The leader of the women’s ministry at my new church talked about this verse at a Bible study last weekend, and what she said has stuck with me. We can’t know the frame of mind of the Israelites as they camped their last few nights in the wilderness. But peppered throughout the book of Joshua are the instructions “Be strong and courageous.” You don’t need to be admonished to do those things if you’re not in the least afraid or uncertain. So chances are, they had some butterflies. They were gearing up to move into a land owned by someone else, that they knew they’d have to fight for, and oh yeah, in the morning they were going to somehow walk through a river to get there.

Had they let their fears control them, they may have stayed camped out across from the promised land, receiving none of the blessings of their inheritance and losing an opportunity to show God’s greatness. But they obeyed, so they got to experience the wonder of waters rushing back from the Ark of the Covenant so they could walk through on dry ground.

God is working in us, on us, and around us all the time, but he does his greatest works through us only when we swallow our fears, walk to the rocky edge of our comfort zone, and step out. Hebrews 11 is a laundry list of people doing impossible, uncomfortable, and inconvenient things in obedience to God, but if that’s too remote to resonate for you, there are modern tales of inconvenient obedience all over the place. Francis Chan, Jen Hatmaker, David Platt have all written about whole churches doing it. Those one or two people you know who actually fast every now and then? They might be doing it. The kid at Burger King who says God bless you when she hands you your lunch might even be doing it.

If I’m comfortable in my life, perhaps I’m ignoring a call to do more. Maybe writing the occasional FS blog post is a skinny little pigeon type of sacrifice, when I’ve got a stable’s worth of overweight lambs in the backyard, if you get my drift. I stand at the door of my stocked pantry and complain when I can’t decide what snack I’m in the mood for, and nearly 1 in 7 people worldwide are going hungry. I want to shine for Christ among my family and friends, but I’m too worried about what they’ll think of me to say too much about it.

Crossing the Jordan takes guts, even when it’s something as seemingly simple as starting a conversation. But  when the Israelites did it, God went in before them, stood among them as they walked, and followed behind them when they reached the other side. He’ll do the same for us if we’ll only obey.

“In Paradise there are many Saints who never gave alms on earth; their poverty justified them. There are many Saints who never mortified their bodies by fasting or wearing hair shirts; their bodily infirmities excused them. There are many Saints too who were not virgins; their vocation was otherwise. But in Paradise there is no Saint who was not Humble.” (from Humility of Hear by Fr. Cajetan Mary da Bergamo

Whether or not I learn much from the rest of this book, I suppose I would do well to reflect on this paragraph every little while.

We’re not humbugs – I love the celebrations of Christmas, and we play Christmas music all December, put up lights, decorate, and throw parties. We just want the celebrations to come from joy in salvation rather than joy in things. So when we realized this Christmas was on a Sunday morning, and we’d have a Christmas morning service, my husband jumped right in to propose some small changes that would give us an opportunity to strengthen our daughters’ connection with Christmas as a joyous holy day. Let’s do all the gifts the day before, and just stockings the morning of Christmas, he said. We can spend Christmas morning reading the Christmas story, lighting the advent wreath, preparing for the celebration of the service, and we won’t have to share it with gift opening.

This is a great idea! I thought. And yet, I couldn’t get my mind around it. I very sincerely wanted to do it. But I immediately felt the counter-pull of tradition. My family never opened gifts any day but Christmas morning. We never had grandparents or other family living nearby, and no one ever worked on Christmas, so we never had to move our gifting to another day as so many other families do. I desperately want to break the link between greed and Christmas, and this idea was just one little tiny change that might point us in that direction. But I had to think about it for 24 hours before I could totally get on board.

There are a lot of traditions in church and in Christian life that are damaging to the body of Christ and the believer, and I’m not always the most forgiving person when it comes to those. But next time I run up against someone else’s tradition, maybe my response will share a little more of the mercy and grace that this holiday is actually about. Tradition is a powerful thing.

It was easier for me to look at Galatians 5 and feel good about myself before I began to see myself through the eyes of my four-year-old daughter. Before, I believe that I thought I had most of the fruit well in hand. I would look at the list and say to myself, “Well, I think most people would say I am kind and loving, gentle, faithful, even joyful.” But my blind spot was spelled out in the first part of that thought: “I think most people would say …”

That is how I view my character: through what other people think of me. So it’s instructive now to be subject to the all-day, every-day gaze of a child who listens and watches intently, picking up and mimicking my true values — the ones I have done a wonderful job hiding from myself over the years. When she screams at the dog for a petty offense I know it’s because, even though I identify myself as an animal lover, too often my first reaction to my dog’s needy character is a shove and a yell. When my daughter lets out a theatrical, irritated sigh after being asked to do a chore she doesn’t feel like doing, I have to realize, even while I lecture her for her bad attitude, that she hears that sigh coming out of my mouth whenever I’m trying to do something and she interrupts with that extra question or that extra request that just doesn’t seem critical to me.

See, the fruit of my spirit, sadly, is anger, impatience, inconstancy, jealousy, self-pity, and the king of them all, pride. And my daughter will have a hard time bearing better fruit than me if I don’t start showing her what it looks like. I pray God will give me the right fruit, so my kids can be closer to Him as they grow.

* It’s common today for churches to call for Christians to “break through the walls” of their church buildings. Usually sermons that go this way are aiming at expanding outreach programs, which are (funny) run from inside the church. Is this the solution to an overly church-centric theology?

* Even churches that preach that Christianity should be lived in everyday life rather than just within the walls of the church often place remarkable import on church attendance as a litmus test for your spiritual well being. Is this right?

* Psalm 32:7: You are a hiding place for me; you preserve me from trouble; you surround me with shouts of deliverance. God is our hiding place. Should church be? What’s the difference?

* What about the home church movement? Is having a more intimate worship setting more conducive to following Christ both within and outside of worship?

* If church consists of listening to sermons and Sunday School lessons (read “sermons junior,” in many cases), are the worshipers using the church experience to meet Christ’s calls to relationship with one another? Is our connection to each other as we sit side by side in a pew any more profound than when we sit side by side in a movie theater?

Unbearable Lightness is a spiritual book, but it is not concerned with God. It is concerned with why people do what they do and how and why people love. So I’ve been interested to realize as I’ve begun re-reading it that I seem to have adopted a philosophy similar to einmal ist keinmal.

This year I have found myself very often saying, “There is no right answer.” When a friend confides a complex problem and asks for advice, this is frequently where I end up. Because when the choice is between one potentially harmful (or helpful) option and a second potentially harmful (or helpful) option, and neither choice involves breaking a commandment, and when prayer doesn’t appear to be providing any guidance, then I honestly don’t think there is a right answer. In my experience there are tons of decisions that fit this description. My version of einmal ist keinmal has a lot more qualifiers than Tomas’, clearly–it does take God’s law and God’s voice into account.

Plus, while in the book Tomas feels freed by his feeling of insignificance, I look at his philosophy as somewhat morbid; it means our existence is pointless. The absence of “right answers” doesn’t mean we are pointless, or that God doesn’t care what we do, or that He is not involved in our lives at that level. I think it just means that God will have His way. Maybe He cares about this decision because we are struggling with it and we feel it is really important, but in the same way that we care for our kids when they’re trying to choose what color shoes to wear. We know it’s going to be OK, but we’re with them in the tough moments anyway, and we’re certainly not going to decide for them. In these instances I imagine it matters to God less what we decide to do and more how we end up doing it–with frustration and anxiety, or with faith and grace.

I wonder if it says something about me that this is one of the songs that I think of as the music of my heart, rather than a hymn or a piece of “Christian pop.” What songs speak to your heart, and do you think that says anything about you?

If God had a blog I imagine this would be His message for me right now:

Beloved, I said seek ye first. Not seek ye when ye have a little extra time, or when you’re feeling less conflicted about me, or when you’re not so tired and cranky, or when you’re not worried about your job anymore, or after your Tylenol kicks in because you polished off a bottle of wine with the hubby watching MST3K last night. I love you, but I’m tired of being your snooze button. Every time I poke you, you ask for five more minutes. You’ve got to throw off the covers and seek me sometime. You can’t snooze forever.

Yours always, G

What would God’s blog have to say to you?