It seems to me that, amongst my peer set of evangelical Christians, there are two main groups: the Ron Paul-loving, libertarian types, and the Barack Obama-loving, liberal types.

I’ve spent a lot of time since the 2008 election cycle was well underway thinking about these things. Both groups are for social justice and the being made right of all things. Both groups come at it from the same theological foundation. To my mind, the only fundamental difference is this: whether you think that government, being an institution of man, can be used as a part of the being made right of all things. If you do, you’re probably with me on the Obama side of the debate; if you don’t have that faith in government, you’re probably in the Ron Paul camp.

As much faith as I have in government, I certainly have far more in God. It just seems to me that a belief in government as a positive or a negative is the differentiator here. Perhaps I’m wrong, but I’d love to know your thoughts.

So I posted earlier on Facebook that I was listening to Bon Iver, saying: “Bon Iver on the iPhone in the office this morning. Like Pip says: I hate that someone broke his heart like that, but I do love the result.” My friend Jud replied:

Isn’t it such a strange truth that so much beauty can come from pain? Personally, this is to me the most obvious solution to the problem of evil: in some mysterious way, it was actually “the best world possible” for evil to exist for a time.

That’s one of those things that seems both profound and utterly obvious. If nothing else, I guess this goes along with the Linford Detweiler quote, “Sad music … makes me happy.” It probably also drives home why I listen to Elliott Smith, Portishead, Bon Iver, et al …

Well, I’ve been to church the last two Sundays, which has at least gotten a couple of my friends off my case. And honestly, it’s been good both times. Of course, I used an easy thing: a preacher who is very, very familiar to me heads the church I’ve attended. He was my grandparents’ pastor when I was a kid, the only pastor from those days I can remember holding my attention. [My childhood pastor is a great man, but his preaching skills rank last in his overall pastoral toolset. That's fine, because he excels at the rest of it.] Pastor Jerry is far, far funnier now that I’m old enough to get all of his jokes and can now follow his theology.

That said, two Sunday mornings is the extent of my interaction with that church. Sure, I know a couple of the people in the choir—they used to be in the choir at one of my old churches here in town—but otherwise, well, that’s been it, other than pleasantries exchanged during passing of the peace. [Well, and the one choir member who all but chased me down the hall to hug me as I left on Sunday. Heh.]

So I’ve been asking myself, now that I’m back actively looking, “What am I looking for?”

1. I have to believe in the preaching coming from the pulpit. United Methodism is as prone to the foibles of modern American Christianity as any other denomination I’m likely to attend [I mean, my PCA brothers don't buy into a lot of the claptrap out there, but, um, I'm a zero-point Calvinist]. The surest way to turn me off from your pulpit is to be basing your preaching around any book besides The Holy Bible. I mean, Rick Warren is a well-meaning fellow and all, but …
2. Traditional worship, including a competent choir, is something that’s important to me. Honestly, that’s something holding me up from thinking the place I’ve visited the last two weeks is going to work out: their quite-solid pianist has to buttress the choir [as, I think, their lone tenor], leaving them to sing along to … taped accompaniment. Can you hear my teeth grinding, y’all? [This is to say nothing of the fact that I would be a four-sigma outlier in terms of ages of the choir members.]
3. Missional focus. I don’t think a church has to be doing Huge Things for Jesus, but I do think that we have to be actively showing our community love and care for our fellow men. Church cannot be like the lodge down the road, huddled close together in their clubhouse and telling each other it’ll be all right.

What else do you look for when you look for a church? What do you think I should be looking for, friends of mine who want me to find a church? [Remember, you're trying to help me find a church, so suggesting I look for something that's not compatible with where I'm at is probably a big bucket o' FAIL.]

So yeah, I’ve got anxiety about church. When I was in Nashville on Monday, Andy asked me about the situation, and that conversation set me off on a Five Whys path to figuring out the core problem.

1. Why have you not been going to church? Simply put, it became a point of anxiety in my life, and I was trying to cut out those things if I could. I really couldn’t [nor did I want to] quit my job, but church was something that I felt I could quit—right, wrong, or indifferent.
2. Why was church an anxiety point? Because I’m one of those Pareto 20%-ers who get caught up in doing 80% of everything.
3. Why are you that way? I think I’m wired into servant leadership because a) I find that it’s the best way for me to lead b) I like to lead c) I show love for people by doing things for them and giving them gifts. My love languages drive me to servant leadership—and while that is a great and admirable thing [or so I tell myself when I can't sleep at night], it’s also terribly draining.
4. Why is it terribly draining? Because I have a hard time saying no.
5. Why do you have a hard time saying no? Because, in my love language, it’s tantamount to saying, “I don’t love you.”

And there you have it. What I need to internalize, of course, is that saying no isn’t a love language issue, for the following reasons:

• I am not always the best person for the job. [Work is slowly teaching me this, although I'm still the best scheduler I know and also the best clerk. Neither of these is terribly value-added, though, because I'm awful expensive to be doing either job.] Arguing that I am both stretches me too thin and keeps other people from getting to serve. Neither is a good thing.
• Even if I am the best person for the job, I have a finite resource of time, some of which I have to learn to selfishly withhold for myself.

There probably are more … and you can sound off in the comments. But I needed to go through this. Of course, now that I’ve squared all this in my head, I’m sick this weekend and better not sicken others.

I didn’t make it this morning; I’d gotten there too early and let myself work up into a crazy panic attack. Rick feels bad [and came by to apologize, even though he totally didn't have to do that ... one reason he's such a great friend and has been for years], but it’s okay. Stephen and I have a different plan for next Sunday, and then the next weekend I’ll be in Austin with Lara and we’ll find someplace to go, I bet. [Maybe with Jeff Miller?]

I haven’t been to a United Methodist Church in over a year.

I haven’t been in a church at all on a Sunday morning in six months. [Then, it was an ill-fated attempt to make myself available to a girl.]

You might note that this dovetails nicely with my depression. You are exactly right. Once out of the habit, it was easy to enjoy my time at Mattress Springs UMC: quiet services, comfortable pews, and no one asking me to do anything.

See, my hangup is that I’m an active member when I’m in a church. I have a problem saying no. I have a problem with volunteering and being voluntold. I burn myself out easily. [Have we noticed a pattern?] All of this has me deathly scared of going back to church.

I had a realization earlier today: being spiritual but not religious is kinda like being intelligent but uneducated. Right now, I feel like Matty Damon in Good Will Hunting—it’s easier being a janitor than admitting to myself that I want to be out there and doing this.

If you are of the praying type, I would ask that you encourage me to be able to write here tomorrow about how I went to church and enjoyed it. I’ll go somewhere new if I go, because all the old places just scare me. I know that people in those places love me and will accept my flaws, but I’m scared and feel like I need a fresh start. I don’t know if that makes sense to anyone but me.

A note: many of you are tired of reading about politics. I ask you, then, “What the hell are you doing here?” Seriously. I don’t write about politics every four years, y’all.

Barack Obama placed his campaign on the concepts of hope and change. I think he was smart to do that—mere change enough wasn’t going to be enough to win this election. Why? Change is hard to articulate—just ask John McCain. Obama, with his steadiness of character, charisma, and leadership skills, knew that asking people to believe in America again was a way forward. It is, of course.

It’s also a dangerous thing for Christians to buy fully into that. We serve a King and a Kingdom, and that is where our allegiances really should lie. A Christian’s ultimate allegiance is not to the earthly citizenship we have, but to the eternal life yet to come. This is not to say that we should not have hope in President Obama, our boss, our pastor, or anyone else in any position of authority over us. Our hope can only be conditionally placed, understanding that we are all humans and we will all fail.

One of my friends noted last night that he found it sad, watching Twitter’s election tweets, that America seemed to be seeking a messiah more than a President. I think that it’s a difference worth noting, and I’ve had that fear myself. Please don’t get me wrong—I voted for the man, donated to his campaign, etc. I eagerly await his inauguration. I welcome his progressive pragmatism, as I find myself increasingly progressive and have long been pragmatically bent. I will pray for him—as I would McCain were he President-elect today. [I will pray for McCain anyway, because I think he needs to re-establish his persona now that the election is done. Also, I think his 2000-era brand of conservatism is more of what the GOP needs than, say, Sarah Palin.] But I do not place all my hope in Obama, Savior of American Government. He only heads one branch, only gets 24 hours in each of the next 1,460 days, and can only do so much.

No, I find my hope in God. If you’re placing it fully in Obama, I’m afraid that he’s gonna let you down, one way or another. Every politician does, and at the end of the day, Barack is a politician—a great one, but still a man with feet of clay.

Lord, please guide him. He will need every last bit of help he can.

Today, I hit the nine-year mark with TBE. To put that in perspective: I have not lived in one domicile for more than eight years. Shoot, I’ve lived in six places around town since I started working there. I turned 21 there, and I’ll turn 30 there in a few weeks.

Wouldn’t have expected that.

So after our Discipleship Conference last night, I came home to watch the TV that had accumulated for me on the ol’ TiVo. One of the things I grab is ABC’s World News; have since before Jennings went off the air. The story that caught my eye was churches in Clacakamas County, Oregon banding together to promote marriage as a positive for the community. Here’s a quick rundown of the concept:

• None of the pastors there will marry you if you haven’t been through the counseling program.
• The premarital counseling program is designed to have the affianced confront the implications of their commitment before they enter into it.
• After marriage, support is there from the community—including community date night, where babysitting services are provided to allow parents to have some meaningful time together outside of the whole parenting thing.

See, what it is for these folks is a commitment to marriage by the community and marriage in the community. Within reasonable bounds, the couples confess things to each other with an eye towards making things work. Clackamas County’s divorce rate has noticeably dropped as a result, which has to be viewed as a positive. [Before you argue that some divorces are necessary, please note that this program is essentially designed to sniff out those truly incompatible and have them realize this prior to making the lifelong commitment.]

Now, this relates back to the discussion in the Discipleship Conference from earlier, which covered David on the lam from Saul and how the church responded to his desperation. I won’t belabor the example, but the central point of the message was that Ahimelech provided bread and a sword—sustenance for David and his men, and a means in which to engage his problems. And truly, that’s all the church is supposed to do—meet people’s immediate, desperate need and equip them to face their problems head-on. If we can simply do that, we’ve met a major commitment we have to the surrounding community.

We’d like to pretend, though, that all these desperate people are outside the church doors on Sunday, and we know that’s just not true. Sometime, we’re even the desperate ones, all but wailing to reach out and just blurt out our problems, but checked by the twin pillars of Pride and Fear of Rejection from doing so. Our charge as a church body is to be as Samson to those pillars and push them down by fostering a community where we can feel safe in communicating these issues to each other. It is a daunting charge, to be sure, but one for which Jesus gave no less than His life.

Okay, so I’m in the second week of Disciple, and all the readings this week are about God’s power and majesty and glory. Which, well, I get all that. I mean, I am the guy who goes into manned spaceflight because I believe in supporting man’s innate need to explore God’s universe. But man … I struggle with wonder. I definitely take it all for granted a lot of the time.

It’s my nature to focus on imperfections, to suggest corrections and push for improvements. The thing that makes me good at what I do for a living also, well, stunts a lot of things. And then I have this nasty tendency to focus on the problems in front of me to the detriment of focus on anything else—amusing, because I’m also easily distracted—and, as a result, let that thing consume. Often, that’s work. None of which is really healthy, even if it may be good in some sense.

So I struggle with wonder. How do you overcome that struggle if you share it?

Last week, I was thinking to myself, “Hey, cool! I can blog about Disciple Bible study!” But then the more I thought about our covenant, the less I decided that I could do it—try as I might, I’d probably not be able to separate other people’s stories and shared discussions from my own, and I really want to respect that covenant. Just know that I’m terribly excited about spending the next 30 weeks or so in shared study with a dozen or so fellow believers that represent a cross-section of my church body, and that I hope to be blessed by it and to bless others as I can.

I think that Greg Boyd is right: Christians are called to be personally pacifistic, but governments are sometimes instruments of God’s judgement here on Earth. [Admittedly, this position weakens my anti-death penalty stance. I will have to think on that some more.]

While the New Testament calls on followers of Jesus to love, bless and serve our enemies rather than use violence against them, it also acknowledges that God uses the sword-wielding capacity of governments to keep sin in check. For example, four verses after Paul tells disciples to love and serve enemies and to leave all vengeance to God (Rom. 12:17-21), he goes on to say that God orchestrates governments to exact vengeance on wrongdoers (Rom. 13:4). In other words, he’s saying that God will use governments to do things God explicitly forbids disciples of Jesus to do.

[Emphasis mine.]

I wished that I’d read this before Sunday morning, when I had to introduce a musical arrangement of Saint Francis of Assisi’s peace prayer. I struggled to make that point in my introduction, but I guess I got it across. And then, of course, my pastor would mention Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus during his sermon [he's been preaching out of Acts for most of the last two months], but only in the second service. In my introduction in both services, I said, “We’re called to love our enemies. That means that we’re called to love Osama bin Laden, as difficult as that might be for us to do. It was difficult for me to do six years ago, and it’s just as difficult today.”

Of course, since I brought up Paul, you can probably see the parallel: Saul, the former persecutor of the splinter sect of Jews, suddenly repents. Brothers and sisters, what a joy it would be, and what a powerful witness for Christ that would be made, if Osama bin Laden, a man responsible for the deaths of thousands around the world, suddenly repented of his sins and confessed Christ. Would we have a hard time believing his faithfulness? Absolutely—but given that we don’t know the hearts of any around us, we have no real reason to doubt any other more or less. And if we Christians accepted him as one of our own? That, too, would be a powerful witness. Certainly, he would have to account for his crimes, as we all do, but we could, through Christ’s love through us, come to love him as a brother.

That would be a rather large wave in life’s ocean that resulted from the Cornerstone being laid into it.

Not that I expect any of this, nor that he deserves it, but that we all deserve death and that none of us deserve heaven nor the grace that gets us there.

Part of the reason that I’m working to prepare my Sunday school lessons instead of just riffing is that I get lost so easily down some rabbit trail. Now, if you’ve had a conversation with me that’s gone longer than, oh, five minutes, this doesn’t surprise you—I have an associative mind, and I’m a spastic thinker. The goal with writing all this stuff down is to have more … ummm, focus.

Today, I finished my series on relationships. Next week, I get my new set of 7th graders, and I only keep one rising 8th grader—probably my most regular attendee. Poor kid, he’s gonna be stuck hearing all my old stories yet again. But as I look back on today, I like how it went. I juxtaposed Proverbs 31:10-31 with Ephesians 5:22-31. We talked through all the anachronistic things in the Old Testament text, and then we distilled it down the key bits in 28-31. Then, shifting to Paul, I said, “Now, the mainstream media loves to lampoon folks who quote from this text, but they always seem to do it with the first part of it, which does sound old-fashioned and outmoded without the context of the remainder of the passage or knowing what Christ’s sacrifice means.” Of course, this is the famous “submission” passage, and in today’s post-feminist culture, that doesn’t sit well with most folks.

I exhorted the kids to consider it in terms of mutual self-sacrifice. I asked them to consider what happens when, in a friendship, one person or the other acts selfishly. What does that provoke within us? “Man, he’s being selfish. I should be, too!” As a result, the friendship typically falters. But in a marriage—which I reminded them was a lifelong commitment between two people that could span decades—I asked them to think of the implications of selfishness. “If a friendship ends, okay, that happens. There wasn’t much commitment there, was there? But marriage is a whole other thing.”

I was terribly uncomfortable in teaching about relationships—I find myself a mediocre friend at best and a horrible mate. I’d argue that every one of my romantic relationships—which, admittedly, don’t number that high—have failed largely because of my selfishness. I felt like a failure talking about these things, but I have great role models. As I told the kids, my folks have been married 38 years; my mom’s folks were married 47 before Papa died, and my dad’s folks were married 64 years before Pops died. That’s nearly 150 years of marriage. I’m quite sure that they haven’t all been easy years—hell, I know that they haven’t been—but they were committed ones. What a great standard they’ve set for Doug and me.

I’ve started a new category, Reading in Reverse, where hopefully I’ll be good about writing about my teaching. [The name comes from the idea that you use a mirror to read backwards-scripted text, and the Bible's lessons are certainly backwards to our human nature.] I won’t promise to write every week, but I’ll try to write as often as I feel led.

Lastly, an addendum: many of my Presbyterian friends linked to John Piper’s essay on the Minnesota bridge collapse, and I’ve kept silent on that. I know what Piper’s getting at, but I disagree with his worldview. I’m far more aligned with how Greg Boyd views the collapse. But then most of my Presbyterian friends know that I’m a not-so-closeted Open Theist.

I was going to be a part of the Blogathon this year, but I’m dropping out. Been sick this week, and I need to do work-type things this weekend to catch up. That, and well, I had done zero prep or marketing. My one sponsor will probably give money anyway.

Hey hey hey, once again, it’s time to absolutely wreck my sleep schedule for charity! Hooray insomnia! For the third year in a row, I’ll be blogging in support of Blood:Water Mission, which seeks to provide clean drinking water and blood for Africa. In addition, I should also be blogging in support of a second, local charity along with some of the other Huntsville Locals. [Yes, yes, I owe everyone an email. I suck.]

More later … but this year’s blogathon is July 28th, starting at 1300 GMT.