from Brennan Manning

(a repost. Brennan Manning passed away yesterday. Abba's child is with his Father.)

A friend sent me this excerpt from Brennan Manning's The Furious Longing of God.  It's been rattling around in my head ever since.

Paul wrote in Philippians, "He emptied Himself." He cried from His heart, nails in His hands, and poured out His blood that we might believe His love for us. Significantly, Jesus chose the giving tree, His cross, as the demonstrative sign of His absolutely furious love for men and women. In the words of one early church father: "the mightiest act of love ever to arise from a human soul." How is it then that we've come to imagine that Christianity consists of primarily in what we do for God? How has this come to be the good news of Jesus? Is the kingdom that He proclaimed to be nothing more than a community of men and women who go to church on Sunday, take an annual spiritual retreat, read their Bibles every now and then, vigorously oppose abortion, don't watch x-rated movies, never use vulgar language, smile a lot, hold doors open for people, root for the favorite team, and get along with everybody? Is that why Jesus went through the bleak and bloody horror of Calvary? Is that why He emerged in shattering glory from the tomb? Is that why He poured out His Holy Spirit on the church? To make nicer men and women with better morals? The gospel is absurd and the life of Jesus is meaningless unless we believe that He lived, died, and rose again with but one purpose in mind: to make brand new creations. Not to make people with better morals, but to create a community of prophets and professional lovers, men and women who would surrender to the mystery of the fire of the Spirit that burns within, who would live in ever greater fidelity to the omnipresent Word of God, who would enter into the center of it all, the very heart and mystery of Christ, into the center of the flame that consumes, purifies, and sets everything aglow with peace, joy, boldness, and extravagant, furious love.This, my friends, is what it really means to be a Christian."

Another friend, just a few days ago, showed me this video of Manning.

Manning's book Ragamuffin Gospel saved my life the summer after my senior year of high school.  I really mean that.  I know my story isn't unique in that regard; there are a lot of people who can point to Manning as a crucial voice in their lives.  But if you haven't read Manning, I hope you will.  We need people who speak with the fury of a prophet about the love of God, because it's not a nice story with a moral at the end, like one of Aesop's fables.  It's the terrifying, heart-breaking, heart-restoring, healing truth of what God has done to reach out to our broken souls and our broken world, and I'm so glad Manning has been telling that story.    

step aside, march madness

an homage to baseball (and bigger things)

The day my parents brought home the Chevy Corsica was a big day.  We were living in a small town in southwestern Michigan, right by Lake Michigan, and I was 5 or 6 years old.  A new car for the Millers felt pretty good (especially because it was a stick, which seemed cool).  

My dad and I would ride around in that car as he listened to AM sports radio that we picked up from across the lake in Chicago.  There was usually a sort of droning hum in the sound, like an electric buzz, probably because of the distance the signal had to travel.  Sometimes I would notice my dad humming, too.  Not a melody, though.  He would just match the drone of the radio, every time he exhaled.  I guess he was really into sports radio (still is).  

new season ahead

The past year has included a lot of seeking and soul-searching. A lot of prayer. A lot of counsel. I want to serve God well. I want to serve Granger well. And I know that I can't do that apart from a life that's in tune with a growing understanding of what makes me alive and where my life bears fruit.

We use an acronym at GCC — SHAPE — as a shorthand to express our conviction that people should live out of their Spiritual Gifts, Heart, Abilities, Personality, and Experiences, and after leading our Creative Arts team for a couple of years, I began to wonder if that role fit my SHAPE. I was also feeling a growing pull toward the kind of work that's done in teaching — studying, reflecting, writing, creating.  It has been an honor and a thrill to spend the best hours of my day working alongside my teammates in Creative Arts. But that has often meant that teaching prep got the last hours of my day. 

is HEREAFTER a Christian movie?

I saw Hereafter the other night and thought it was an amazing movie. I mentioned that on Twitter, and then I got an email from someone who saw my endorsement and wondered about the movie; they had heard that it wasn't Christian. First, you ought to know that I think this was a sincere, worthwhile question from someone who wants to make good choices in their entertainment. That being said, however, I couldn't help but think the question is sort of misguided.

Augustine | what to pray for

Some advice on what to pray for from Saint Augustine:

Stretch wide the net of your insatiable desires, greedy, and find something greater than God, find something more precious than God, find something better than God.  What won't you possess, when you possess him?  But all right, rake in to yourself gold, silver, as much as you can.  Cut out the neighbors; keep a tight grip on your estate by enlarging it, till you reach the ends of the earth.  Having bought up the whole earth, add the seven seas.  Let everything you can see be yours; let everything under the water which you can't see be yours.  When you've got all this, what will you have in fact, if you haven't got God?  

So if by having God a poor man is rich, and by not having God a rich man is a beggar, don't ask him for anything except himself.

(Sermon 105A, from Essential Sermons, New City Press)

when I'm taking myself too seriously...

There are days when it's easy to take myself too seriously.  Sometimes, when that happens, I go watch this video again.  Jeff (the cow) and I have been close friends for 10 years now, through school and ministry together, and I don't know if I've ever had as much fun with him as I did when we made this with video prodigy Ben Sanders calling the shots.  Fair warning... this really offers very little value to your life in any way.   


Michael Eisner on hiring storytellers

From Michael Eisner, in the Wall Street Journal Magazine:

I would much rather hire an executive who has taken courses in history and philosophy and language and art, and English and Russian literature than somebody who has only studied a single element of one subject. When my son wanted to go to undergraduate film school, I called George Lucas, who told him: Don’t go. Learning to make a movie is like learning to drive. Anybody can learn to drive. It’s where you drive that counts.

A lot of people can learn to write computer code and understand the inner workings of the technological revolution we’re going through, but if you’re going to be in content, I would rather you understand what makes a good narrative. To find people who can make you laugh or cry or smile or get upset or learn something about yourself. Those people are rare. They are rarer, frankly, than the others. We always talk about the lack of engineers in America. I would say we lead in what is most important to create all this, which is the education system for liberal-arts students. To me, that’s key.

For people coming into the entertainment businesses, the openings are enormous. However, the rules of drama haven’t changed. Denouement has not been replaced by dead ends. You still have to have characters, you have to have an emotional reaction, and you have to learn something from it, preferably. Those things don’t go away.