Prejudice

I wonder how much prejudice affects what we experience, participate in and see in our spiritual life. I'm not talking necessarily about racial prejudice, I'm talking more generally--about premature judgements made upon first impressions.

I traveled home to Mariposa this weekend and rode the train back to Portland. I boarded the train in Sacramento at about midnight Sunday evening. I was assigned a seat on the isle in the front of the car. A guy much younger than myself was asleep in the window seat.

I put my backpack in the overhead rack and did my best to make myself comfortable in the seat so I could sleep. The foot rest on my seat was broken and would not come up all the way. That gave my chair the effective shape of a ski jump. I spent the first hour or so sliding down the ski jump and then pushing myself back to the top.

I finally gave up and decided to lower the foot rest and try sleeping with out it. By this time I was pretty grumpy and primed to indulge in a little prejudice. I attempted to lower the foot rest but an obstruction blocked it. I raised it back up and felt around on the floor. There was a cardboard food caddy with an empty sandwich wrapper, juice bottle and french fry bag under my seat. There was a trash receptacle within two steps of our seats. I immediately assumed that this guy next to me was one of those self-absorbed kids who assumed it was someone else's job to clean up after him.

grumbling, I tossed the trash and lowered the footrest.

At a few minutes before six, I woke to the silhouette of Mt. Shasta as the sun began to glow through the window. I almost missed the beauty of it because I was ready for another helping of prejudice. I was too uncomfortable to sleep any longer, but my seat mate was still slumbering contentedly. I decided that he had never crawled out of his sleep number bed before 10 AM in his life and his body was just reacting out of habit. I noticed the tag above his seat indicated that he was bound for Kalamath Falls. I consoled myself that he was getting off in a couple of hours.

I went to the lounge car and grabbed some coffee. When I got back, I pulled out my Bible and started reading (I know, that picture embarrasses me, too). After a while, my traveling companion awoke. I expected him to pull out his ipod and cell phone and start texting away, but instead he gazed out the window for a while as I read. After a few minutes he adjusted the curtain. The movement caused me to look up from my reading. He smiled and said, "I noticed the sun was in your eyes." (I know, I should just label myself a jerk right now and end this post. And no, the Bible did not burst into flames in my lap).

We introduced ourselves and began to talk. I enjoyed one of the most engaging and interesting conversations I've had in a long time. Come to find out, my friend had graduated from University of Washington and then had spent two years in the Peace Corps. While in the Peace Corps he lived in Tanzania and taught there. He was preparing to start graduate work that would better prepare him to make a difference in lives of people like the ones he had learned to love in Tanzania. He didn't even own an ipod or cell phone because he said they take your attention away from the people around you. I was greatly disappointed when he detrained in Kalamath. I put on my mp3 player and texted Debi.

If I had let my prejudices run the show, I would have missed meeting an amazing person. But, what if I take that a step further? I wonder how many times God has placed people, or opportunities, or blessings in my life and I ignored them or avoided them or failed to explore them because that first impression birthed prejudices that hid what was really there?

Do I habitually prejudice myself out of what God has for me? I hate to think....

How pure is pure?

"Blessed are the pure in heart for they will see God."
Matthew 5:8
"Purity of heart is to will one thing."
Soren Kierkegaard

Sometimes I have to admit I don't think things through when it comes to following Jesus. I read things like those written above and I think, "that is what I want." But later, maybe much later I realize there are significant ramifications to being "pure in heart" and "willing one thing."

Yesterday I was reading Ezekiel 24. It is an amazing story, but I doubt it is in anyone's top 10 Bible stories list. In the story, God tells Ezekiel his wife is going to die. God goes on to instruct Ezekiel not to mourn for her, but to use the experience as an object lesson--a sermon illustration--for the people.

Okay, let's just stop here for a minute. Is that God's definition of purity of heart? Was Paul that serious when he said in Philippians 3, "I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ"?

In a religious culture were we are taught that faith is believing that God will give us everything we need (and most things we want), are we to understand that being pure in heart may mean giving up everything, EVERYTHING, to follow Jesus?

In this process of moving to Portland, our house in Mariposa has been sold and then not sold more than once. Friends tell us, "you're doing what God called you to do, he will take care of the house." Is that the only option the Bible presents? Is purity of heart believing that God will take care of the sale of the house before its to late, or can it mean that there is a possibility that our house will become Ezekiel's wife? Is it conceivable that God could ultimately ask us to give up our house, and everything we've invested in it to follow him? Is the house and our possessions that go with it a threat to our purity of heart? Is purity of heart trusting God even if the worst happens? Should we believe that the worst we can conceive is what God considers best for us? Did Ezekiel believe that as he watched his wife dying?

I have to confess I'm struggling with this. It's not that I don't want to be that pure in heart, it's that I am afraid. I understand that whatever God does is best and I should be willing to entrust myself to him. But my heart wonders how far he will take that. Did Ezekiel feel blindsided? I'm not sure I can make the commitment Ezekeil did. My humanity fights against it. My one hope is that Paul was also serious when he said that our very faith is a gift of God.

I'm not ready to be that pure in heart, yet. But I want to be that ready, so that is where I have to start. I lay my "want to" on the altar before God and trust that when the time comes for him to ask extraordinary things of me, he will give me the extraordinary faith to walk through it.

God is not fluff. Just ask Ezekiel.

Using our heads--too much?

How comfortable are you with prayer?

The other day I was watching the movie Finding Forrester. In that film, Sean Connery plays a Pulitzer Prize winning author, William Forrester, who is mentoring a 16 year old boy named Jamal. He instructs Jamal to sit down at the typewriter and write. Jamal sits down and stares at the keys.

William asks Jamal if there is a problem. He responds, "No, I'm just thinking."
William responds, "No thinking, just write." He continues, "You write the first draft with your heart. You rewrite with your head."

The lesson is that if you focus too much on how you want to say something, it is easy to lose track of what you wanted to say. Have you ever written something and realize that it didn't sound anything like it did in your head? Forrester would say that you let your head in the process too soon.

I think it's easy to do the same thing with prayer. I wonder if the average Christian is over-taught when it comes to prayer. It has become a formal style of communication like writing a business letter (you have to use the right format, language, punctuation, etc.), rather than an intimate form of communication like conversation.

I think prayer is a gift God gave us so we can engage with him in the process of figuring life out. The psalms are a good example. In fact, they are both good prayer and good writing. They continue to connect with people centuries after they were written because they live at gut level. The psalmist's heart got to pray what it meant before his head started tinkering with it.

The risk I can see in praying my first draft with my heart is that I might discover what I really think and feel rather than what I believe I ought to think and feel. That is a little frightening. But the reward might just be that I also begin to discover what God is actually thinking and feeling.

That sounds suspiciously like a conversation.