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I start with the rule against surplusage because the second line of the Lord’s Prayer, “who art in heaven,” can easily be ignored and said merely out of habit instead of to elicit some particular meaning. We all know that God “Our Father” from the first line is not physically present with us here on earth and, as cartoons teach us from our earliest years, heaven is the place where God resides. These basic facts beg the question of whether there is a reason for including the second line of the Lord’s Prayer and, if there is, what is it? If we say there is no reason then we are in effect declaring the line mere surplusage which means that the original Christian prayer that has roots dating to Jesus and that has been universally recited for two millennia contains a throwaway line.

Declaring by fiat that it must have meaning because Jesus said it seems insufficient because if he said it with a meaning then he must have intended for his followers to discern what he meant. Have you ever thought about what that meaning is? Stated slightly differently, have you ever thought what would be missing from the Lord’s Prayer if we did not say “who art in heaven”?

Although I still have questions about the inclusion of the line, in talking through it in Sunday school, we came up with a number of possible meanings. I’m not declaring these are all original to Jesus or the early church but I do think that they can help deepen our appreciation of this universal prayer. The possible meanings we discussed are that “who art in heaven”:

1. Contrasts with the intimacy of the opening line “Our Father” to help us remember that God is not our “homeboy” to use modern parlance or that the “fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is understanding” to borrow from the language of Proverbs 9:10.

2. Creates separation between our earthly conception of a father and God as our heavenly father which builds on the first meaning while also helping us tease out that no matter what our experience of fatherhood is on earth - good, bad, absent, abusive, etc. - that God is different from those so that we can affirm he is our father free from the baggage of our lived experience with human beings.

3. Reminds us that the earthly Jesus was not God the Father, but had come to earth to teach people who God was and show his love for them as John 3:16 so memorably tells us.

4. Adds wonder to our ability to call God “Our Father” in the opening line because (a) the only person who could call him Father directly was Jesus and (b) we have no right to expect any relationship with a God in heaven given our sinful ways but the Lord’s Prayer signals that he chooses to have a relationship with us and do the work through Jesus to make such a relationship possible.

5. Anticipates the rending of the curtain of the Holy of Holies in the Temple at Jesus’s death, since that curtain signified that God’s presence dwelled in the innermost sanctum of the Temple and its tearing meant that God’s presence was going out of that place.

6. From the perspective of the gospel writers, reflects back on the rending of the curtain of the Holy of Holies since the gospels were likely written after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD so they would know that there was no longer a Temple for God to dwell in at the time people were reading their writing.

7. Invites non-Jews into a relationship with the God who is “Our Father” since the other major religions of the time had concepts of places where their gods dwelled and saying that the Christian God was the Father in heaven would be a natural point of connection for nearly everyone living at that time.

These are certainly not all the possible meanings of the line but they are plausible ones that help give meaning and context to why it was important enough to be included in Jesus’s model prayer.

One foundational question related to the line that I have save for last due to its difficulty is what is meant by “heaven” here? The Old Testament is focused largely on life on earth and God’s involvement in it, particularly as it relates to his chosen people Israel. It provides few answers related to life after this life, and the answers it provides are short on details related to what comes next. The Christian understanding of heaven as being the perfect place where God dwells that we go after this life stems largely from the teachings of Jesus as understood in light of his resurrection. Easter therefore interprets the prayer for all of us who come after but its meaning would have been different prior to the empty tomb. Perhaps that is the reason Jesus included the line: as a permanent reminder that his resurrection clarified heaven as the place where God dwells and where God invites us through Jesus to dwell with him. If so, that shows yet again that the line is not mere surplusage.

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Even if you have not called the wrong person “mom” or “dad,” you might have hugged a stranger when you were young because they looked like a parent or grandparent from the perspective of a four-year-old. I’m pretty sure I did do this at least once and I have seen kids do it on a few occasions. The looks on the kid’s face when they realize that the person they just hugged is not their parent is a priceless combination of confusion, surprise, and bewilderment mixed with abject terror at their mistake.

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Jesus beginning the model prayer with “Our father” solves the problem of identifying who we are talking to and how we address them when we pray. Today it is easy to take it for granted that we pray to “God the Father” or “the Father,” but in Jesus’s day that would not have been as obvious. Jesus claimed that God was his literal father, a claim that no one else before or since can make, so it would make sense for him to tell his disciples that when he prayed he began by saying “Father.” By telling them that they and by extension we could join him in calling God “Father” is an invitation to enter into a unique relationship with Jesus’s Father that was not otherwise available to us.

“Our Father” also indicates that Jesus is inaugurating a reconstituted people of God whose membership is determined by their relationship to Jesus. The Old Testament records that God chose Israel as his people and called them to be his children. In Exodus 4:22-23, God tells Moses “say to Pharaoh, ‘Thus says the Lord: Israel is my firstborn son. I said to you, ‘Let my son go that he may serve me.’” By leading Israel out of Egypt, God established himself as their Father-God and freed them to serve him as his children. While outsiders could join the nation of Israel in certain limited circumstances, the lengthy genealogies recorded in the Old Testament and the beginning of the gospels demonstrate that membership in the people of God was ancestrally based. God alone had the ability to broaden who could be members of his chosen people and he did so through Jesus. Praying “Our Father” signals our membership into this reconstituted people of God and reminds us that we should live our lives in accordance with that membership.

Finally, Jesus inviting us to call God “Our Father” invites us to think of ourselves as God’s adopted children, meaning we are also Jesus’s brothers and sisters. Paul summarizes what this means in Romans 8:14-17:

“For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, “Abba! Father!” it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs: heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, if we in fact suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.”

To fully understand what Paul’s writing meant, we have to disentangle our modern conception of adoption from what it meant to someone living in the Roman Empire like Jesus and Paul. We think of adoption primarily as a process for a child missing one or both biological parents to become the son or daughter of a person or a couple by process of law. There is nothing wrong of conceptualizing of ourselves as adopted in this manner since it results in God being our Father and makes us equal before him in every way to everyone else, as well as gives us a point of reference for how much he loves us. Even so, there is an even deeper meaning to adoption that comes through when we consider it through the lens of the Roman Empire.

Unsurprisingly, succession planning was immensely important to Rome’s rulers. Failing to plan for succession could lead to civil war or, perhaps worse from the perspective of an emperor, a successor who would seek to erase your reign from history. To avoid these two problems, emperors chose their successors through adoption, the difference being that the adopted successor would be a successful adult whose parentage might be irrelevant to the decision. For example, Rome’s first emperor Caesar Augustus was the nephew and adopted son of Julius Caesar who was on the path to emperorship prior to his famous murder. Augustus’s adopted sonship gave him political capital that he was able to turn into armies and ultimately the establishment of the empire. Further, after he became emperor, he declared Julius Caesar to be divine, making Augustus the son of a god. Augustus adopted Tiberius, his step son, as his successor who then declared Augustus to be divine making him also the son of a god.

When we read that we are God’s adopted children, then, we should understand that carries the connotation of being adopted as co-heirs with Christ of God’s kingdom on earth. This does not mean we are to sit in judgment by virtue of our adopted status. Instead, it means that we should consider ourselves Jesus’s chosen successors who he has entrusted to continue the work of bringing his kingdom to earth. Consequently, adoption empowers us to bold action and encourages us to build upon the work of those who have come before us and who work alongside us.

“Our Father” - two simple words that invite us into a multi-layered and amazing relationship with the Father who loved us enough to send Jesus to teach us to pray and to live as his children.

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I asked these as part of a series of questions as an introduction to reflect on the Lord’s Prayer. The questions I asked are:

Who taught you to pray?

How did you learn to pray?

Do you pray set or pre-written prayers?

Do you pray scripture or hymns or songs or poems?

Do you pray privately, publicly, communally, or with family?

Are there subjects/topics/concerns that you always include in your prayers?

Are there subjects/topics/concerns that you never include in your prayers?

When do you pray?

Where do you pray?

Do you always close your eyes when you pray?

Do you assume a specific posture when you pray?

Do you ever meditate?

After putting these on the white board and discussing them for a half hour, I asked one final question: Does the Lord’s Prayer influence or factor into how you prayer and/or how you think about prayer?

The Lord’s Prayer appears twice in the gospels: in Luke 11:1-4 Jesus gives a version of it when his disciples ask him to teach them to pray; and as part of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 6:5-13 when Jesus tells his followers not to pray like the hypocrites. The formulation of the Lord’s Prayer used today harmonizes these two prayers.

The Lord’s Prayer is ubiquitous in that we say it aloud in church, before and after sporting events, in small and large group gatherings, and essentially anywhere where two or more are gathered. We say it so often that we can come to take it for granted, not reflecting on its words or giving it too much thought.

I largely fit within this category until this past spring when our church printed different translations of the Lord’s Prayer in the worship guide so that we could say them together as a congregation. Besides naturally drifting towards saying the words we all know, the different translations drew strong reactions, with some people finding them offensive, others weird, and nearly everyone uncomfortable. Interestingly, these reactions were consistent across all age groups. Further, some of the strongest reactions that I heard came from elementary age children who declared that they would say the familiar version regardless of what was printed in the worship guide. If you search for alternative translations of the Lord’s Prayer online and then say them aloud, you will better understand why they leave people uncomfortable.

Inspired by this experience, we are going to go line-by-line through the Lord’s Prayer in Sunday school this fall and in posts on this blog. Jesus did not utter idle words or give us a model prayer with inaccessible meaning. Reading it and thinking through why Jesus would include each line and what that means for us can transform a prayer that can sometimes seem like background noise into the centerpiece of faith that he intended it to be.

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Noel’s recent book, God in the Desert: A Spiritual Theology of Wilderness in the Old Testament, is the inspiration for this podcast series. Her book explores and connects the depiction of wilderness journeys in the Old Testament to our lives today. It is a thoughtful and deeply moving book that anyone who has wrestled with their faith or questions about God and spirituality can connect with. You can buy a copy of her book here.

In this episode, we give the background of our friendship, discuss Noel’s book, and Noel summarizes some of the positive and negative aspects of wilderness that she has identified through her work. We also give an overview of our goals for the podcast which will feature interviews of other people about their wilderness journeys, what they took from those journeys, and how we can find hope when we find ourselves in the wilderness.

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Our assumptions do structure the world for us. This first became clear to me when I spent the night at a friend’s house in elementary school. My family was quiet and structured and my home life was stable. None of those things were true for my friend, but I didn’t fully understand that until after I had ridden home with him from school and became fully immersed in an unfamiliar and uncomfortable atmosphere. I won’t go into details but I will say that my parents picked me up early.

Assumptions are atmospheric, like the smell of your house and your accent. You don’t notice either because they blend into your life even though they may be striking to someone else. If you have a southern accent and have traveled outside of the south, you quickly learn how noticeable your accent is when waiters, taxi drivers, and random strangers ask you to talk just so they can hear a southern accent.

We need assumptions because without them we continually would be guessing at what comes next and unable to predictably order our lives. In that regard, we would be like my six-month-old nephew who just came for a visit. He knew and was comfortable with his immediate family but the rest of us were questionable. When we popped into his field of vision, his eyes widened and he had to decide whether we were friend or foe. Fortunately, he is a happy baby so he almost always smiled and sometimes giggled when we smiled at him. Even so, he did not have enough experience to assume things about us one way or the other prior to looking us directly in the eyes.

At the same time, and the older we get, assumptions threaten to shrink our world and color our views of it unnecessarily. We assume things about people based on their family ties, friends, jobs, addresses, and any other number of external factors so that we have a fully formed view of them prior to or just after meeting them. Such assumptions cut us off from deeper relationships and interesting experiences because they tell us that we already know how the story ends so there is nothing to see here.

Peterson continually challenges his readers to question their assumptions about others, themselves, and God. He invites us to see life as an adventure or a series of adventures and to avoid falling into ruts and getting stuck in our ways because to do so will leave us jealous, angry, and resentful at the world, at God, and at ourselves. As part of the adventure, he encourages deep reflection and unflinching honesty, particularly when it comes to our own wants, desires, and needs, so that we do not bury ourselves under layers of lies and dishonesty that pile up over the years.

My personal belief and experience that the trigger for many midlife crises is when the lies we have told ourselves over the years become untenable and force us to confront undeniable truths that threaten our core beliefs about ourselves and our identities. I found Peterson’s calls to proactively confront the lies we tell ourselves and to act courageously when confronted by unwelcome truths to be refreshing and reassuring, not least because they confirmed that none of us are alone in these types of struggles even if we don’t talk about them with anyone else.

Our avoidance of talking about such struggles brings me back to Peterson’s point on how we structure our world through our assumptions. Oftentimes we assume that our struggles are unique to us, that admitting them would show weakness, and that they prove our unworthiness for love, happiness, and fulfillment. Those assumptions are incorrect and Peterson helps us understand why they are wrong and how to overcome them so that we can live meaningful lives.

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The house we stayed in while visiting May in mid-June backed up to a beautiful bay where seals sometimes chased fish while eagles soared overhead. There was a large flat rocky beach at low tide that extended out a few dozen yards. The kids and I skipped rocks when the water was calm and, on one occasion, a few of us took a polar plunge in the water that even in early summer was a frigid forty-nine degrees and cold enough to take your breath away if you fully submerged yourself.

Low tide was also an excellent time to bring a lawn chair down to the low water line and read a book. I did just that on one of the early days of our trip. I set the chair up a few feet up from the water, put the notebook and pen I had brought with me down on the rocks beside the chair, and began to read a book I had brought with me. I lost myself in the book until the bugs started eating my arms and legs. As an aside, if you ever travel to Maine in the summer, bring bug spray because the bugs are tiny but bloodthirsty. But-for the bugs, however, I might have lost my notebook to the rising tide.

When the tiny flying vampires forced me to look up from my book, I saw that the water was hitting the bottom of my shoes and one of the legs of my chair with my notebook only inches away. Stubbornly refusing to leave despite the attacking insects, I moved my chair up a few feet and went back to reading - holding the book in one hand while swatting bugs constantly with the other. I also kept an eye on the water which I realized was rising a few inches every minute or two. All told, I probably moved my chair a few feet a half dozen times over the course of an hour or so while the water continually chased me up the shore. Had I stayed in the house, I would have seen the larger movement of water as the tide came in but I would not have been able to see it’s steady, unceasing rise.

Although I’ve read it’s an urban myth, the story goes that if you put a frog in a pot of boiling water he will jump out but if you put him in a pot of room temperature water that you slowly bring to a boil then he will die. I’m not going to say that I would have drowned if the bugs had not forced me to look up from my book but I’m pretty sure that my socks would have gotten wet inside my shoes.

The image of the water creeping up the shore, covering rocks that were dry just seconds before has stuck with me since we returned from Maine. It strikes me as a metaphor for many things in life, some good, some bad, some ordinary, and some divine. If you stopped what you are doing now and looked up, what might be lapping at your shoes that you didn’t even realize was there?

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I’m staying on the Alabama-Georgia border this week for work. My trip reminds me why I am not a traveling salesman, namely, because I get lonely without my family nearby. My wife tells me that I am an extroverted-introvert, a contradiction in terms that sounds absurd. Even so, I think that she’s right. I find it difficult to work sitting alone in my hotel room so I go and sit in the lobby or, if it’s not too hot, outside on a patio near the pool. I rarely talk with anyone but there is something comforting in hearing other people move and talk and interact. I can’t put my finger on why, but it is something that is deeply ingrained within me.

I was sitting quietly outside when I took the above picture of a rainbow over the Chattahoochee River. I had been sitting outside reading earlier when it began to rain. Not wanting the library’s book to be ruined, I went inside and read it while sitting on a stationary bike that faced a picture window. I got exercise, read a book, and could glance up to watch it rain, a winning trifecta if ever there was one. After it stopped raining, I went back outside and returned to reading. I had read a few pages when I looked up to see the rainbow and take the picture above.

I needed that rainbow. More importantly, I needed the reminder that it represents the presence of a God who chooses to make promises to people that he is under no compulsion to make and then keeps those promises out of love and faithfulness. Just like something within me needs to be in the presence of other people not to feel lonely, something within me also needs the presence of God to avoid hopeless despair. The rainbow reminded me that God is always there for me and everyone who has ever seen or experienced a rainbow.

You’ve seen a rainbow by looking at this post. I hope you continue to see them and that they help you remember the God who makes them and is always with you.

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I will return to more regular blogging and podcast soon.

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The beach was crescent shaped and at least a quarter mile long. During low tide, we walked from one end of the crescent to the other looking for crabs, skipping rocks, and watching the gulls, osprey, and bald eagles fly. As the tide rose, we balanced atop rocks as we walked to keep our shoes out of the cold seawater.

There was a near-constant breeze blowing off the bay that helped lower the heat level during the middle of the warm days, while making a jacket necessary the remainder of the time.

As we walked down the beach the first day, I heard what sounded like rain or a small stream as we approached a bend in the shoreline. Not seeing any flowing water or mist, I glanced into the trees that lay at the edge of the shore just beyond the high tide line.

The trees all looked the same except for one small patch of a dozen or so trees whose leaves were dancing frenetically. While the leaves on other trees moved back and forth as the wind gusted, the leaves in this small patch twisted and rubbed against each other. They seemed barely connected to the tree but yet none of them flew off even with stronger gusts. From a distance they looked as if they had been animated in a cartoon because they blended and blurred together as they moved. Just watching them was mesmerizing.

Up close, they continued to blend together and it also became clear that they were the source of the sound I was hearing. They sounded akin to weeping willows but with small round leaves instead of long wispy ones. The video above is my attempt to capture the unique sound and movement of these trees that I am pretty sure do not grow in the south.

The Bible says that if the people stay silent then the rocks will cry out. Since God created the heavens and the earth, I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say that these trees provide harmony to the singing rocks.

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Jasper Beach is a rocky beach on the coast of Maine. It was cold and windy when we went there, and it started raining within 10 minutes of our arrival. The rain was cold so we did not linger long.

Even so, if you watch the above video with the sound on, you will hear rocks sing each time a wave recedes down the shore. It’s proof that the rocks still cry out and that they do so regardless of temperature, rain, wind, clouds, or other circumstances.

We have a lot to learn from the singing rocks.

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I took Existentialism as a class in college. I loved the class because it helped me think about life from different perspectives. It also taught me that I enjoyed Albert Camus but couldn’t stand John Paul Sartre who never met one word that he couldn’t replace with five longer ones.

My professor only irritated me once in the class when we were reading The Grand Inquisitor by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, a writer that I loved and had read in high school. My professor said multiple times in the class that writers did not have a monopoly on how their works were interpreted. Instead, interpretations were left to the reader who did not have to agree with the writer’s interpretation of his/her own work.

When we read The Grand Inquisitor, my professor had a definite opinion on its meaning and how it should be read which was different than mine. While annoyed, I kept my opinion to myself because, while I valued free expression, I valued my grade more.

All that to say, I offer the above picture without interpretation. I hope it makes you smile and whatever caption you come up with for it makes you laugh.

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The wind picked up and the leaves started falling like heavy snow or, since this is Alabama, ash from a bon fire. The trees were swaying when one of them started cracking. The sound of the wind passing through them made it impossible to tell exactly which one was about to break so the air was full of tension in addition to the blowing leaves for about thirty seconds or so.

And then the tree fell. I could say that was when the limb fell because about half of the tree remained standing. Even so, the half that fell was dozens of feet long and larger than most of the trees around my house. I saw it give way, fall across the neighbor’s fence, and land about ten feet from the end of the porch I was sitting on. Along the way, it broke a large limb off a neighboring tree and wound up on top of a rose bush and pomegranate trees.

The final cracking of the tree before it fell was loud enough that my family heard it from the basement if that helps give some perspective on how large the fall was. While I can see the jagged remains of the limb where it broke off the trunk, I have not examined the limb on the ground. I could be wrong, but I am expecting to find that it is black and hollow in the center.

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Rot is fascinating because it eats away from the inside of something living, concealed by the life it is destroying and only becoming apparent after it has undermined the structural integrity of the organism. Jesus captures the essence of rot when he calls the teachers of the law and pharisees “whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean.” Matt. 23:27. Similar to the wind’s impact on a rotten limb, Jesus’s teaching and actions pressured the religious leaders of his time which exposed the rot lurking just below the surface of the prevailing social and religious order.

Within a generation, the rot Jesus exposed contributed to the sacking of Jerusalem, the destruction of the Temple, and the ensuing existential crisis for the Israelites. Luke captures Jesus’s heartbreak over Jerusalem in the week before he died, as well as his prediction of the consequences of the City’s refusal to deal with the rot he was exposing before it was too late:

“As he approached Jerusalem and saw the city, he wept over it and said, “If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace—but now it is hidden from your eyes. The days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment against you and encircle you and hem you in on every side. They will dash you to the ground, you and the children within your walls. They will not leave one stone on another, because you did not recognize the time of God’s coming to you.”

Luke 19:41-44.

Rot lives within all of us to one degree or another. Sometimes we recognize it and sometimes we don’t. Sometimes its consequences are small and sometimes they are existential in scope. I like to think that part of the reason why the Holy Spirit appears as a wind at Pentecost is because it blows on each of us so that we can understand and identify where rot and weakness that leads to rot lies within us. Of course, the Holy Spirit’s purpose is not to exploit that rot but to expose it so that the Son can heal it if we will allow him to do so. In other words, Jesus is still looking at each of us and asking us to recognize that he alone is the one who can bring us peace.

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Sometimes, however, I miss the Sportscenter segment that I include in my morning routine. It is not because I’m getting my kids up or the dog threw up (again) or my schedule changed for some work-related reason. Those would be uncontrollable and understandable reasons for missing it. No, I miss it despite sitting on the sofa in front of the TV that is turned to Sportscenter with the volume turned on so the anchors’ voices can be heard announcing the start of the segment and discussing each play.

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How is this possible? Simple: I am engrossed in my phone to the point that everything outside of it ceases to exist. It is usually because I am playing one of the games that my sons recommended to me and that I started playing to connect more with them. These are games where you manage home bases and/or troops that you then use to fight head-to-head battles with other players online for battles lasting between three and four minutes. One of the reasons why I agreed to start playing the games was because they were quick, unlike many of the other games my kids play that can take half an hour or more to complete a single level.

What I did not factor in was how the games have been engineered to draw you in so completely that you lose track of time. There are daily bonuses and weekly events that will give you free stuff if you will only play a couple more games. There is also the thrill of winning that drives you to see how many games you can win in a row, as well as the agony of losing a close battle so that you feel compelled to redeem yourself by playing just one more. The games are set up to incentivize you to play just one more battle and make starting that battle as easy and compelling as possible. Four or five or ten games later, you look up and realize that the Sportscenter Top Ten ended a half hour ago or the dog threw up on the floor (again) or the kids are asking if you filled their water bottles since you do that every morning before they leave for school.

Lest you think I am an old curmudgeon when it comes to online games, I can assure you that I am not. I enjoy them and find them to provide a few minutes of welcome distraction when I get too caught up in some other task. The issue is not the games themselves. Instead, it is in how easily they entice players to lose themselves completely in them so that time, other people, responsibilities, etc. disappear for long periods. Even if you are not a gamer, I bet you can think of some similar task - a TV show, social media, mindlessly researching an esoteric topic online, or some other mindless endeavor that you lose yourself in and look up half an hour or more later as if you have just awoken in a strange place and don’t know what time it is.

My example of missing the Sportscenter Top Ten segment is an annoying but largely painless illustration of the problem. A less pleasant one is when I am lost in my phone and I realize that I have been half carrying on a conversation with one of my children for a few minutes. I have been agreeing with them or given non-matching responses to whatever they were saying in the hopes of giving the appearance that I was engaged with them. Safe to say, they are not fooled so I am communicating to them that the weekly challenge to earn more gold for my online army is more important than spending time with my kid. While my kids are older now, even young children see when they are being given a lukewarm shoulder instead of our full attention. They also learn to emulate such behavior, as well as to spot hypocrisy when they are told to put down their screens by an adult who cannot do likewise for more than five minutes. One great modern irony is that some of the most neglected children today are also the most spoiled by parents who give them screens as the solution to any and all complaints and demands, including demands for quality time with their parents.

So what is the solution? I do not think it is to break from all technology or deny it to our children. Such a radical move disconnects us too much from the modern world and isolates our children from obtaining skills and experiences that they will need to succeed in it. Instead, I think the solution lies in not losing ourselves so completely in any mindless activity so that everything else disappears. To draw on a biblical analogy, mindfulness is like yeast in that you need only mix a small amount into your life to turn mindless activities into meaningful uses of time.

Prayer is a great starting point for incorporating mindfulness into our lives because prayer puts the issue before God and also puts it in the forefront of our minds. Prayer focuses our attention, consciously and subconsciously, so that we become attuned to the object of our prayer. If our object is mindfulness, then praying for it is like tripling our resolve to mindfulness since (1) the fact we are praying means we are thinking about mindfulness; (2) the act of praying heightens our attention to being mindful; and (3) the act of praying invites God to help us be more mindful.

I pray for mindfulness daily and have observed myself becoming more aware of when I neglect the important people and things in my life for mindless pursuits. I hope you will join me in praying for mindfulness and seeing how illuminating that prayer can be.

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Two quotes from Jordan Peterson help illuminate a better, more biblically based definition of calling that encompasses all of us and endows our everyday lives with meaning:

“To stand up straight with your shoulders back … means deciding to voluntarily transform the chaos of potential into the realities of habitable order.” 12 Rules for Life

“Who are you - or, at least, who could you be? Answer: … part of the eternal force that faces chaos and turns it into productive order, or that takes order that has become too restrictive, reduces it to chaos, and renders it productive once again.” Beyond Order

The bible begins with God’s spirit hovering over a formless and void world into which he speaks creation and order. Jesus’s ministry was about revealing what it looked like when God’s kingdom came to earth - both in how he brought healing and redemption to hurting people and in how he challenged the prevailing religious order that had elevated form over substance.

We are not called to bring or break order everywhere with everyone, but there are unique places and opportunities for us to use our gifts, talents, and abilities to bring God’s kingdom to earth by calling order from chaos or challenging order that has become too much.

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We were fishing behind my in-laws house in a neighborhood lake that sits in a valley in the middle of two steep hills that are part of the southernmost foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. There is a natural wind tunnel effect so that the wind usually blows down the valley from the upper end of the lake to the lower end. Sometimes this means that there is a gentle cool breeze to cool you off on a hot summer day. Other days it means that you will be fighting the wind all day as it relentlessly seeks to push you against the dam on the lower end. This day was somewhere in between, with gentle breezes turning into gusts that then stilled completely.

We fished our way up the lake, or at least my son did. I tried to fish but spent most of my time adjusting the trolling motor’s speed and direction so that the boat didn’t turn sideways and run into the bank. Eventually, I gave up and told him that we were going all the way up and work our way back. By going to the upper end of the lake, I did get to fish some in between trying to keep us off the bank and away from the multiple snakes that we saw swimming near it. Drifting into the bank is no fun. Drifting into the bank alongside a snake is frightening, particularly since Northern Water Snakes look just like Copperheads and those are the two types of snakes that swim in the lake.

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While my son and I went up the lake and fished down, my other son and his friend went down the lake and worked back up. As a result, they had an easy time at the very beginning but then fought the wind constantly thereafter to avoid being blown onto the shore. This meant that they were constantly running their trolling motor at a higher rate of speed, the end result being that they ran out the battery and had to paddle. Fishing was a chore for them but in a different way than it was for us since I had more experience managing the boat and trolling motor. Even so, I will begrudgingly admit that they caught more fish than my other son and I caught.

In my last post, I wrote about the transcendent experience of sitting still while watching the wind make everything around you dance. Trying to fish in a boat with the wind blowing is a different experience altogether because it forces you to decide how you are going to approach it. You can approach it by letting it blow you onto the bank which does no good if you are fishing and might run you into an unhappy snake. You can fight it as hard as you can which will work until you exhaust your trolling motor and yourself. You can work with the wind, pointing the front of your boat directly into it and then managing your energy to keep the boat positioned where you want it so that you can fish and not run out of battery power forcing you to paddle.

I’ve spent significant periods of my life fighting like crazy against spiritual winds. It’s as if there was 20 mph wind blowing from the direction I wanted to go. I used the equivalent of a trolling motor until the battery died and then paddled like crazy until my strength failed. Inevitably, I wound up adrift or, if I was lucky, back on the dock where I started. Sometimes, after recouping my strength, I would set back out in the same direction into the same wind with the same result in the end. I’m sure that you’ve had similar experiences in your life.

When this happens, there is a natural tendency to blame some nefarious force for preventing us from moving forward. If our intentions are good and our plan logical then it must be Satan stopping us goes the logic. We must overcome by pushing harder, strengthening our faith, trusting God more, and resisting temptation. Many of us have heard something like this in church.

The older I get, however, the more I have come to realize that it is often the Spirit of God blowing in my face preventing me from going to where I had planned. I fight and rage and pray and strengthen my resolve, only realizing later that God was the wind frustrating my efforts. In the last few years, I’ve tried to let myself be guided by the Spirit instead of raging against it. This is not to say that I drift aimlessly without thought or care, but it is to say that I do my best to discern where the divine winds are blowing and then position myself to work with them instead of rage against them.

Acts 16:6-7 tells us that the Holy Spirit prevented Paul from preaching in the province of Asia and the Spirit of Jesus prevented him from entering Bithynia. Given Paul’s influence, these divine preventions likely changed the course and shape of Christianity. If you’ve read any of Paul’s writing, you know that he is no wilting flower so I imagine these verses cover over at least some consternation and frustration on Paul’s part. Regardless, the Spirit moved Paul where it wanted and the rest of Acts tells the circuitous route he took to bring the gospel to Rome. Given Paul’s strong willed and opinionated nature demonstrated most directly in his conversion by Jesus blinding Paul when he was on his way to persecute Christians, I expect that Paul had to learn that the Spirit thwarted his plans just as capably as his earthly and spiritual adversaries. It’s a lesson we all have to learn lest we wind up exhausted, adrift, and in danger of crashing onto snake infested shores.

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“We eternally inhabit order, surrounded by chaos. We eternally occupy known territory, surrounded by the unknown. We experience meaningful engagement when we mediate appropriately between them….

To straddle that fundamental duality is to be balanced: to have one foot firmly planted in order and security, and the other in chaos, possibility, growth, and adventure. When life suddenly reveals itself as intense, gripping, and meaningful; when time passes and you’re so engrossed in what you’re doing that you don’t notice - it is there and then that you are located precisely on the border between order and chaos.”

The border between order and chaos is also where the redemption of the world and the coming of the kingdom of God lies, as illustrated by Jesus’s life and teachings in the gospels. He was constantly bringing God’s order into the world, not least through miraculous healings that restored people to full health and well-being, while also being constantly pressed on all sides by people resisting the coming of the new order. The frenetic quality of his ministry as depicted in the gospels demonstrates his straddling the line between order and chaos. It also shows that God places us in similar circumstances so that we might imitate Jesus in bringing God’s order into a chaotic world.

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I was sitting reading a book under a Japanese maple tree in my front yard. I may have been the only immobile object in the yard. I was so engrossed in the book that I almost didn’t notice the movement that surrounded me. Indeed, if there was not just a touch of cold in the wind then I might not have noticed it at all. Once I saw the movement, however, I could not look away. The world was engaged in a mesmerizing dance and I was an audience of one with a seat in the middle of the dance floor.

There are few things that will make me close a book I’m reading. With four kids, oftentimes the best I can hope for is to be in the eye of the hurricane where there is relative calm surrounded by chaos. Give me a good book and I won’t look up until someone calls my name, covers my eyes, or credibly claims to be injured. The reason I went to the yard was so I could read without any background noise or distraction.

My ability to tune everything out heightened my sense of awe that the nearly silent wind had fully captured my attention so that I forgot about the book I had been reading. Something was happening all around me, something that I was invited to notice and experience with all five of my senses. At the same time, I knew that I had not been invited to participate because, if I tried to join in, then I would cut myself off from the life affirming act of watching the wind breathe life and joy into the world. I could do nothing to enhance or diminish that joy, but if I had attempted to act to join in it then I would have distracted myself from letting the life and joy infuse my spirit simply by being present in the moment. For a long time, all I moved was my eyes so that I could see different participants in the dance, from the trees and bushes to the birds and squirrels.

When the wind calmed a few minutes after it started, I felt peace and contentment because I knew that I had experienced something transcendent in those few minutes. I think that if I had tried to participate in it then I would have been disappointed when it ended and felt a sense of loss. By contenting myself with being present, gratitude for being able to watch something beautiful eclipsed any possible negative emotion when it reached its inevitable conclusion.

At its core, this transcendent experience that so lifted my spirit consisted of cool breeze on a warm day. Genesis 1:2 states that the spirit of God hovered over the waters just before he spoke light into existence. God remains present in the world and Jesus said that after he went away that God would send the Holy Spirit as our helper. We cannot see the spirit but sometimes we can experience the breeze it gives off when it hovers around us, breathing life and joy into creation itself. In those moments, we understand what it means “to be still and know that I am God.” Ps. 46:10.

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We pair Mark’s account with Jordan Peterson’s explanation of order that gives comfort and stability to life:

“Where everything is certain, we’re in order. We’re there when things are going according to plan and nothing is new and disturbing. In the domain of order, things behave as God intended. We like to be there. Familiar environments are congenial. In order, we’re able to think about things in the long term. There, things work, and we’re stable, calm and competent. We seldom leave places we understand - geographical or conceptual - for that reason, and we certainly do not like it when we are compelled to or when it happens accidentally.”

Fairy tales, myths, and stories nearly universally tell us that nothing good comes back from the dead. Zombies, vampires, Frankenstein’s monster, and killer mummies are what happens when the dead rise. We order our lives around the fact that when someone or something dies, they stay dead. Yet, at the same time, we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus as the ultimate event that supplies order to our lives.

If we will stop to think and place ourselves alongside the terrified women of Mark 16, we might understand that we should not so celebrate the resurrection glibly or without reflection because it does introduce chaos into the world and our lives. We find comfort in an otherwise unimaginably crazy singular event in history. That should give us pause and by pausing we may find deeper meaning, faith, and hope in it, as well as a renewed and better understanding of what it means for how we live our lives and how we serve and minister to others.

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Now that it’s broken, I realize how much work the dishwasher was doing. We first learned it was broken when my wife went to run it and none of the lights would come on its display. She told me this at bedtime and I told her I would just wash the dishes in the morning. Since the dishwasher was full, it took me around an hour to get all of the dishes washed and dried. Afterwards, I instituted the rule that everyone must immediately wash every dish they use as soon as they finish using it. Everyone has thus far abided by the rule without incident. Of course, it has only been a day so I’m expecting to get up to a sink full of dishes in the near future.

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Dishwashers, like childhood, are only fully appreciated in hindsight. If it had not broken, I would have continued on blissfully unaware of all of the work it performed and saved me from doing while I was asleep or outside or doing anything other than washing dishes. We will get another dishwasher soon if for no other reason than the skin on my hands would either get too soft or start to crack from the soap and hot water. I vow not to take it for granted, although I am sure that there will be standoffs over who will load and unload it again.

Sometimes our spiritual dishwashers need to break so we can appreciate how much work they do on our behalf. I remember visiting a person of another faith who simultaneously was listening to his faith’s scripture in a foreign language while reading a different passage of the same scripture in translation. He told me it was so that he could make it through the entirety of his scripture in a single month. To be clear, he was a sincere adherent to his faith so his efforts were not just for show. Nevertheless, I went away wondering how he could have accomplished his goal if he had to read all of the scriptures.

His is perhaps an extreme example of how people of all faiths use technology as a shortcut for spiritual growth and development. I like to listen to books on theology at double speed because listening to them at normal speed drives me crazy because it is too slow. Yes, I get through more books that way, but I also find that I only understand at least parts of them later when my mind processes what my ears heard. Even worse, I have become so accustomed to listening to these books that I zone out for a minute or two which at double time might be half a chapter. I betray my inability to process everything I am hearing by buying hard copies of the books that seem worthy of sustained attention. So, I justify the double time listening as a more efficient screening process than buying or borrowing a book that I might be interested in. Even so, I bet that I’ve missed out on some meaningful works by not being forced to hold them in my hands.

Of course, audio books are but one technology that provides shortcuts to spiritual work. We can watch church from our beds, the beach, a restaurant, or anywhere else in the world. Yet, Jesus’s life and ministry, as well as the history of the early church recorded in the New Testament, reveal that following Jesus means living in community and gathering together with other believers. Likewise, phone calls and emails enable communication over long distances and in sometimes difficult circumstances, they are still no substitute for physical contact or a handwritten card. The internet and more recently the rise of artificial intelligence have convinced many that the need to study faith and scripture is obsolete since a few key strokes will give you answers that you might never come up with on your own. How that sentiment matches up with Psalm 119:1 that tells us “I have hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against you” remains a mystery to me.

The ideas behind this particular post came to my while I was washing dishes in the sink. I think it was around the time that I was scrubbing last night’s dinner off of the 15^th fork that it dawned on my how much unnoticed but vital work the dishwasher performed.

None of this is to say that technology or modernity is the enemy of a healthy spiritual life. It is to say that the Christian life revolves around relationships with God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, others, and ourselves. Only we can create, foster, and grow those relationships, but we have to be willing to put in the time and effort to do so instead of letting some spiritual version of a dishwasher do it for us. So, wash some dishes, write a handwritten note, say hello to neighbor - anything that makes you slow down enough to do the work that God created us to do.

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“I learned two very important lessons from Carl Jung … about ‘doing unto others as you would have them do unto you’ or ‘loving your neighbor as yourself.’ The first lesson was that neither of these statements has anything to do with being nice. The second was that both are equations, rather than injunctions. If I am someone’s friend, family member, or lover, then I am morally obliged to bargain as hard on my own behalf as they are on theirs. If I fail to do so, I will end up a slave, and the other person a tyrant. … It is much better for any relationship when both partners are strong.”

We consider what these ideas mean for our relationships with family, friends, neighbors, co-workers, and enemies, how they get to the heart of how we often confuse love with being nice or liking someone, and how loving someone means being willing to engage with them on issues and ideas where there may be disagreement, not for disagreement sake, but because love requires engagement, vulnerability, and honesty.

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