not about non-conformity.

I played this game for a week longer picking on the conforming goodie-two-shoes that could not even faithfully change their ridiculous sign.  But I read it each time I went by. Back and forth, day and night, its words seeping in.

And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed
by the renewing of your mind. 

Romans 12:2a

This amusement became tedious as well and was replaced by this daring declaration, “I bet that’s not even in the Bible!”

I am confident that anybody will likely catch why this is a bold, if not comically arrogant, thought.  I mean, this was a church billboard and I was not a Christian at the time – certainly not a Bible reader.   

I was not unaware of Jesus and God.  I was raised Catholic – casually – meaning mass on Christmas and Easter and when we visited my grandparents.

If you have not experienced a Catholic mass, you may not know that the faithful do not use a Bible since the Church conveniently provides the scripture necessary in a missalette. This little printed pamphlet contains an outline of the service. It tells you when to pray, what the Priest will say, what you will say in response, and when to sit or kneel. It also includes readings from the Old and New Testament printed with very formal references to the scripture such as: “A reading from the letter of Paul to the Romans.”

Despite my limited exposure, I did have moments growing up where I felt a connection and heart calling to God.   I also thought these readings were correspondence that some missionaries at our church had written and had no idea they were in the Bible.

I was pretty sure we had a Bible at the house, even though we never used it.  Sure enough, I found it on a top shelf in our living room and after cleaning the mountain of dust off it, I dove in to prove this passage about non-conformity was in error.

I discovered all these tabs on the edge of the book pages and ascertained they were abbreviations of the sections in the Bible. So far, so good.  I was shocked when I opened to the beginning of Romans and saw the words, “The Letter of Saint Paul to the Romans”. 

“Wait!  That’s the guy from all those letters at mass!  That’s from the Bible!”

Mind a bit blown, I made my way to Romans Chapter 12, Verse 2 – deciphering the structure for the first time.  Confirming that the verse was mostly as advertised on the church billboard, I decided I needed to understand the entire context.  Maybe that would make it different somehow.  Romans 12:1-2 told me:

I appeal to you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

Romans 12:1-2

I found these little symbols in the text – T and R.  Continuing my improvised study of Biblical structure, I found references that led me somehow to the book of Matthew.  

Once there, I was confronted with something new.  Some words were red and some were black. Reading a few of each, I quickly saw that the red letters were the words of Jesus and I was very intrigued by what I read. 

Before I knew it, I had read this entire Gospel and I found myself in love with Jesus and frustrated, if not a bit angry, that my Christian friends and church people had not been able to share with me what I clearly saw now.  

To be honest, I had never really had a Christian treat me poorly. Yet, somehow, I had in my mind that they thought of themselves as perfect and they (and I) knew I was a hot mess and not accepted by them – even though I had never really been shunned or treated badly.

In the Bible, I found Jesus going, not to the religious people, but to the hot-mess, non-conforming, outcasts like me!   I could hardly believe it.  But the pattern was clear over and over again.  I realized the Pharisees and Sadducees were the religious holier-than-thou elite and Jesus was constantly trying to help them get over themselves and their rules so they could love people.

What was not to love about Jesus?

I did not have anyone there with me to teach me the sinner’s prayer or tell me my next step – but I did not need that.  God had disrupted my seemingly non-conforming, tragically truly conforming life and showed me the only real non-conformist, Jesus Christ, His son who laid down His life for others instead of claiming His right to it – because he loved us that much.

What is Real Non-Conformity?

I have spent about 37 years with Romans 12:1-2 since that night and God still shows me amazing new things from these two verses.  That is crazy-awesome-miraculous.

It is still sad to me when this verse is used to heap judgement upon people – Do not conform any longer to the pattern of the world with the pattern being drinking, sex, cussing or whatever other infraction being condemned by the speaker.  The pattern of this world is self, separate from God, and the Pharisees as well as those they condemned as sinners were stuck in this pattern. The modern equivalent is no different.

The transformation that comes from renewing your mind is the one that Jesus enabled for us – by us viewing instead, His mercies that enable us to be a living sacrifice because we too give up our life to let Christ live His through us. 

Even after we become a Christian, Satan accuses us constantly that we are not good enough – as if we were still separate from Christ. But Christ already disrupted Satan’s power when He claimed us and came to live in us as one with us – as our very life. 

That is what disruptive faith is – the faith of Christ to overcome both sin and death in us, which he has already done.   This is why we must continually renew our minds to see the mercy and grace Christ already provided – Christ in us, the hope of glory – and continually let this revelation transform our lives.

Why Does This Matter?

People are often amazed when I share how I came to know Christ through a billboard rather than another person.  I am sure others had talked to me before about Christ, but it never seemed they had introduced Him to me.  I think that is true for most of us, even if we come to Christ when another shares the gospel with us. Usually, there were previous experiences too but this one is the one in which Christ reveals Himself to us – even if facilitated by another.   Saint Paul tells us it requires God’s revelation:

But when God, who had set me apart even from my mother’s womb and called me through His grace, was pleased to reveal His Son in me so that I might preach Him among the Gentiles.

Galatians 1:15-16a

When we see Christ as one with us, it is not our environment, behavior, capabilities or even beliefs that change – It is our identity.  We are now one with Him, inseparable.  This is true regardless of our environment, situation, or circumstances.  This is true despite our behavior whether good or bad.  We are not operating under the law of good and bad – but under the reality of Christ’s grace and life in us as one.

When we are one with Him, we love Him and His life in us begins to transform us as we journey with Him. Like Paul, God reveals His son in us for a purpose God reveals His son in us SO THAT we might live out a unique calling with Him in our life. 

Seeing His presence in us is how we come to know how we are uniquely called to live and love others. It empowers us to co-create with Him the same types of environments of love and grace He created when he walked the earth.

We are not here to only work and live and consume and experience our culture.  Christ has disrupted all that.  He has replaced life with life abundant.  We are here to partner with Christ in the restoration of all things – to create His culture – on earth as it is in heaven.  

If you have invited Him in, Christ lives in you and through you and is disruptively revealing Himself to you, SO THAT you can disruptively partner together.   Your calling, His mission through you is at stake. 

  • Do you see Him? 
  • How will you partner with Him? 
  • Will you accept His disruptive calling and live life abundantly?

People There’s a Train a Coming

train2Living in Hutto, one can’t help but experience the joy of trains – to the point that joy ceases to be the experience.  Since the town is divided by railroad tracks, encountering trains is pretty much a daily occurrence.  The audio tracks, pun intended, play their rap every quarter hour for those who live close enough.  Paul Simon recorded a song with the refrain, “Everybody loves the sound of a train in the distance. Everybody thinks it’s true”.  I’m not quite sure what he meant by everybody thinks it’s true but I can assure you that whatever he meant, it is not true that everybody loves the sound of a train, even in the distance.

It was this very thought that tunneled into my mind along with the train that accompanied it at about two this morning as I was having trouble sleeping.  We are fortunate to be far enough away as to not notice the sound most of the time but lying awake in the quiet sleeping house is not one of those times. 

train1I begin to think about what nuisance these trains were as the sound of the train invaded my consciousness. There is no station here in Hutto.  They are not delivering or picking up cargo or passengers.  There is no partnership with the city.  Trains push through town bringing traffic to a halt and interrupting life with noise, yet they give nothing to the town. If you know anything about the railroad, you will know that they have huge power to do whatever they want – they are not under city, county or state jurisdiction.   There are many crossing improvements that the railroad could make for this town of 20,000 that has the same number of crossings that it did when it only had 600.  While the tide of trains through town is regular and frequent, improvements are slow to roll into town if they come at all.

Then I got to thinking that people are like this in many ways.  Unless the people we encounter become passengers on our train, provide cargo we care about or are meeting us at one of our scheduled stops, we are usually just rolling through.  In our busyness, we are moving too fast to stop, we have our schedule to keep, and I’ll be gone 500 miles when the day is done.  I think we all understand this reality and we don’t think about it much.  

Perhaps this phenomenon is a necessity of life, which by nature has a point of origin and a point of destination and the rails in between cannot help but be travelled each and every day.  Occasionally we lament just like Steve Goodman did – “Half way home, we’ll be there by morning.… And all the towns and people seem to fade into a bad dream.…this train’s got the disappearing railroad blues”.  We come to these places in the night and wonder about the switches in the tracks we didn’t take, knowing we are half way home and watching the rail fade away seemingly faster with each hour heading down to the sea and the morning light.  Perhaps, we don’t think about it much because we just can’t bear it and we’re maybe a little scared of that final termination point. So we clear our minds and drop into the tunnel of sleep that emerges into bright daylight, the stoking up of engines, and a new day’s journey where the noise and heat of the rails overcome those quiet evening thoughts.

We certainly cannot be God and know each and every passenger, visit every town, haul all cargo. We must choose.  In some sense, we don’t even really do that.  We are more like passengers riding this rail for the first time knowing very little about where the rail will take us or what the odyssey will bring.  Yet most of us act as if we are in complete control and like we own the railroad. We’d be wise to talk to those who had gone before us and even more so to the conductor who is always singing his song for us again hoping we will refrain from our assumed control of his job and would instead enjoy the ride and the interactions that come to us.

Perhaps our difficulty stems from our preoccupation with trying to run the railroad of our life when we are really only passengers.  Jesus clearly had a purpose and was focused on it yet every interaction along the path was savored and given attention.  He said things like – I only do what my Father tells me to do. So, if he found that God had put him alone at a well with a Samaritan woman – he demonstrated God’s love to her. If the Pharisees setup a trap for him by exploiting an adulterous woman, he loved them both enough to rescue them from the error of their ways without condemning either of them for their treachery. If a Centurion’s daughter needed healing, he would heal her while encouraging this “heathen” that he was actually a man of faith and simultaneously helping the assumed faithful realize their need for His faith.

If anyone’s track of life was well predicted, it was our Lord’s.  There are over 300 prophecies concerning Jesus that he fulfilled.  He was clearly aware of these too for he told men such as John the Baptist to perform actions they thought unnecessary for Jesus – because “it is proper for us to do this to fulfill all righteousness”.  Jesus knew God’s vision for His life and was totally focused on it yet able to say in the same prayer both, “I have brought you glory on earth by completing the work you gave me to do.”, and, “I have revealed you to those whom you gave me out of the world. They were yours; you gave them to me and they have obeyed your word.”  Purpose and people always went hand-in-hand with him.

Perhaps, if we will rest from “working on the railroad…all the live-long day”, we could realize that these interactions with other passengers is our primary work.  We aren’t meant to “work on the railroad…just to pass the time away.  We are passengers with a purpose on a specific track, on a specific run, on a specific train.  We can rest in our work when we let God do his, when we avoid lamenting about those tracks and trains we can’t ride and when we instead embrace in love those he has given us as we ride the rail of our life.  Jesus was known for the way his love impacted other people and the life he lost, trusting God to raise him up.  If we will be his disciples, we will have to give up our life to make time for Jesus to impact the lives of other people through us. Faith is trusting God that is we lose our life, he will resurrect us.  This is what it is to deny ourselves daily, pick up our cross and follow Jesus.

As I wrote this, the rumble and ruckus of another train builds as it comes from the distance soon to diminish in the dark of the night on the other side of our town.  The whistle blows to warn passengers it is crossing our path and for us, these are the only interactions.  But for those riding the train, I hope there is much more as the expedition continues. 

Lord, help me to rest in the joy of being a passenger on the train you have put me on.  Keep me from wasting too much time staring out the window into the darkness or the whizzing-by world of wishful thinking. Help me trust you who knows the tracks and the course and the power of the engines of my life – that you have all that worked out and I can add nothing to it.  Help me to enjoy the freedom you’ve given me in your rest in Jesus – to enjoy the companionship of the fellow passengers you’ve given me on this unique voyage of my life.  Help me bring you glory in the awesome work of my life, living in Christ and loving and encouraging those you’ve given to me.  Dear friends, get ready, there’s a train a coming, You don’t need no baggage, you just get on board. Don’t need no ticket, you just thank the Lord.