The world is filled with tension. That tension is skyrocketing anxiety levels: ISIS, racism, a volatile election season, the economy… I could go on and on. Some would describe the situation as hopeless. I would describe the situation as an opportunity, an opportunity for the church to do what we were created to do. As followers of Christ, we hold two things in tension, the reality of our world and the hope that we have in Christ.

Jesus said that we are “salt” and “light”.  Bill Hybels, the Pastor of Willow Creek Church, once said,  “The church is the hope of the world”. The church is the hope of a world that has lost its way, a world that lives in pain, fear and anxiety. 40 million Americans struggle with anxiety and the behaviors that result from it (www.adaa.org/about-adaa/press-room/facts-statistics). What is the response of the church to this? A revolution…

Just over a year ago I read a history book about the American Revolutionary war, titled 1776 by David McCullough. As I read it, there was a phrase in the book that griped me. The phrase was “the glorious cause”. The colonists referred to the American Revolutionary war as “the glorious cause”. I thought to myself, what is the glorious cause of the church? With bible in hand, I searched the scriptures and came upon Galatians 5:6, “For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor un-circumcision has any value. The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love.”  That’s it! That is the glorious cause of the church: faith expressing itself through love! The hope for a hurting, anxious fear filled world is “faith, expressing itself in love!”

I love the local church. As a pastor, I am one of its biggest fans. I love what I do. However, I am also unsettled. I wonder if the church has morphed into something Jesus never intended it to be. Has “the glorious cause” been replaced with what I want? With what I prefer? With my “rightness”? I hear much debate about who is right and who is wrong. When did our faith move from relating to God, to being right about God?

It seems that “religion” is really good at helping us live within the “toxic environment”of the world. In some ways, religion has simply become a coping mechanism. Shouldn’t faith consist of much more than that? Pope Paul VI said, “There can never be a personal conviction without also working for social transformation”. Faith and religion lead to transformation, not mere coping techniques. Transformation of self and transformation of the world around me. The convictions that we hold naturally lead us to good work, the good work of sharing the message of Jesus and transforming society. James the brother of Jesus said, “Faith without good deeds is dead”. In the coming post’s I will continue to explore the Love Revolution and the dramatic impact it can have on our world.

I have been on vacation for the last ten days. My hope and goal was to completely detach and relax. No email, no phone calls, and no writing—not even for this blog. I told my wife, “My life and job require me to make constant decisions. You are making the decisions on this trip”. It took me three days to really settle down. It was hard. It was hard not to constantly check emails or call the office to “check in” or sneak away to work on some project “for a little while”. I learned a hard truth about myself.   Sometimes I am a control freak. I like things my way because my way is always the right way…right? Wrong. I have been guilty of manipulating situations or fudging on facts so that I get what I want. I call myself a Christian, a follower of Christ. Christ wasn’t described as a control freak. Jesus is described as “the lamb of God”. Could there be anything more vulnerable and submissive than a lamb?

Yet so many of us are addicted to control. We use all kinds of tools to control our environment. Some people use subtle manipulation so that things turn out their way. Others use anger or violence to control the people around them. Still, others use fear and some even use sex to get what they want.

The life of faith is more about letting go than holding on. To be fair, I believe that one of the vocations of every human being is to live life well, to work hard and to be productive. At the same time, we must admit that some things are simply out of our control. This becomes an issue of trust. Do I trust the God that I say I believe in? Trust is learning to be “ok” with not knowing “why?” Early in our marriage, my wife and I lost two children to miscarriage. We asked a lot of “why” questions and God answered with nothing but silence. We needed to go through a period of mourning and grief.  The author Richard Rhor writes in his book Simplicity- “Historic cultures saw grief as time of incubation, transformation, and necessary hibernation. Yet this sacred space is the very space we avoid. When we avoid darkness, we avoid tension, spiritual creativity, and finally transformation. We avoid God, who works in darkness – where we are not in control”. As the years went on, we have become OK not knowing why. It was hard to let go, but in the end we chose to embrace the mystery of faith. Even when things don’t go my way, even when the outcome is less than ideal, I hand control to one who created time and space/ I walk with the one who is present in the past, present and future.