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The Godward Life

What Richard Sherman Accidentally Exposed

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Seconds after Richard Sherman’s spectacular defensive play in the end zone sent the Seahawks to the Super Bowl with a win over the formidable 49ers, reporter Erin Andrews thrust a microphone in his face while Century Link Field rocked with excitement. She asked him to walk her through the last play and here’s what he shouted:

“I’m the best corner in the game. When you try me with a sorry receiver like Crabtree, that’s the result you gonna’ get. Don’t you ever talk about me…Don’t you open your mouth about the best or I’m gonna’ shut it for you real quick.”

Watch Richard Sherman’s rant here. It’s far better on video than in print.

Whether or not his diatribe was a justified response to criticism, whether or not it was a planned publicity stunt, whether or not it was excused after a physical game, whether or not he deserves a raise and more credit as the best cornerback in the league is for others to decide.

One thing’s for sure. Within seconds of his interview, reactions flooded the social networks. He was called a thug, a jerk, a fool and many other words I won’t print.

His rant certainly woke me up, but what really caught my attention was an article in Forbes the following day: “22 Brief Thoughts About That Richard Sherman Interview” by Tommy Tomlinson.

It’s not the greatest bit of journalism, but two sentences stood out:

“Sherman graduated second in his class in high school and also graduated from Stanford. So not only is he not a fool, odds are he’s smarter than you and me.”

What we have here is a categorical problem.

Folly is not the same as ignorance. The Bible is clear about what qualifies someone as foolish:

  • He talks too much: Ecclesiastes 10:14
  • He slanders others: Proverbs 10:18
  • He is a scoffer: Proverbs 24:9
  • He speaks too soon: Proverbs 29:20
  • He has stumbling and sinful steps: Ecclesiastes 10:3 and Proverbs 26:11
  • He is proud: Proverbs 28:26
  • He is stubborn: Proverbs 12:15
  • He is rash: Proverbs 12:16 and 13:15
  • He picks fights: Proverbs 20:3
  • He is quick to anger: Ecclesiastes 7:9
  • He enjoys mischief: Proverbs 6:18
  • He meddles in other people’s business: Proverbs 26:17

Obviously, folly does not preclude intelligence; in fact, it could very well be argued that intelligence is required for folly.

That fact is worth remembering in a time when education is vaulted so highly and the general public leans on it as a kind of savior.

Richard Sherman didn’t reveal anything new about himself, really, but he accidentally revealed a lot about us. Yes, we love controversy. Yes, we love to vilify. And, unfortunately, we don’t know the difference between an ignorant man and a fool.

Okay, so Richard Sherman has publicly condemned his diatribe as “immature”. Fine. No breaking news there. But it’s worth remembering that athletics often reveal our immaturities. It’s also worth remembering that the most pressing question is not whether he’s immature. Nor is the question whether he is smart or ignorant.

The most pressing question is whether he’s a wise man or a fool. That’s the question every child should learn to ask and it’s the question every adult should keep asking.

Look, an ignorant man has hope, but where is the hope for a fool?

Want to share your thoughts? I welcome them. Here’s a question to ponder: what can we do in a world where folly gets most of the publicity?

Make 2014 The Best Year Yet: Practice Doxology

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We live in The Therapeutic Age, an era marked by a fixation on social, emotional, and psychic well-adjustment, often in that order. Self-improvement is the special-of-the-day. We worship a therapeutic God, reformed into an image of ourselves, and we lap up “tips to a better you” like a deer pants in the desert. The consequences for this fixation are myriad and I suppose I’ll try to thumb-war this therapeutic age at some point, but today’s post is unashamedly therapeutic. Today, I join all those millions of others who offer “tips to making 2014 your best year EVER!” I gladly stole this little gem from J.I. Packer.

Tip: practice doxology.

A “doxology” is a short song of praise.
And “practice” means intentional repetition.

The most common doxology is, of course, The Doxology, but don’t limit your imagination to The Doxology when practicing. Any short and direct song of praise to God is a doxology. The church has a rich storehouse of these, if you’re stumped, but you can make it up as well.

Sound childish? It is. One of the best traits children have is the desire to sing…all of the time. Have you heard a child singing a made up song to God lately? Imitate him. He’s practicing doxology.

God doesn’t need our praise, but he asks us to praise him because he knows that practicing doxology is important for us.

It does three important things:

  • Practicing doxology cleanses us from the black bile called pride. It forces us out of the prison of our tiny little selves and into the open sunshine of God’s face.

  • Practicing doxology shapes us into the likeness of Christ. We become more and more like little Christs, whose life was and still is a praise to God, the Father.

  • Practicing doxology not only shapes us, but it also has a shaping affect on others. Our practice draws others out of themselves.

And that, in short, is one of the best tips to a better you. Want “your best year ever”?
Be intentional. Practice.
Praise God more.
After all, we’re practicing for eternity where doxology will be the air we breath.
Can’t wait.

Growing Down: Reclaiming a Childlike Imagination

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Brian Aldiss suggests that children remind us of our decay. There was once a time when we dreamed long dreams and hoped large hopes, imagining remarkable possibilities for our life stories. We used to dream of walking with kings until our sin, failure, and cowardice pressed us down into the cellar of our own hopelessness.

Sometimes, sometimes we dream those dreams again. Sometimes we hope those hopes. It is in this way, that the imagination tries to break out of that cellar before the realist inside beats those dreams down, reminding us why we are in that cellar in the first place. It recalls to us the myriad dangers lurking in those open spaces. Why? Because the power of sin, failure, and cowardice does more than alienate us from God, it erodes our dreams and decays our joy.

What’s the solution?

Ephesians 3:20 is a much needed jetpack:

“Now unto him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or imagine, according to the power that worketh in us.”

If we wake up every morning with this verse strapped to our backs, then we can power out of the cellar and live the day more hopeful, more optimistic, and pursue bigger, more generous dreams. We could never out-dream God and that’s a child-like vision for life.

Christ’s death restored that child-like thinking to us.

Heraclitus once said, “Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.”

We’ve assumed that a child’s imagination is limited to childhood, but that assumption is unbiblical and sad. A “realistic” adult is one who has consigned his vision to the narrow confines of a cellar. His hopes, if he has any, are small and they stink like sniveling wishes. He demands we forget that Christ is loose and at large. He sneers at miracles or explains them away. And I don’t mean that he sneers only at miracles in Scripture, he does so even with the small and large miracles of our day to day.

How many of us have become this man? How many of us avoid eye-contact with failure or refuse to confront our cowardice. How many of us give our sin to Christ with one hand while snatching it back with the other?

We smell the cellar and feel its cold pressure. We want out, but we’re too afraid of the possibilities of living under an open sky. We’ve grown comfortable with our familiar confines. Maybe it’s time we nurtured a childlike imagination.

As the man once said, “You will find more happiness growing down than up.”
Amen to that.

My Life As A Bobolink

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God has used various means to show me my need for him, but it was health collapse that most forcefully pushed me to confront my destitute state. It was a long year at the bottom of an ocean of suffering. My resurrection was no over-night affair. Two years of halting efforts finally resulted in an embrace of this destitute reality. If I were totally honest, I still haven’t come to full grips with it.

But there is no doubt that my year of suffering was one of the best things that ever happened to me. And I’m still convinced that suffering might be the best thing that ever happens to you, but only if you embrace destitution and your deep need. We need this recognition to revise our vision.

Metaphorically speaking, this revised vision makes us smaller. The rest of the world seems bent on bloating their egos and bulking up in every way possible like a toad. In the end, however, it is the small who win. Their lives are not weighed down and they are able to fly farther and faster in life. A toad is still a toad, hopping from lily pad to lily pad, but neediness makes us like birds, able to cover the world.

One of the smallest, most over-looked birds in the world is the Bobolink. What a great name? It’s plumage is nothing special and neither is its song. But that bird can fly farther and longer than any other bird, even farther than the B52s with the massive wingspan.
All exercises that make us smaller, especially prayer, serve us in the long run. Our spiritual flight is more exhilarating and our progress more substantial than those of the pruning peacocks or lumpy toads we used to be.

Paul was destitute and would have it no other way: “If I must boast, let it be in the things that show my weakness.” In this he was imitating Christ, our older brother, and knew the benefits of doing so: “For though he [Christ] was crucified through weakness, yet he lives by the power of God. For we also are weak in him, but we shall live with him by the power that works within us.”

Let us boast in our weakness and reclaim the power of God that works mightily within us. Let us live and, therefore, fly like Bobolinks.

benpalpant.com – life re-imagined

The Purpose Of Prayer Is Me [God Help Me part 3]

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The only thing I really remember about Popeye, besides his cans of spinach and bulging muscles, was his motto: “I yam what I yam.”

The Apostle Paul said it a little more clearly: “By the grace of God I am what I am: and his grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain” (I Cor. 15:10). My life story is marked by a running conflict between the me forged over time by my imagination–tall, dark, and handsome…and strong–and the real me. The imagined me is Autonomous Me (sounds like a good band name). The real me, the one whom God sees, is desperately in need of him.

It seems to me that God uses various means to help us recognize our desperate need for him: loss, illness, financial distress, loneliness. Whatever his means, the aim is to reconstruct a person’s imaginative grooves. At the end of our rope, we realize that our very identity is being recast. What we worked so hard to forge over a lifetime has melted and we’re left wondering who we are. The word “Me”, being the final one in the prayer for the destitute (“God help me”) is the proper close of all prayers. You and I are, after all, the end purpose of prayer. Prayer is not so much for God’s benefit as it is for ours and this prayer forms us in a very special way.

This simple prayer for the destitute shapes our identity, particularly as we repeat it. It declares who God is, acknowledges what he will do for us, and establishes our relationship to him. Given time, a person who habitually prays in this fashion will embrace the reality of who she is: destitute.

I Corinthians 1:26-29 reminds us that this identity is not only true to reality, but a good thing. God chooses the foolish things of the world, the destitute: “For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God.”

How willingly we forget what God does not. He “knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust” (Psalms 103:14) and he has pity on us as a result. You and I are dependent nobodies. It’s who we are. As Jim Eliot put it, “We are a bunch of nobodies trying to please somebody.” Anthony Esolen riffed on the same theme in his wonderful book, *Ironies of Faith*: “What can return foolish man to his senses? Little, if he is blessed by nature with the small gifts that veil his yawning insufficiencies. Some people, ‘vain in their imaginations,’ ‘professing themselves to be wise’ (Romans 2:21,22), lapse into comfort and self-satisfaction, as a fish swims easily and stupidly into a trap. Such ones are so full of all-important ephemera that they miss the miracle before them.”

Esolen’s words kick against our human sensibilities, but they’re true nonetheless. Being highly aware of our yawning insufficiencies opens our eyes to our dire need and to the daily miracle of God’s help on our behalf. A Christian’s daily habits should include a conscious confession of personal helplessness: I am what I am.

Our fathers and mothers of the faith have echoed that fact ever since Christ. “I am what I am” marks our identity and serves as a plumb line against which all other human claims are measured. “By the grace of God I am what I am.” Any statement out of alignment with that is a false one and will prove hollow over time.

benpalpant.com – life re-imagined

Dis-ease And Why It’s Good For You

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A person who desperately needs God’s help doesn’t mess around with formalities. His prayers are simple and aggressive, variations on the same three word prayer, “God help me!” It is a richly theological prayer and worthy of more insights than I can give it here. We briefly considered the first word, “God” in last week’s post, now let’s consider the second word.

The second word, and the essential core of a destitute’s prayer is “Help”. It is, after all, what we really need. Nothing superficial here. A truly needy person doesn’t have time to tiptoe. “Help!”

A man once accosted me outside the public library and made a strange request: “My kids are hungry and we’ve run out. Do you have a loaf of bread?”

I’ve been asked for cash countless times. If he’d asked for cash to buy bread, then he very well might have wanted the money for something else. But a man who asks for bread wants bread. He needs.

It reminds me of Christ’s words in Matthew 7:9-10. “Which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent?” The answer? Well, no decent dad would ever do that. Correct. “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!”

God knows the extent of our need. Does that mean that God gives his children candy all the time? No. Does his answer to this destitute’s prayer always look like the salvation we hoped for? No. But when we ask for fish, he will not give us a snake. In my case, God brought a night into my soul to dispel the darkness that was suffocating me.

To someone observing from the outside, it may have looked like God was giving me a snake instead of fish. I felt that way at first, but now I know that the night in my soul was the cure for my darkness. Does he answer that way for every cry? No. Just as suffering seems especially tailored for each of us, so his help is fitted particularly for each of us.

In any case, God’s rescue and whatever form it takes, is in line with his final vision for us. He is about the daily task of forming us and he will bring us to completion.

That’s no lounge chair doctrine. If I am a pot (and I am), and if God is a potter spinning me on his wheel right now (and he is), then I should expect trouble. Those who have done any pottery know that the process is a violent one. Early on, the clay must be literally pounded. Spinning the pot is no gentle task either.

C.S. Lewis famously noted that an artist making a sketch for his three year old nephew takes little pains about it, content to whip something up. “But over the great picture of his life–the work which he loves, though in a different fashion, as intensely as a man loves a woman or a mother a child–he will take endless trouble–and would, doubtless, thereby give endless trouble to the picture if it were sentient.”

God is an artist. You are his masterpiece. God causes trouble, varying degrees of dis-ease, not only to shape and cure you of various ills, but also to bring you to himself. The dis-ease, the suffering, is an opportunity for you to depend completely upon the one whom you need anyways.

 

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God. Help. Me. Part 1

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Being destitute simplifies things. A destitute person has simple needs and his prayers are simple too.
That simplicity is provoked by a certain urgency. Someone who recognizes just how needy he is has no time to mess around. So his prayers become a variation on the same theme: “God help me!” That, my friends, is a simple and urgent prayer with three words worth unpacking. Let’s unpack the first and most important part of that prayer: “God.”

I remember when my daughter was just two or so, wanting to move a box of toys from her room into the living room. She pleaded for help, but I told her she could do it. I promised to walk beside her the whole way. It took some convincing, but she finally reached her little fingers around the edge of the box and pulled it into her chest. Her eyes were just peaking above the box that was bigger than she was.

A few huffs and grunts and the box was up. Her eyes brightened as she took one step and then another, down the hall, into the living room, and finally staggered to a stop. The box dropped and she put both hands on her hips with incredible gratification as if to say, “See? I am a big girl!” I had walked the length right by her side as promised, but she had no idea that I had held the box up with my own hand.

That story is a fitting description of how God walks with us. We are the little girl huffing and puffing through life, struggling under a weight which we aren’t really carrying and fearing circumstances totally in his control. He carries us. He carries our burdens. If we imagined life like that, like it really is, then we might start living differently.

Unfortunately, many people have constructed God in their own image. Like them, he is recalcitrant, quick to judge, quick to anger, and has a ready list of all our failures in his mind’s back pocket. He is a god whom we would dodge should we see him down the isle at Fred Meyers. And so we do. We dodge him most of the week and most of our lives until something forces us to confront our neediness.

In our desperate need, our vocabulary simplifies. That simplification starts with “God.” The first word of a destitute’s prayer is “God” and rightfully so. Everything starts with him. He is the source and sustainer of life. He holds all things together. You and me and all our particles included. Whatever those particles do comes as no surprise to the one who speaks them into being and who makes them move. Jude 1:25 says, “All glory, majesty, power, and authority are his before all time, and in the present, and beyond all time! Amen.” That about sums it up.

None of the glory, majesty, power, or authority belong to me. They belong to God. What a relief! God is able to do far more than we ever ask, let alone imagine, and his power is at work within us. Not our power. His.

When we finally encounter God, despite our best efforts to avoid or appease him, we face staggering degrees of bewilderment. We’ve spent all these years thinking one way, only to discover that we’ve been seeing upside down all along. Our destitute state is made manifest to us, leaving us helpless (as we always were) and trying to cope with that new reality.

For all these reasons, and about a billion more, the first word of a destitute’s prayer is “God”: “to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.”

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