Following politics is a hobby of mine, but I try (usually successfully) to avoid arguments either in person or online with all but the most trusted friends. Given my profession, the question “how should Christians regard political involvement?” comes up not infrequently. Since I can affirm a wide range of possible answers to the question, I tend to avoid too much public discourse on the topic.

But a recent blog conversation on the Christians-and-politics led to an observation about some friends of mine that points to something larger. Here’s the observation. If you were to ask most people in my church “tell me who the most politically involved people around this place are”, I’ll bet a lot of people would get the answer wrong.

I think of two friends, both quite politically involved. One is in her early twenties and has worked as a campaign staffer for several major races (and on the off chance she is reading this, sorry about Saturday.  You’ll get’em next time).  The other is a bit older, and works fairly high up in state government (let’s just say that she reports to somebody with the title “governor”).  Here’s the thing: they are in opposite political parties, but they have no trouble relating to our church. Furthermore, they are not very politically outspoken at all.  And when you do try to talk politics with them, the conversation, while interesting, is actually fairly mundane- more about the day to day realities of campaigns and political office.

Which leads me to the further observation that doing things is significantly more effective than having opinions. This is just as true in church life. It is so easy to get into endless debates, particularly online, about Marc Driscoll, Brian Mclaren, Joel Osteen, Chuck Colson, or Jim Wallis. It’s a lot harder to build a functioning ministry, disciple people, and train leaders.

On one hand, having opinions is certainly important. But having opinions at the expense of doing things, particularly in a world with constant interconnectivity, might ultimately be a temptation that leads to fruitlessness.

But it can’t be one-sided either way. How should we healthily hold on to our opinions?

This feels like an ongoing tension. Should we be “do-ers” or “be-ers”? On one hand, the simple answer is, of course, both. We must have a balance in our lives. Yet it strikes me that in practice, people tend to fall into one category or the other. And, in practice, both groups judge the other.

The mystic judgment is that these activists are crazy with all the doing. They never stop to think, they just build another institution, raise more money, renovate another building, call another meeting. The whole problem with the world, for the caricatured mystic, is that these people never stop to think and contemplate!

The activist judgment works a little different. We just nod politely and silently think to ourselves that those mystics are pretty glad for their university post and the publishing house and the bookstores that enable them to write their scathing critique of activists. And yet, late at night, we are secretly tormented by the fact that the mystics might have it right.

I’m listening to some lectures by a couple of Catholic priests that pose an interesting solution, and it relates to our ongoing conversation about the tasks of young leaders. They say that the task of the young is the activist task- to do, to build, to create, to change the world. Then, they say, the task of the old is to let it all go and empty themselves for others. It’s far more complex than that, the lectures are really worth hearing.

That said, which way do you tend? How do we try to live out of both places?

In the first chapter of Orthodoxy, GK Chesterton posits that anyone with a closed system of thought, that is, anyone who has all the answers to all the questions, is almost certainly insane.

Try a simple thought experiment: Joe thinks he’s a tree. He thinks everyone knows he’s a tree. But there is a giant worldwide conspiracy to trick him, so much so that many people have become so brainwashed, that they don’t even know he’s a tree.

Here’s the trick: you can’t prove Joe wrong, but you very likely should help him get treatment.

It turns out that the world simply doesn’t operate by a neat set of laws and logic that can be fully grasped and parsed. The Bible, to my mind, understands this point profoundly. In fact, this explains the very nature of the Bible. We would like a book that lays out “everything you need to know about God in five easy steps.” Instead, we get poetry, laws, prophecies, biographies, apocalyptic visions, long lists of names, and ancient ceremonial laws.

This used to drive me crazy, but then I figured out that the Bible needed to be complicated and multi-faceted if it was going to have any chance of helping us live actual life. People who tell you the Bible is a “simple instruction book for life” have clearly never read it- or never gotten much past the book of James.

It is tempting to create an insane worldview. Most ideological extremists have one. You may be familiar with Fred Phelps (if not, have fun googling!)  To my mind, he is the clear example of logical, insane people. But I think there are many writers who are somewhat more mainstream, who fall prey to this same problem.

How do you know if you are living in a logically insane world? If expressing your beliefs is more important than living them out, if you find yourself more angry about other worldviews than excited about your own, I think you might want to check on your logical insanity status.

One more note on this- to some degree, we all live in a logically insane world. By which I mean, we have to create in our heads “rules to live by”.  And from time to time, aspects of these rules stop working. This causes us to change the way we live and think. It’s called “growing up”.  And it’s pretty hard.

So, our church staff has been experiencing quite a bit of what some of us would call spiritual attack lately.  Others might just want to term it bad luck, but to suffice it to say that staff meetings have been taking on a book of Job quality to them.  And if you know me, you know how much I despise self-pity, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that they’ve really, honestly been having a tough time.

So, at staff meeting this past week, during prayer time, we made sure to take some time to thank God for good things he’d been doing, in our own lives and ministry.  And, as always happens, even in the midst of a whole lot of difficulties, we could think of a lot of blessings.  It almost felt (to me anyway), like the thanksgiving had a kind of power to lift off some of the sense of oppression.

I’ve also found that when I’m feeling strained in a relationship with someone, gratitude his remarkable power to patch things over.  Not insincere flattery, but very real acknowledgment of the gifts and contributions someone else has made.

I’m reminded of a conversation with a well-known lay leader at a church I attended.  I was getting ready to go plant our church, so I asked him how I could find people like him who would be willing to give so deeply of themselves to the development of a church. I thought he would say vision- but he said, one word, “appreciation.”

So- thanks to all of you who have left comments and guest posts and encouraged me to write this blog!  And keep it up!

My old boss had a lot of sayings (he was a farm kid, there’s something about farmers and sayings), “Nothing’s as bad as it seems, nothing’s as good as it seems.”  I can’t tell you how important that has been for me.  Here’s another one (same source), “You can do less than you think in a year and more than you think in five years.” Again, incredibly true in my experience.

Things go up and down. Economics change, politics change, churches adjust, companies transform, families evolve. Just because things are good today doesn’t mean they will be tomorrow, just because you’re sad today doesn’t mean you will be tomorrow.

At the same time, sometimes it is worth panicking- responding quickly is essential in a few situations.  But in a lot less situations than we often think.  Over the long term, it is the formation of character, the attention to detail, the focus on the vision, the everyday care for people that really makes a difference.

Do you panic? How do you keep yourself from freaking out when short term reality seems dire?

About three months ago I was introduced to the book The Enneagram: A Christian Perspective by Richard Rohr, and have been helped immensely by it.  Having read it with my wife, we find it almost impossible to stop ourselves from endlessly analyzing ourselves and others according the the “9 types“.  (It’s probably worth noting two things here, first, that the Enneagram has been used in a lot of settings, including some that are expressly not Christian, and second, that Rohr is a Catholic with certain commitments that are clearly not of the evangelical-Protestant persuasion of many readers here.  So you have to take him with the occasional grain of salt.  Just to give you some context if you decide to start googling.)

On the surface, the Enneagram feels essentially like another personality test (think Myers-Briggs, DiSC, or StrengthsFinder). But, as a junkie of such tests, I am tempted to say that this one is different in at least two substantive ways. Perhaps if I describe these differences, you can get some sense of how it works.

First, the Enneagram is quite willing to pigeonhole you in ways these other tests aren’t. That is, at least Rohr insists you are one and only one of the nine types. It’s not that you won’t recognize pieces of yourself in the other eight, but until you come to terms with which one you are, the system won’t have much value. And many Enneagram-ists warn that taking a test is only a help to discovering your true type- for many people, it takes quite a while. And it is crucial, ultimately, to come to terms with your type. To try to spread yourself over several types is an obvious move, and partially true, but in another sense, also an attempt to dilute some central realities of who you are.

For example, when Dave was first telling me about this, he was fairly sure I was an eight. Then, I took an online test and was labelled a three. Reading the description there, I thought the test was wrong and Dave was right. But later, reading Rohr’s much more detailed description of the Enneagram and the types, I came to the crushing realization that I am a three and gosh darn it, I’m going to have to own it. (If you make any progress into Enneagram-land, this sort of bizarre number-talk will soon be familiar territory).

I mentioned the “crushing realization” that I was a three, and that related to the second helpful thing about the Enneagram- it is shamelessly judgmental. It has its sources in the seven deadly sins with two more added, and the basic key is that your type is your core sin. It is the core sin that is under all your other small sins, and it is the sin which, if you do not come to terms with it, will destroy you. When I read the description of a three, I literally went flush and had to hide in embarrassment for several hours. (And the fact that I am now writing a public essay on the fact is, to my mind, impishly three-ish).

But this judgment is in a strange way, exhilarating. Because most of us (some of us?) feel like our surface faults, our surface problems are, well, not, the real thing. Everyday lusts and vanities, even addictions and betrayals, while destructive, feel symptomatic of something underneath. And battling off those surface faults, while crucial, begins to feel like an endless fly-swatting routine. Particularly people like me with Midwest-guilt issues, at some point we wonder if we really need to be doing this much soul-searching and repentance over snapping at our co-worker- with no minimization of the need to apologize and change such behaviors.

When I work with the Enneagram (which has concrete tools for each type to begin to confront the core sin) I often still deal with my Midwest-guilt issues, but I feel like they are actually getting me somewhere.  Like there might be change and maturity that goes beyond endless sin fly-swatting.

Looking at what I’ve written, I think I’ve painted to dark a picture, so I’ll add a brighter side.  It just helps us understand funny things about each other. My wife is brilliantly perfectionistic, a classic “one”, and at times, realizing the things that she is obsessing over perfecting simply enables her to laugh a bit and let it go. At the same time, there is incredible power in her perfectionism, and when it is redeemed with a touch of grace, we see the incredible things that she is able to pull off, and to thank God for who he made her to be.

And for all my “need to perform and impress” three-ness that can turn me into a vain peacock, it’s also true that when I put my shoulder into something, I tend to get it done. And when I can harness that power in the direction of love and responsibility, instead of mere strutting, good stuff can sometimes happen.

Well, that’s just really a taste.  If it seems interesting, spend some time on it, and let us know how it turned out for you!

Thanks for the passionate replies to the “dark side of sexuality” post- I’d love it if Pam, Kris, or others were to send me a guest post outlining some of your additional thoughts about that important topic.

Thinking about sexuality reminds me of a classic quote from a younger guy in our church.  He had been at one point heavily addicted to internet porn, and he was walking out recovering from that problem.  Frustrated with the three steps forward-two steps back nature of breaking that habit, he exploded one day, “There has got to be more to following Jesus than not looking at pornography!”

This strikes me as hitting at a central tension of faith. On one hand- there are very helpful rules.  Don’t gossip, don’t judge, don’t hate, love each other, worship God, be generous. And these rules exist for our good.  One famous illustration insists that we must regard them more like doctor’s orders than traffic regulations- they are guidelines that lead us into abundance of life.

But these rules can be abused- they can become a means of control rather than a fountain of life.  I think of the famous example from the life of Jesus in regards to the Sabbath.  The Jewish Sabbath day had been so saddled with unnecessary regulation that it had become a burden rather than a blessing.  Jesus at times seemed to deliberately flout these regulations, at one point making the famous point “The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath.”

And yet, just a few posts ago, we had  a number of comments espousing the virtues of making a regular habit of sabbath-keeping.  I am writing this post from a condo in the Wisconsin Dells where my family is happily submitting the Sabbath concept.  And I would agree that given the frantic work pace our society can place on us, regarding the sabbath as a “rule”, and not merely a “suggestion” can be important- otherwise it’s too easy to make short term sacrifice of rest that leads to long term breakdown.

Are you starting to see the tension? Rules can be bringers of life or death. We seemingly can’t live without them, and yet we find that rules quickly devolve into sources of shame, exhaustion, manipulation, and control.

How do we know which rules to follow?  How do we know when rules have gone from serving us to squeezing the life out of us?

Ok, off to ride waterslides with the kids…