I wrote a post about parenting. I’ve been having a lot of conversations about it lately. I thought I’d pass the fun.

Here’s the thing: Parenting isn’t about the parents. I know this post is going to get me in trouble. I know it’s going to have people angry with me at this point, let alone after they read what’s coming. I know people are going to de-friend me and gnash their teeth at me. I even know that some people are going to decide to not come see me as a counselor, which will cost me money.I do not care. This is too important.Parenting is about the kids. It is about what is best for the kids. It’s not about the parents happiness. It’s not about the parents social life, or how fulfilled they feel. It doesn’t matter that most of our life someone has lied to us and told us a lie that we can do whatever we want and that having a kid greatly limits that.Now hear me out, please. It is important that parents take care of themselves. It is important that parents be well developed and emotionally mature people. So that they can model that for their children.

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Never forget my friends, no matter what you may have heard or what has been said, the overarching plot of the Bible is a positive story. It is a  story of redemption. It is the story of Ressurection. It is an invitation to be a part of God’s family. No matter where you have been or what you have done, He loves you. He died and rose for you. Nothing you have done or will do can make Him live you any less or more than He already does. God loves you.

I doubt I’ll ever forget the day.  There are a series of days burned into my memory. My wedding day. Graduations (both mine and friends). My kids birth. The phone call from my dad telling me that my mom had died. The day Rob put his hand on my shoulder.

It was dark in the shed. “I come to the garden alone…” was being sung by pastors all over. I had prayed 30 minutes before that I needed some confirmation from God about the direction I thought He was taking me. I knew there were dark nights ahead. My soul lanquished inside of me. Raw wounds stung my heart and bled all over the place.

My wife and I had been at our current church for 18 months. They had lied to us throughout the process until we moved there. My wife was hurting. My bloody soul was literally in shock. I felt used, abused and betrayed by the church, Christ’s bride. Now, I was going to move my family to Michigan without a job? And I was going to have to tell people that we moved because God told me to do it? To say, I didn’t trust the church would be an understatement (and this was before I knew about angry “christian” bloggers).

So I prayed, “Dear God, I’m going to do what I believe you are telling me to do one way or another but I need a sign. I know it’s weak to ask for a sign but I need one. I need one for the cold, dark nights of doubt that I am sure are coming. I need one because my faith will be tested. If You would, I’d like to ask…I mean, I was hoping…Here’s the thing God, I’m going to go up on that stage and I’m going to pray right at the foot of that cross. I’m going to pray and if I really am hearing You, would you have someone from staff here touch me? I don’t care if it’s a preacher, or a janitor. I just need a ‘I asked the LORD and He answered me’ moment, if you know what I mean God.”

Then I went and prayed.

As I was getting ready to get up and call it a day. I felt a hand on me. I looked up and it was Rob sitting there just offering me comfort. God moved in my soul at that moment. That was January. We moved to Michigan in April. It has been the best decision we ever made. We’ve since left Mars Hill so that our family could worship in the community in which we actually live. We want to give our kids roots and Mars is about 40 minutes away.

But man, the things I learned while I was there! The healing that occurred in my life. I am not sure I can do it justice. God used Rob and Mars to bring healing to my life, and that of my family. He Rob and Mars to help me get over my hurt with the church. Rob taught me the best way to answer your accusers because he did exactly what Jesus did and ignored them. Rob taught me that Love Wins. Rob preached three of the best messages I have ever heard on forgiveness.

Sure, he preached things I didn’t agree with all the time. He said things that made me stop and scratch my head once in a while. He also taught me that it’s OK for people to disagree. We can disagree and still be brothers and sisters in Christ. Being creative doesn’t mean you hit a home run every time. You know you have really good material when the stuff you’re cutting out and leaving on the floor is really good.

He also taught me that we can have real live humans that we look up to. Before Rob, I used to say that my heroes were all dead, that way they couldn’t let me down.

Rob taught me that you can be a flawed human, with a wealth of insecurities and still change the world.

Man, I’ve debated writing this post because I am sure that people are going to read it and want to attack him. There are going to be people who say that God didn’t really talk to me that day. I may actually lose business over this post. I’ve decided I don’t care. If it were not for Rob’s influence in my life, I might not be in church today. God used him in my life in a might way.

So like John Piper once famously (or infamously said), “Farewell Rob Bell.” I would add, “I and my family will miss you.”

Tags: church, rob bell

(Note: I read the Kindle version of the book, so I haven’t tried to reference page numbers here.)

If you have any connections to the world of evangelicalism, you’ve undoubtedly heard of the controversy surrounding Rob Bell’s book, Love Wins. The reactions of the book have ranged from somewhat gentle critique and interaction (see Ben Witherington III, Roger Olson, or Scot McKnight) to people calling Bell a false teacher (see, Mark Galli, Al Mohler, etc.). In addition to countless blog posts, tweets, and Facebook meltdowns no less the half a dozen (and counting) book have been released or are going to be released in response to Bell.

Now personally, I’ll start be laying my cards on the table. I read Love Wins the day or two after it was released. I liked the book quite a bit. But, honestly, after reading I couldn’t see what all the hoopla was about. Bell explores the concepts of heaven and hell, the Kingdom of God, and salvation in a way that is pretty much consistent with his earlier books and his sermons. Now, I shouldn’t say I was totally surprised by the reactions – after all, hell is sort of the third rail of evangelicalism. People approach the subject at their own risk. But there wasn’t really anything in the book that people like C.S. Lewis, N.T. Wright, Brennan Manning, or other writers have been saying for years. Bell’s popularity certainly surpasses theses writers in the general church-going crowd (With the exception of maybe Lewis), but still what is the big deal?

Enter Francis Chan and Preston Sprinkle and their book Erasing Hell. I had heard this book was coming out not long after reading Love Wins. Chan is somewhat of a rising star in evangelical circles. He’s about Bell’s age, and he’s written a number of books that have sold well – Crazy Love and Forgotten God. I have not read Chan prior to reading Erasing Hell, and my only experience with him was when he led our “small” group at one of the Passion conferences a few years ago (small being around 600 or 700 people). Given Chan’s ties to Passion and some of the neo-Reformed movement folks, I’m not surprised to see that he has a problem with Love Wins.

As far as the book, Chan (and Sprinkle – it’s not always clear who is actually writing) begins the introduction by stating how important it is that we get the doctrine of hell correct. He says multiple times that it’s something that we can’t get wrong. Getting it wrong puts us at risk of sending others to hell or even puts us at risk. To his credit, he also states that we can’t let tradition or our feelings dictate what is right as far as what Scripture says about hell. Personally, I find fear-based or slippery-slope framed arguments to be inherently weak. Yes, there is an element of pragmatism that guides the formulation of doctrine, but it simply doesn’t seem to me to be a fair statement that a Christian’s walk or zeal to evangelize is ultimately driven by what they think of hell. If it is, then I think there are other bigger issues that need to be flushed out.

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Yesterday I held a newborn boy.  He was nearly perfect.

I also took my daughters horseback riding at a farm where a little five year old boy lives. He’s dying. There’s a good chance he won’t see the end of next month.

Last night I found out another little baby boy died. He was still born. His parents have been trying to have kids for years. They buried him on his due date.

Life is hard. I’ve had my share of hard times. Compared to kids dying though, they seem like nothing.

It seems that it’s always a matter of perspective. I mean, have you ever just asked yourself, “Who Cares? Who cares about this whole stupid mess?” Certainly the Psalmist did time and again.

Then of course there is the issue of Theology. There’s the issue of people who have no idea what to say, feeling like they have to say something. There is the issue of what is said usually being not all that helpful.

I’m convinced all of our stories were meant to be told together. We need each other.

And yet people hurt us.

There’s so much hurt and anger in this world of ours. So much about life that doesn’t make sense. Can I be honest with you? I think one of the biggest problems we have with God is that there is a lot to Him that we can’t understand. Oh we want to. We rail and scream against our lack of control but at the end of the day we simply cannot wrap our brains around this Divinity.

I think that’s the problem. We refuse to admit there is some ambiguity. We want certainty where God demands faith and obedience. One of my friends lamented to me that there is just sometimes where God doesn’t make sense. I couldn’t agree enough. We can’t see God. We cant’ touch God. I think that’s why God tells us we need each other.

Sometimes, we simply have to trust in God’s character, not our ability to explain Him. More often than we do currently we need to make room for disagreements. We need to make room for people to experience Grace. We need to remember that Jesus came so we can have life

together.

The apostles didn’t all share the same ideology. They did all share a relationship with Jesus. May we all be able to say the same.

I didn’t watch the Casey Anthony trial. I refuse to allow tragedy to be entertainment for me. Whenever I would tell that to people who were watching they would tell me it isn’t entertainment but they could never actually tell me what it was if it wasn’t entertainment.

Finally this past week, I figured it was going to end.  I was actually happy. I figured I’d be able to stop hearing about it.  Then came the acquittal.

Then came the facebook status updates blowing up…

Some languished at the lack of justice for the poor murdered little girl.

Some cried out about the injustice in the world.

Some wondered openly if there was such a thing as justice.

Some just went too far.

“Someday the jury will have to answer for what they did.”

“ I hope that God decides to take a loved one from the jury.”

“Someday that evil woman will get what she deserves. The coals of Hell will be heated for her forever!!!”

And they went on.  Many of my Christian friends were excitedly pointing to the day that this woman would end up in hell.

This post is not about her guilt or if there is a Hell.
This post is about Christians that miss the point of the gospel. This post is about God being in the redemption business.

Moses, David, Paul are all guilty of murder. They all killed people. It would be hard to argue that Paul didn’t  kill babies younger than this little girl in Florida.  They never got the justice “they had coming to them.”

God redeemed them. I have to say I didn’t see a lot of posts by Christians saying they hoped that would happen for this woman.

You see embedded in those posts was honest anger. I get that. But I also think there was a little bit of “I’m better than HER, because I would never do THAT!!!”

Yet, James says, if you break one part of the law you break it all.

So we’re all guilty and God is in the business of offering us all redemption, even child killers.  My desire for justice rails against that. My desire to love my own skin is thankful for it.

I don’t know if this woman is guilty or not. I imagine she probably is and yet the evidence wasn’t enough.

I know that wherever she is, and whatever she’s done Jesus died and rose again so she could have eternal life and be freed from the guilt of her actions. Jesus paid it all. All to him we all owe.

In the past day or so, I’ve had a friend who sent me a couple of links to articles on Cracked.com (Warning: NSFW language) with some interesting observations.  His first was this one, based on this Cracked article:

I was reading an article about how good news no one talks about is out there. One of those was about the gulf’s recovery from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. It made this point:

“What we will talk about is how no one expected fish, crab and shrimp catches to be average compared to past years or that oil chomping microbes would go to town feeding on our disaster. And more importantly, the Loop Current that was on track to carry the oil to the Florida Keys just broke. As in, it broke off into a big swirly hilariously named Franklin Eddy, which unexpectedly contained the oil in a tidy circle of cool. We’d like to think of Franklin as a bongo-playing beat poet who doesn’t have to play by your current rules, maaan.

Had it not been for Franklin, the oil would have hit the Keys and made its way up the East Coast, and there wouldn’t have been a whole lot we could have done to stop it. Thanks to Franklin, which no longer exists, much of the Florida coast was spared from the oil altogether.”

I don’t really have much of a point except to say maybe the hand of God is was in this. Its nice to remember this when life fights dirty.”

I found this profound for a couple of reasons: First off, it is a demonstration of how God is such an awesome engineer (says the professional engineer), who has contingency plans within contingency plans within contingency plans for when we make things go awry. Secondly, it just reminded me how negative I sometimes feel when I listen to too much news – because bad news sells, so we rarely hear good news (or Good News) from the news media.

The second article, 7 “Ancient” Forms of Mysticism That are Recent Inventions, made me laugh even more:

Yoga as we know it today — a set of postures (asanas) combined with breathing techniques — dates back to around the grand old year of 1960. In other words, yoga is as old as Bono.

So all of the Yoga wars that have been fought “for God” by Johnny Mac an others are all just pretty much (as previously noted) bunk.

So, maybe quoting Cracked.com from time to time is a little bit like quoting Cretin poets.

The following post is one that I wrote for my own blog today.  This is something that I see quite a lot in sessions and I would normally not post like this to my own blog but it’s been relatively quiet around these parts for the last few days and I feel the information is helpful. Enjoy or ignore. Either way, have a great day.

One of the common issues that I deal with in couples counseling is related to the aftermath of mistakes.

A spouse cheats

A spouse uses painful words like a scalpel to cut as deeply as possible.

An angry outbursts scares the bejezus out of a spouse

A secret offense is brought to light.

The list is quite long, and I am sure you could probably add two or two hundred things that you have experienced or heard of happening.

Invariably, the question posed to me is, “Why can’t she get over it?” or “Why can’t he just move on? I said, I was sorry. I feel bad about it.”

Often this comes across as defensive to the offended spouse and even to me as a counselor. The following are some steps that I believe are helpful in repairing broken relationships.

1. Leave all the but’s in the barn.

You’ve heard this one before, “I am sorry, I feel bad that I did that, but….” Invariably, an accusation or degradation for the spouse follows that but. Here’s the problem, when you say I’m sorry but___________, it sounds like you aren’t really all that sorry. It sounds like you’re wanting to make sure that your spouse gets some of the blame too.  It sounds like your saying the adult equivalent of the four year old, “She did it too” defense. It’s silly. It’s shallow. And it is not helpful. If you messed up, own that. Don’t try to deflect blame. Don’t try to pass it off to your spouse. Just admit that what you did was wrong. No one made you do it. We control our own actions. What is interesting to me is that when someone commits to this idea of actually owning their own mistakes, their spouse will often start admitting their own errors.

2. Double down on your patience level

If you have done something that has damaged trust in the relationship there is absolutely nothing you can do that will “fix it.” You may have to answer a lot of questions. You may have to answer the same questions more than once. You may have to answer questions that don’t seem relevant to you but matter immensely to your spouse.

3. Check your ego at the door.

Click here to continue reading this post at my own blog.

In political theory, there is a concept called the Overton Window, and its general function is this:

At any particular point in time, there is a range of “acceptable” views on any particular subject.  This “window” of views can be “opened” or “shifted” through the serious suggestion of a view significantly outside the mainstream.  In doing so, even if the “radical” suggestion is not adopted as mainstream, the window of “acceptable” views will be increased.

Opening the Overton Window can be a good or a bad thing, depending on the subject at hand.  Additionally, the attempt may utterly fail if the person trying to open it does not have the perceived gravitas to do so, or if the window of “acceptability” has sufficient rigidity in its foundation.  As I have read Love Wins, read its critiques – from positive to negative and all spots in between – and listened to Rob Bell’s responses to questions/criticism surrounding it, I’ve come to the conclusion that, strategically, the goal of Love Wins was not to promote a particular view of hell as superior to another, but rather to open the Overton Window on the doctrine of hell in order that the Gospel might be better seen as independent from it.

The Thesis is the Thesis

As I have read numerous reviews of Love Wins, I have been struck by an odd correlation.   The way the reviewer interpreted Bell’s thesis paragraph (page vii) almost always predetermined how they would review the entire book.  Here is the thesis paragraph:

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So, with the recent furor over Love Wins, and with varying degrees of hand-wringing or gnashing of teeth over the certainty in hell’s manifestation, it probably makes some sense to outline what the Bible actually says about hell, some of the different views of hell, and why loosely holding your beliefs about pareschatology – the study of what happens between death and the final state of humanity – is probably the best course.

Hell in the Bible

First off, you won’t find any references to hell in the Old Testament.  The only thing you will find referenced after death is Sheol, which is translated as “the grave”.  All people die and go to Sheol, the righteous and unrighteous.  Their bodies remain there, but they are still viewed as individual souls.  In the Septuagint, this word is translated Hades – a word used a few times by Jesus – where Hades, in Hellenistic mythology was a state of limbo where all souls dwelt, awaiting the final judgment.

In the New Testament, Hades is mentioned five times – Matthew 16:18 (in this case referring to a literal place in Caesarea Philippi called the “Gates of Hades”), Revelation 1:18; 6:8; 20:13; 20:14. This is also translated as “death”, “the grave”, and “the pit”.

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