This week I crossed something off my bucket list. I played street ball on the courts of Harlem. Now, it probably wasn’t all that you are imagining. I was not hustling street ballers by pulling And-One type moves to the shock and awe of an eager crowd, even though I may have felt like it. In reality, I was only playing a game of twenty-one with my short Jewish friend from Maine and our newly acquainted, twelve year old friend named Joseph.

Regardless of whether or not I will be a legend on the courts of Harlem, which is not likely, meeting Joseph was the highlight of my week. At first, I admit I was hesitant when he asked to play with us. The introvert in me wanted to just pretend that we were about to go home, but against the odds, I made a different decision, and I’m so glad I did, because I had a blast making a new friend.

When I take a step back and look at my life, I am astounded by the amount of energy I can sometimes spend avoiding connection. I have my close friends, I have my family, and I have Twitter followers, but anyone outside that is someone to be avoided, or if that is not possible, then to be put up with until I get what I need. I know this makes me sound like a real jerk, and maybe I am, but I hope I’m not the only one who can admit that they’ve struggled with this feeling.

As I sat on the subway the next day, reflecting on how much fun I had had playing basketball the night before, I looked around at the people commuting with me and I was struck with a thought as if for the first time…

What if I could change my spirit of avoidance to a spirit of engagement in my fellow man and women? What if the people around me were not just blobs of moving matter only to be dealt with if they cut me off on the highway or don’t give me the right order at McDonalds? It took me only a second to realize that this thought was not revolutionary whatsoever, but that Jesus himself had talked about this thousands of years ago.

I knew the command “love your neighbor” was one of the “important” ones, but I always thought it was just because that’s the right thing to do. While I still believe that it is the right thing to do, I also believe that there is so much more to it than that. I don’t think Jesus gives us commands just because it’s “right”, He gives us commands because they are “good”, and good leads to life.

Loving our neighbor is not simply a fulfillment of our daily Christian duties, it is a call to experience life at it’s fullest. It is an opportunity to live the way we were ultimately created to, in connection with one another. It is an offer to give joy and to receive it, to enter into a transaction of the soul with another human being. It is an opportunity to do exactly what Jesus did, to show each and every person we come in contact with that they matter.

Hanging out with Joseph was not some profound, spiritual experience. We did not talk about salvation or Jesus, we talked about sports, girls, and music. I cracked some jokes, we followed each other on Instagram and we went our separate ways. What Joseph reminded me of though, was invaluable. He reminded me that fellow human beings are not roadblocks that get in our way, but they are beautiful pathways on which we can discover stories, give joy, and receive life. 

I had a conversation with a friend the other day about fear. Apparently these are the kinds of pretentiously deep topics my friends and I spend our time on. During the conversation, he asked me a very interesting question.

“Jon,” he said, “What do you think the opposite of fear is?”

I thought about it for a second before my answer hit me…

“Trust.”

When I was child, I was afraid of the dark, and to be honest, I probably still am. Many of us struggled with that probing fear of monsters lurking in our closet or hiding under the bed. If you were at all like me, your plan of action in moments like these was to simply scream until somebody came to the rescue. As soon as mom or dad entered the room however, my fear completely subsided. Why was this so? The circumstances hadn’t really changed, there very well may still have been a monster in the closet, the only difference was that now I had someone near me that I trusted. Fear no longer had a place in my heart, because I trusted that even if the monster was there that my parents would protect me. I had, without trying, simply replaced fear with trust.

Rarely do we think about fear and trust being so intimately connected, especially from a spiritual standpoint, but David makes the connection incredibly clear with the powerful words of Psalm 56…

         “When I am afraid, I put my trust in you….
         In God I trust and am not afraid.”

David, through his many hardships, has discovered the truth of 1 John 4:18, that “perfect love casts out fear”. It is by trusting in God’s perfect love for us that we can live a life free from fear, worry, and anxiety, even in the midst of incredibly adverse circumstances.

Now, this sounds like a great idea in theory, but I'm be lying if I told you that I didn't struggle with how to actively trust God in my life. “Entrust your entire life to God” is a big, abstract, general command thrown out by many in contemporary Christian culture. While entrusting my life to God is the goal, I’ve found along the way that it’s also a very difficult thing to measure. Every time I tried to “trust God more” with my life, I was always at loss for exactly what areas I was withholding from Him in the first place. I wanted to give myself over to Him, but I had no way of measuring where I was lacking trust.

In light of this connection though, I've realized that instead of asking where I can trust God more, I simply ask, in what areas am I experiencing fear? The areas of our lives where we experience the most fear are the same areas that require the most trust in God.

Recently made a list of the biggest fears that I’m facing in this season of my life. I read and pray through that list everyday now, entrusting each of those things specifically to God, knowing that when I invite trust into the equation, fear automatically subtracts itself out, even though the monsters may still be lurking in the closet

I recently had the opportunity to hear vulnerability expert, Brene Brown speak at a conference. Several times throughout her session she referenced Teddy Roosevelt’s famous speech “Citizenship in a Republic”…

“It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to man who was actually in the arena whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood…”

Upon first hearing this quote, it gripped my heart and inspired me, but lately I’ve come to understand and appreciate it a little more deeply.

This past summer I helped start a YouTube channel called The Anima Series, a creative project committed to giving local Christian artists a more global platform. For some strange reason, some of our most viewed and commented-on videos are ones of me doing spoken word pieces that I’d written. The videos themselves have been viewed nearly 50,000 times, which is actually a pretty small number when it comes to the internet, but even with a small audience, I have run into my fair share of critics. In some small way, I feel as though I’m beginning to understand what Brene and Teddy were talking about.

If we want to step into the arena, if we want to become a voice for something we believe in, there is a promise that goes along with it. The promise tells us that the critics indeed WILL be there. The critic WILL point out where you stumble and where you could have done better, and your face WILL be marred by dust and sweat and blood. These are not things that might happen if you build your platform enough, these are guarantees no matter how large the arena may be.

The early believers in the book of Acts were very familiar with this promise. These apostles, fresh off the Jesus’ ascension into heaven, wanted to step into the arena and speak boldly for Christ. Very quickly, however, they were arrested, thrown in prison, and rebuked by the religious leaders. When Peter and John are released in the middle of chapter four, they return to their own people with a report of what happened. In that moment, it’s clear things are not going to be easy. It’s clear that by stepping into the arena, they will be marred with dust, sweat, blood, and eventually death.

So what do they do? They pray, and their prayer is perhaps a bit different than you would expect.

“Now, Lord, consider their (the religion and political elite) threats and enable your servants to speak your word with great boldness.” (Acts 4:29)

This prayer surprised me a bit. The apostles run into persecution and adversity and their gut reaction is to pray not for deliverance from the circumstance, but for God’s power to work within the circumstance.

We so often want to escape criticism, hardship, and uncertainty. We so often want to step out of the arena at the first sign of trouble, but what we don’t realize is that perhaps God wants to enter in and use us right in the midst of the hardship. He wants to meet us in the fire to refine the communities around us.

With stepping into the arena comes the promise of adversity and criticism, sometimes to an unnecessary degree. But there is a much more powerful promise there as well, that the God of the universe meets us in the arena and enable us to stand tall, even with a face full of dust and sweat and blood.

I listen to more podcasts in a week then I would ever care to admit. I’m a bit of a nerd in that way. Last week, I was listening to one of my favorite Podcasts on leadership; the interviewee was a well-known leadership trainer and consultant, specifically amongst the younger generation of leaders. About halfway through the interview, he said something that intrigued me…

“It seems like every single twenty-something I know, they feel like they can change the world…”

The emerging generation, otherwise known as Millennials, are often described by researchers as lazy and entitled. We were given everything we wanted as kids, therefore we expect the world to give us everything we want now that we’re all grown up. Among these negative descriptions, there are also a few positive trends that define this rising generation of recent college graduates, one of which, and perhaps the most important, is this desire to make in impact on a global scale. Now more than ever young leaders today feel that they not only can change the world, but that they have a responsibility to. In light of globalization through things like the internet, especially Facebook and Twitter, the problems of the world are no longer far off, distant issues, they are a personal, pressing crisis that we witness everyday with a simple touch of the screen.

These struggles of the world capture the hearts of young people so intensely that there is a new business model emerging, and this new model is revolutionizing the way we create and innovate. It is no longer enough to just simply make money, now a business must seek to support some sort of greater cause, it has to stand for something bigger than simply the welfare of it’s own employees.

This I think would best be described as “The New American Dream”. It is no longer just about upward social and economic mobility through hard work. This generation is adding service of our fellow man into the formula. Businesses such as TOM’S Shoes and Krochet Kids are proving that this is the hot new trend, and in fact, it’s what consumers are looking for. It’s not that making a bunch of money isn’t the goal anymore, it’s just that keeping it all for yourself is a bit out of style.

Perhaps we may be a bit entitled, but I would challenge this description of laziness. If Millennials were truly lazy, then we would be killing the American Dream founded on hard work. I do not believe we’re killing it, however, I just don’t think we’re satisfied with this dream being confined only to American’s anymore.

I just recently finished a six-month study on the gospels. It was a long, slow process, but I walked away with a renewed appreciation not only for Jesus, but his disciples as well. Reading these four books and going so slowly through the stories this time helped me to realize just how late in the game most of these men arrived at the truth that Jesus is Lord. It was encouraging, seeing just how much the twelve disciples struggled with faith and believing, even though they were the twelve freaking disciples, the founders of our faith. Maybe I’m not such a terrible Christ-follower after all, I thought to myself.

Even through all of the wrestling matches with belief in Jesus, one thing never changed for his inner circle of friends, they always followed him. Even before they believed in Him, even when everyone else left, even before they discovered the truth that Jesus was the Messiah, in the midst of figuring all that out, these men still followed him, some of them all the way to the cross. They may have been hiding amongst the crowds like cowards, but they followed.

In fact, that was Jesus’ first real command to them. In Matthew 4:19, Mark 1:17, and in Luke 5:10 Jesus never says, “believe and have faith in me, then come and follow me”. His command is much simpler, and I think shows much more power. “Follow me.”

In my experience, evangelical Christianity often times gets hung up on an ordering of faith that says, “believe in Jesus, then begin to follow him”. While I agree that belief in Jesus as the Savior of the world is the most important realization a human being could ever come to, I would argue that the process above is actually a bit backwards. It seems clear to me from the scriptures that Jesus first invites us to simply follow, and it is through following, by getting to know him and learn from him, that our hearts will be changed and we will come to believe in him.

Pastor Andy Stanley says it better than I ever could. He says that the message of Jesus doesn’t say, “change, and then you can join us”, it says, “join us, and you will change”.

Andrew and Simon and James and John were not fully formed fishers of men when they first decide to follow Jesus. They were not convinced that He was the one they’d been waiting for. They were just lower class fishing brothers. Jesus doesn’t seem to be too concerned about all that though. It looks to me like he trusts that God’s power will speak for itself once these men decide to go with him.

In my experience, screaming at people to just all of a sudden believe in Jesus almost never works. And anytime it seems to, it usually means the seed was planted in some pretty rough soil and it won’t last very long. What I have found to be much more effective, is to invite people to simply begin to follow Jesus around, invite them to objectively read what the Bible says about him, invite them to begin hanging around communities that are gathering in his name. I invite them to do that, and then trust that God will do the work needed in their hearts.

The Great Commission of Matthew 28 tells us to “go and make disciples of all nations”. We could do that by screaming “repent and believe” from sidewalks and street corners, thus adding to the Bible-beating, hate-filled, Christian stereotype. We could do that, or we could do it the way Jesus did to his disciples, by simply extending a loving invitation to follow Him, and trusting God to do the transformation in their hearts.

The other day I participated in my first ever half-marathon. The actual running of the race itself was totally normal, the story lies in how I got there.

On Friday night, I was getting ready for dinner when my mom looked through the paper and said, “Hey, there’s a half-marathon in Crystal Lake on Sunday. They’re still accepting sign ups.”

I knew she was joking, I hadn’t been training for a race of that size by any means, but my mind was already in the works. Figuring I could do a Saturday night church service, I quickly decided that I had nothing better planned for Sunday morning, so I said in all seriousness, “Sign me up.” So with less than a forty-eight hour notice, I would be running a half-marathon. I’m either foolish, or completely arrogant sometimes; any other time, I am both.

The race went pretty well despite my lack of training. I held to my strategy of starting as far back as I could and slowly working my way forward. For some reason, passing sixty year olds with breathing tanks made me feel as if I was going faster than I was. By the time mile ten came around and I was entering the fourth quarter of the race, I was feeling surprisingly strong. I hadn’t really run this far before, but something told me my body was going to make it, so I increased my pace and brought the race home with pride.

While nearing the finish line, I thought a bit about my journey as a runner. I started running on an irregular basis about five years ago, and when I say irregular, I mean it. I’ve had times where I took my running extremely seriously, staying on a consistent plan and training to reach a certain goal on a certain date. For every season like this though, I’ve also had three or four where I didn’t run for months, because, well, I just didn’t feel like it. As a runner, I’ve been both super disciplined, non-existent, and anywhere in between. When I finally crossed that finish line Sunday morning though, a thought came to my head.

I never could have done this five years ago, I thought to myself.

I think this probably rings true for most of us, whether we’re runners or not. Whether it’s fitness, relationships, work, or God, we all have those places in our lives where we long for consistency, but we just can’t help being totally inconsistent.

I would love to run everyday, eat right, sign up for races, and stay on a specific training regiment. This is the ideal best thing I could do for myself as a runner, but if I’m honest with myself, some days I just don’t feel like it, or I make sure I get too busy and I can’t find time for it. This happens to all of us in many areas of life, and the temptation in those times is to say to ourselves, “well if I can’t be consistent with it, then I won’t do it at all”. Noble as the thought may sound, I think it’s a bit unrealistic. If I quit everything in my life where I experience inconsistency, then I probably wouldn’t have a career, family, friends, hobbies, a girlfriend, or a blog; and I definitely wouldn’t have a relationship with God. Not only that, but to quit when things aren’t perfect is to rob ourselves of the growth that can be experienced in the midst of inconsistency.

Please don’t misunderstand me here. I’m a huge advocate for personal discipline and hard work, but consistency and discipline are a goal. They are something we work towards, something we develop over time. They may be the best pathway for growth, but they are not a pre-requisite. We cannot allow ourselves to be trapped by the lie that tells us if we lack discipline then growth is not a possibility, because that leads to quitting, and therefore, no growth at all.

I’m an inconsistent runner, but five years ago, there’s no way I could have ran a half-marathon and lived to tell the tale. Day in and day out, I get frustrated with myself for not being more disciplined, and that’s fine, we all get frustrated. Self-deprecation keeps us motivated I guess. What’s important though, is to every now and then take a look back to recognize and celebrate the growth we’ve made in the long run, inconsistent as it may be. This is something very few of us do, but I’m learning just how important it really is. Not only does looking back help us realize that growth truly can happen through inconsistency, but it helps fuel us to become more disciplined in the future, which means experiencing even greater growth.

Moving forward, I hope to run on a more regular basis, and I hope to one day be ready to run a full marathon. For now, my body is telling me to take a few days to rest. More importantly though, I plan on celebrating the growth I’ve made as a runner, even if it hasn’t been perfect. Let us accept our inconsistency, not as a barrier to growth, but as a winding, twisting avenue towards growth. If we expect perfection, we’ll live our lives disappointed, but if we work from where we are, and take time to celebrate where we’ve come from, then we’ll live our lives inspired to keep going to where we will be.

I learned something from the Bible, and it wasn't in the New Testament...

I know what it’s like to overcome impossible odds in order to accomplish a task. Not too long ago, I took on the impossible. I set out to read through Leviticus, Numbers, and 1 Chronicles without skipping or skimming a single section. After finishing, I was thoroughly confused, totally bored, and my brain just hurt. I had to rest for about three days in complete isolation with nothing but ice cream and mindless television.  It was not a pretty sight.

For the everyday, unstudied, non-theologian like me, there are certain sections of the Bible that are less than riveting, not because they aren’t holy or awesome, but simply because I’m not smart enough to understand what all the lists, practices, and laws mean. If you’re like me, most of the time we shy away from what we don’t understand. I’m not sure when, but at some point, I got really tired of fear, so I decided to actually dive in and see what might be hidden there for me.

When it was over, and after much reflection over mounds of Rocky Road, I still didn’t understand exactly what all the laws meant, but I had learned something about what it means to create something for the glory of God.

While reading, I ran into many seemingly monotonous lists of materials, measurements, and proportions that were supposedly given by God to the leaders as instructions for how the Ark, the temple, or wherever the Lord would dwell, should be constructed. Upon reflection, I noticed that everything that appeared on these lists was extremely valuable, like gold, silver, or fine fabrics. I also saw that all the measurements and proportions for these projects were extremely specific, which explained why the lists were so freaking long.

I noticed these things. And then, in a flash, it was simple.

If these Israelites were going to build something for God’s glory to rest upon, then it was going to be their absolute best. When I saw this, the verses began to transform themselves right before my eyes. Instead of seeing a long, boring list of materials and instructions, I was seeing a lesson about the worth of God, and the responsibility of those who seek to create for his glory.

As a self-proclaimed “artist”, and as a Christian, I hope that in some way everything I write, perform, and create reflects and brings glory to the God of the universe. Now, just to be clear, this God I’m talking about is the all-powerful, all-knowing, loving, merciful, strong, mighty, patient Father. Seeking to reflect the glory of a God like that can begin to look like a tall order.

God is awesome. His worth is beyond measure. Therefore, if we truly seek to reflect him in the things we create then we must offer up our absolute best. In creating for God, we cannot bring a subpar effort. Just like the builders of the temple, who used gold and gave God their most precious offerings, we must bring him our best ideas, our best effort in creating. We give him the best we have to offer with our lives.  If we seek to bring glory to the King of Kings, then we must seek to create with excellence. Be excellent.

I heard it said once that God has never given us anything but his absolute best. I think that’s true. After all, Jesus was a pretty good gift. So then how could we, in return, give him anything less from ourselves? The art and lives that we offer up to God should be the absolute best we have to offer. And just like we don’t have to understand every single verse in scripture for God to teach us something, we also don’t have to be a creative genius in order for God to use what we have created. He knows our hearts, and if what we make is truly offered with the hope of reflecting him, and we’ve given everything we have to it, then even if it looks like a first grade painting of a tree, he will react just like a loving father would. He will bless it, use it, and cherish it.

I watched a movie the other night that most would probably place in the “Christian” genre. The movie itself was okay, but what struck me most were the previews. Each trailer advertised a different “Christian” film, but to me, they all looked and felt and sounded exactly the same. It was really just one story being told over and over in slightly different ways.

I often have the same experience when I listen to “worship music” or read “Christian fiction”. If we’re honest, just about every song we sing in church or listen to on K-Love these days sounds exactly the same, and it’s not just because they all use the same four chords. It’s real easy to get lost in a “Christian bookstore”, because every story we find is nothing more than an adaptation of a biblical story set in the eighteenth century.

Okay, Jon, so why the vendetta against “Christian art”, and why all the pretentious quotations? Maybe I am being a bit harsh, but I believe there are better questions to be asking.

Such as…

When did “Christian” become a genre? Why does the “worship music” industry only seem to indorse one type of sound? Why does every “Christian film” need to end in some sort of alter call for it’s prodigal character?

Christian art, in my view, is anything created with the intention and hope of bringing glory to God. Worship is our way of expressing and giving worth to that God, and creating is our way of reflecting the image of God that he has placed upon us. We create to give glory to a God that is all-powerful, all-knowing, the creator of the heavens and the earth, the author of every story under heaven. So it makes absolutely no sense to me that “Christian” is one of the most limiting and uninteresting genres in music, literature, and film.

If we truly desire to reflect and give glory to God, the depths of whose presence and love are unsearchable, then there should be no limit to the stories we can tell through our art. Yet as it stands, “Christian art” is utterly and easily searchable. In fact, we’ve been searching the same old places for the last twenty years or so. The “worship sound” has made very little development since entering the new millennium, and most “Christian films” still look like they should be on the Hallmark Channel in the 80s.

Why is this so dangerous?

Art is a reflection of culture. And with art that is so limiting, it’s no wonder that society’s perception of the Christian life is one of stuck rules and regulations. This is how life with God is viewed because this is the message we put out there, that there is one story to be told, that God fits in a category, and if you don’t like that category, then you don’t like God, and you don’t fit in.

With the parables he told, Jesus brought a new word into the first century conversation. He challenged social norms, he made people angry, and he refused to be put into a box. His heart was intimately connected with an unsearchable God, and therefore the stories he told were also unsearchable, diverse, excellent, and most of all, honest.

There are many artists out there who are beginning to take this posture of creating new, fresh, innovative sounds and stories for God. But we are so hesitant to bring them into the “mainstream” because we are simply afraid. I understand that the responsibility is great when we say we’re “creating for God” because we would never want to misrepresent him, or say something that bears a false image. But this fear has crippled us to the point where we are now only creating one-dimensional, boring, unskilled images of God. If this is our message, then we are misrepresenting him. We cannot allow our fear to keep us from, as his word says, singing a new song to the Lord through the art we create.

If we allow God control of our hearts, and our heart are where we create from, then we’re creating from a place where he has control. If we begin to do this, as Jesus did, I don’t see how we could misrepresent him. Not only that, but with the all-powerful, all-knowing, dynamic God on our side, how could we not absolutely revolutionize a culture with the stories we tell?