Whimsical capers and ordinary life
Like many, my introduction to Bob Goff came through Donald Miller in his book A Million Miles in a Thousand Years (Thomas Nelson). As Miller was working to turn his earlier bestseller Blue Like Jazz from a collection of autobiographical essays into a movie, he was realizing just how unremarkable his life had been until that point. Eventually he came to terms with the fact that he'd need to edit his story in a big way before it would become very interesting, and this got him to thinking that maybe it would be better to just live a remarkable life in the first place.
Enter Bob Goff, a guy who had done just that with his life. Miller tells some funny and inspiring stories about Goff's antics in A Million Miles, like how he went with his kids to give keys to their house to world leaders in hopes of showing them hospitality and friendship. And then there was the New Year's Day parade they organized in their neighborhood, with the only catch being that there would be no spectators -- just participants.
It was only a matter of time, of course, but Goff has just released his own book, Love Does: Discover a Secretly Incredible Life in an Ordinary World (Thomas Nelson). Each of the book's thirty-something short chapters begins with a variation of "I used to think... but now I know...," then tells a story that includes a lesson about God or faith or love in one way or another, representing a shift in perspective and way of living.
In the book it becomes clear that Goff doesn't sit still for very long. I'm still trying to figure out how he manages his time living in San Diego, running a law firm in Seattle, teaching at two colleges, staying at his summer lodge in British Columbia, and traveling often to Uganda for his nonprofit work, among other places. I'm also trying to figure out how he affords it all: buying sail boats, flying to New York at the last second for what he thinks is a prank, and taking his ten-year-old daughter to Paris for the weekend because she wants tea. (Do lawyers really make that much money?)
He really enjoys capers, and considers whimsy a significantly underappreciated virtue. And in some respects, I'd say he's right. Many of us do live pretty unremarkable lives, considering anything whimsical to be childlike, and not in a good way. As Miller puts it in A Million Miles, working hard and buying a Volvo may be part of the American Dream, but it doesn't make for a very good story.
Many of us would do well to pursue adventure rather than just accepting the stifling status quo of suburbia as the only possible way to live. And Goff gives us a lot of inspiration towards that end. When he's not sneaking into his best friend's hotel room to order $400 of room service without his friend's knowing, he's just as likely being whimsically generous, like the time he let a young stranger use his yard and his boat for an elaborate marriage proposal just because he had the audacity to ask. And he's started a nonprofit called Restore International, which works in Uganda and India to fight injustices against children (all the proceeds of the book go toward this cause, by the way).
There's much in Goff to appreciate, and I'm sure his book will stimulate the imaginations of its readers. In an age of slacktivism, I especially like his encouragement to embody the kind of love that does stuff -- that sets out on adventures and is generous and serves in real ways. As the subtitle puts it, we really can discover a secretly incredible life in an ordinary world. But I find it unfortunate that so many of his stories involve inordinate sums of disposable cash, which for most of us is not the ordinary world we inhabit. It's even less ordinary for billions around the world.
I believe it's possible for all of us to set out on adventures, be they near or far, and each of us can be whimsically generous with our time, our money, our gifts. We don't need to settle for the status quo. But for those of us who aren't jet-setting lawyers, we'll need to get creative and figure out what this looks like in our ordinary, everyday lives.
We can't escape the fact that the vast majority of the time, life will not be a thrill ride. So I'd encourage you to read Love Does, but then pick up The Practice of the Presence of God to learn an equally important part of what it means to live faithfully and well in the midst of truly normal, everyday life.
[Note: A free copy of this book was provided to me by BookSneeze for review; as always, opinions here are my own.]
Weaving together belief and behavior
For many of us the college years are an especially formative time, shaping who we become as people and pointing us in the direction of a career. That is, at least theoretically. Each of us have different kinds of college experiences, of course, shaped by our own choices and priorities as well as by factors beyond our control.
I started college in the fall of 2001 at a state university as a business major because I thought that was as good a way as any to ensure I’d have a job when I graduated. And I chose the management concentration because as an eighteen year old I thought managing people sounded better than being managed. Halfway through my freshman year I’d come to hate it and had terrible grades, so I switched over to the major with the fewest math requirements.
Somehow it hasn’t all turned out terribly, which I attribute solely to God's grace, but I do wonder how my college years would have been different had I made life-altering decisions based on even better questions than how to avoid math requirements -- for instance, questions about the nature of the world, and God’s relationship to it and to me and to everyone else, and how a college education may actually be a gift to be stewarded for God’s glory and to be used for loving our neighbors.
I hadn’t heard of Steven Garber yet, but I wish I had. His book The Fabric of Faithfulness: Weaving Together Belief and Behavior (IVP) came highly recommended, and now I see why. Garber currently leads The Washington Institute in DC, "a place to explore common grace for the common good."
In working with students over many years, Garber noticed that the university setting is often an environment that allows room for private beliefs and opinions, but it isn’t comfortable with affirmations of public truths, especially ones clearly connected to private, and deeply held, beliefs. Therefore, those students seeking integration of their deepest beliefs with the realities of the world around them are often frustrated, and at times they face a crisis of identity or even a crisis of faith. When integration is thwarted, dis-integrated cynics are born.
Garber’s work has been an effort to give students a vision, as the subtitle puts it, for weaving belief and behavior together into a fabric of faithfulness. Higher education isn’t to be used simply as a ticket to privilege, but, rooted in our deepest beliefs, a means of serving others, of seeking the common good.
How does one come through college prepared for a life with belief and behavior woven together?
He has found three crucial factors:
Over the course of hours of listening to people who still believe in the vision of a coherent faith, one that meaningfully connects personal disciplines with public duties, again and again I saw that they were people (1) who had formed a worldview sufficient for the challenges of the modern world, (2) who had found a teacher who incarnated that worldview and (3) who had forged friendships with folk whose common life was embedded in that worldview. There were no exceptions.
I think the wisdom in prioritizing those three things speaks for itself, but Garber illustrates it much more fully in the book, and he does so largely through different people’s vocational stories and by asking the big questions that only we can answer for ourselves.
Garber includes a quote from Jacques Ellul, the French philosopher and theologian, on the importance of working these things out while we’re young, before it’s too late:
You must take sides earlier -- when you can actually make choices, when you have many paths opening at your feet, before the weight of necessity overwhelms you.
Though I wish I’d known about this book during college, I’m glad to know about it now, on the other side of both college and grad school, still working on figuring out the particulars of my vocation and how I could best steward it to serve the common good. Needless to say I highly recommend the book for everyone, but especially for those in their college years, or for those who interact with college students, whether as parents, siblings, teachers, pastors, or friends.
Weaving together belief and behavior is an ongoing process as we seek to be faithful in all areas of life, and Garber has given us some clues to point us in the right direction.
Develop a worldview. Find a mentor. Be in community.
[Photo credit: luna13.com; this is a Guatemalan woman weaving a traditional piece of fabric, which I think serves as a beautiful picture of what this sort of "fabric of faithfulness" represents. Check out WeavingWomen.org, an organization the photographer founded "in partnership with indigenous Mayan women to preserve traditional, sustainable weaving arts in Guatemala."]
Tozer on the sacrament of living and the dangers of dualism
I recently read A.W. Tozer’s classic The Pursuit of God (WLC) as part of a book club at our church. It wasn’t my first time through the book, but like many classic devotional works, there’s plenty to learn on second (and third and fourth...) readings. But while it's wise to learn from those who have gone before us, I think it's also wise to read their work critically.
I love the big message of the book, that there’s more to the Christian life than memorizing certain core beliefs -- the Christian life is to be lived! Even more, God is to be known, not just known about. These are important and timeless reminders for church people.
This time I was especially struck by the book’s final chapter, “The Sacrament of Living.” In it he challenges the all-too-pervasive, unfounded and unhelpful sacred-secular divide many of us live with. It’s been challenged by others in recent years, but that Tozer was calling the church out on it in the 1940s is impressive:
One of the greatest hindrances to internal peace which the Christian encounters is the common habit of dividing our lives into two areas -- the sacred and the secular.
I find most of the chapter (and the book as a whole) very encouraging and challenging. Here's where he suggests that all of life can be a sacrament:
Every act of [the Christian’s] life is or can be as truly sacred as prayer or baptism or the Lord’s Supper. To say this is not to bring all acts down to one dead level; it is rather to lift every act up into a living kingdom and turn the whole life into a sacrament. If a sacrament is an external expression of an inward grace, then we need not hesitate to accept the above thesis.
I like this idea of viewing all of life as a sacrament, or at least having that potential. But I’m not sure about some of his conclusions in the chapter. Though he couches his critique by saying he has “no desire to reflect unkindly upon any Christian, however misled,” he argues that “the Roman Catholic church represents today the sacred-secular heresy carried to its logical conclusion” by driving a wedge completely between religion and life. I’m not convinced by what he chooses to focus on: sacraments and the church year.
While urging us to consider “the sacramental quality of everyday living,” he takes issue with the number of sacraments the Catholic church recognizes; he prefers the Protestant two to the Catholic seven. It's a bit puzzling, in my mind, to insist that all of life is to be a sacrament, but then to make a big deal about the fact that to him, the Catholics have too many. But my bigger beef is with his dismissal of the value of celebrating or observing the church year. He laments the Protestant return to what he calls “spiritual slavery,” saying,
The observation of days and times is becoming more and more prominent among us. “Lent” and “holy week” and “good” Friday are words heard more and more frequently upon the lips of gospel Christians. We do not know when we are well off.
Celebrating or observing the events of Holy Week, in my view, doesn’t constitute spiritual slavery, and ignoring them doesn’t make us any more “well off.” Now, if he’s worried that by observing “days and times and seasons” and considering some more holy than others, we’d be in danger of further reinforcing the sacred-secular divide, I’m at least sympathetic. But I don’t think that’s the biggest danger we’re facing in this regard. There’s so much that could be said about this, but I’ll make just one point.
All of us live lives according to certain rhythms, whether those rhythms have anything to do with our faith or not. By opting to refrain from observing Lent or Advent or the rest of the Christian calendar, we’re not simply leveling out the year into 365 equally holy and “sacramental” days. For one thing, we set Sundays apart as a day of worship and rest. But more than that, in the absence of “Christian” rhythms, our lives are shaped by the “secular” rhythms of our world -- the school year, or sports seasons, or perhaps by the opportunities and limitations of fall, winter, spring and summer, respectively.
To put it starkly, if we refrain from observing Good Friday, do we likewise refrain from observing Black Friday? Or are we content to live with that sort of sacred-secular dualism?
Our lives will be shaped by rhythms of one kind or another; my contention is simply that I think we’d do well to shape them primarily according to the rhythms of our faith, rather than merely marching along, unthinkingly, in parades of consumerism, materialism, nationalism, or any of the other isms that are constantly competing for our allegiance. But moving on...
Tozer concludes,
It is not what a man does that determines whether his work is sacred or secular, it is why he does it. The motive is everything. Let a man sanctify the Lord God in his heart and he can thereafter do no common act.
As Tozer says, our motive for our work has a lot more to do with whether it's sacred or secular than whether it's formally considered a ministry, or business, or education, or politics, or science or art. Our motive really matters, but I think that beyond motives, the bigger question is whether our work is contributing to the common good. Consider these big questions for business leaders -- and for all of us -- to better think through how our work can serve the common good. Yes, motive matters. And yes, there is sacred work to be done in every sphere of society. But good motives aren't sufficient to guarantee good results.
Once again, I love that Tozer challenges the sacred-secular divide, and this theme of the integration of faith and work is a big one. I plan to explore it a bit more soon, in conversation with a couple of more recent books.
If you've read any of Tozer's work, what did you most appreciate? What do you think of my affirmations and critiques?
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