Allah and the Flower Child

Amidst a world of suffering and personal tragedies, Christians refuse to consider the possibility that their “Good, Good, Father” might not be all that good. When you look at the world that God supposedly created, all you see are school-shootings and hurricanes and corrupt politicians. Cancer is always knocking at someone’s door and maybe you’ve even lost a loved one. So how exactly is God good?

I think the simplest answer, aside from the fact that NBC gets better ratings when they report violence, is that He’s not. The simplest answer on the surface, is that God doesn’t exist and that Christianity is just a band-aid that someone manufactured for hopeless people.

I’ve found however, that the simplest answer might not always be the right one. And so, if you suspect like I do that there is a god and that this god is probably the One the Bible describes, you might also, as I do, care to seek Him out in hope of discovering exactly who He is.

When we search our motives, I believe that the much more personal question we are really asking is not one of God’s apparent goodness, but whether or not God can be trusted. How can a Christian like Horatio Spafford lose everything dear to him and respond with words like, “it is well with my soul”? Let’s start by outlining two views that shape how Christians put their trust in God.

Part I “Mutant Spawn”

On one hand, we have a holy, all-knowing, all-powerful, infinite God who by default is the cause of all things. Nothing happens that He doesn’t either allow to happen or put into motion Himself. We believe that God’s in control and that He’s also benevolent and loving and so all these bad things that keep happening must be the most infinitesimal part of His massive, cosmic plan that will turn out to be good in the end. And so we trust God because He’s God.

On the other hand, we have a loving, compassionate, humble God who desires intimacy with His creation. But because He’s a gentleman, He let’s us choose whether we want to be with Him or not; whether we want life or death. Out of love, He sacrifices perfection and His right to control His own creation for a relationship with us by offering us free will. In this way, we understand that the cause of our suffering is ultimately anything that separates us from God; whether it’s our choices, sinful lifestyles or Satan. And so we trust God because He’s good.

“Well Brice, Fluffy is still in the ground and all you’ve managed to do is describe a mutant form of Islam and the disillusioned spawn of new age hippies and dualism. How is this supposed to help?” Your words, not mine.

Before we move on I would like to draw your attention to two things. The first is that I’m not a theologian or a pastor or the Pope, and I hope my incomplete, and possibly inaccurate descriptions of how we as Christians sometimes view God will not deter you from grasping the point I hope to make in just a bit. The second is this: It is by faith that we believe that God exists and it is by faith that we believe that God is good. What we believe doesn’t change who God is. Instead, what we believe changes who we become. And what we must choose to believe that is of the utmost importance, is that Jesus came to earth and died in our place and then came back to life so that we may have life in Him. The cross is the foundation of our faith and any contractor will tell you that a house without a proper foundation, isn’t worth living in. Back to the mutant spawn.

What I’ve described above is not Islam nor new age-dualism. Muslims don’t believe that Allah loves them and dualism within the context of Christianity tries to put Satan on the same level as God. I don’t think I’ve ever met a hippie but I’m sure they’re kind and lovely. What I’ve described are two Christian views that focus on different characteristics of the same God but elicit the same outward response of trust in a Higher Being. While these views are helpful to a point, they paint an incomplete picture of God’s character; a dire insufficiency I hope to remedy a little bit later.

Many Christians will argue over which view is better but I don’t want to and since I’m the author, we won’t. However, I will say this. While knowing what we believe is important and knowing why we believe it is just as important, I’ve come to understand that what we hold in our hands is very dull indeed when compared to the truth we hold in our hearts, and if we find ourselves with our fists clenched so tightly around an idea that it’s impossible to hold someone’s hand, we might be missing the point altogether. Whether we trust in a God with a good plan or we trust in a good God, we must love as Jesus did.

Thus far, we’ve approached our question from a subpar perspective which is to say “our own.” Much like an astronomer that seeks to understand the universe but believes the sun to revolve around the earth, are we who seek to understand God but believe His existence to serve our own.

If we look at the cosmos as a near infinite symphony, each one of us might be just a single note on an everlasting sheet of music. And in the blink of an eye, as our lives connect with what we know as the present in time, we live out our solo loudly and proudly as the star of our own concert but only the Composer/Conductor can witness the true splendor in His masterpiece as a whole.

Life on this earth is a God-given privilege, not a right. Take God out of the picture and there is no picture. He’s big. We’re little. He’s right. We’re wrong. He’s not a part of our symphony, we’re a part of His.

So now, rather than looking at God through our earthquakes and illnesses, let’s try to rise above our fading circumstances and see things from God’s eternal perspective. Instead of looking at our world and then searching for flaws in the Creator, it might do us well to look at our Creator and search for flaws in ourselves--or literally anywhere other than in the only truly good and perfectly loving Person to ever exist who has insurmountable power and infinite wisdom.

To know God in His fullness is the first step to understanding how He is good and ultimately trustworthy. And while I’m sure He’s a composer of sorts, He’s definitely a writer and He’s written a pretty good book to get us started.

Part II “The Whole Truth”

The Bible is first and foremost a story about God and His personality. As we read, we find out who He is and what He’s like. First we find out that God is a Creator of good things and that He’s personal. Then we find out that He doesn’t tolerate disobedience and that He has emotions like anger and jealousy. But we also find out that He doesn’t give up on people and that He exists in three parts. He’s loving and kind and gentle, He’s patient and humble and He has big plans for our lives.

Discovering the character of God is a lot like math. Not in the meticulous, boring sense but in the sense that it builds on itself. When we find out that God is loving, it adds to the fact that He’s holy. It doesn’t negate it.

God has always been exactly who He is today. God is infinite, omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent. He is holy, just, and jealous. He is kind and compassionate. He is Love and He never changes. While God is unchanging, there is a significant change that occurs in how He chose to interact with humanity and that started and ended with our Savior, Jesus Christ when He became the eternal object of God’s eternal wrath instead of us. This is a gross oversimplification of the single greatest act of love known to mankind so I encourage you to read it for yourself but basically this is what we call The Good News of Jesus Christ.

At this point it might seem like we’ve gotten off track a little bit, but the point of part II is this. How we see the world and interact with one another should start with a full and accurate knowledge of God’s character based on the whole Bible, and while a book can’t possibly encapsulate God in His entirety, the Bible contains exactly enough to let us in on what we need to know.

So far, In order to get an accurate understanding of who God is, we’ve looked at two different theological views and then I’ve implored us to grasp a greater view based on not just sections of the Bible, but the whole of it, and now we’ll move into what is hailed by most Christians as the most important facet of faith, albeit perhaps also the most neglected. This last part is all about relationship.

Part III “So Help me God”

The Bible, like any other good book, is more interesting when we know the Author personally and to read God’s word is good, but to read His word with Him is a whole different story. Many of us have said a prayer and attend church or were baptized when we were younger, but still struggle to grasp what it truly means to have a relationship with God.

Time is currency. Where and with whom we invest our time is where we see returns. We must invest our time in the Person that offers the best return, not because He will return or because our return is in heaven, but because we must become like Him and be the light to our world outside our Sunday mornings. We must approach our lives with Jesus, not the other way around. As we spend time with God we begin to look like Him and think like Him. We understand who He is and who He calls us to be and so we begin to approach others around us in the same way that He would. We either look like Jesus, or the world.

Too often, we leave Dad at home when we go to the playground and when we get picked on, or someone doesn’t take turns on the slide, we run home crying to Daddy. Church on Sunday is our home and our lives at work or school or with our families is the playground. We leave God in Sunday. We leave God in our morning devotions. We leave God at youth group. We live our entire weeks on our own strength and go to church to get “filled.” God doesn’t live inside four walls, He lives inside us.

(Church on Sunday is an opportunity to serve and encourage one another. If you go to “get filled” or expecting to be served, you’ll be looking for a new church every other year. Jesus didn’t look for another earth, when we didn’t offer Him coffee and put Him on our prayer list.)

As Christians, we are supposed to be in this world but not of it. Living in our circumstances and then looking to God to fix them is being of this world. Instead, we are of God which means our reality is His kingdom. We live according to His righteousness and His love, lead by the Spirit of Holiness, and then in Christ, we come to understand that we are the solution to our world’s problems. Or rather, Christ in us is the solution. We don’t really amount to much on our own.

Our relationship with God is of paramount importance. In many countries, people are being killed because they act like Jesus. In our country our laws make it increasingly difficult to have a thought or opinion that doesn’t offend someone. When your boss says you have to give a marriage license to two men, you may have to ask yourself whether Jesus died so that you could have life in Him or so that you could have a job. We make sacrifices because God made the ultimate sacrifice. It’s what we do. We must be like Jesus in every area of our life. Especially outside of church. Theology is good, the Bible is where everything starts, but our relationship with Christ sustains us and changes the world around us because this is where we truly begin to know God.

If at this point you feel like I lured you in with a titillating question and then proceeded to dodge the answer to that question while dragging you down an obscure path to end with a rant that has nothing to do with your beloved Fluffy, then you’re pretty much right. But if you’re still wondering who to blame for this bad world then let me be the first to admit that though I’m supposed to be part of the answer, I’m at the heart of the problem. God is good, but He’s hidden behind all my opinions. I’m supposed to look like Jesus, but I’ve left Him in church. I’m a Christian who says the right words but does the wrong things. I’m supposed to show you Light during your dark times and encourage you when you’re in despair but I haven’t been there. I’m sorry.

Our answer to this globe-sized deuce we seem to experience every day, is a Christian who reads his Bible and prays. And a Christian who doesn’t do that is of use to no one but Satan. I believe that with Jesus, I can change this world. So, help me God.

Two Years in the Rear-View Mirror

In February of 2014 I decided to make a two-year commitment to Youth With A Mission (YWAM) in Honolulu, Hawaii.

I had just finished six months of missionary training through YWAM Honolulu’s Discipleship Training School (DTS), the latter half of which I had spent in Nepal with eight of my classmates. It had been a trying adventure in a new place far from the comforts of home but also a necessary experience from which I am still finding new value. Nepal was like a heaping pile of vegetables. Eating your vegetables at dinner is not just a good idea because Mom won’t let you have ice cream if you don’t, and also not just so you will be healthier later in life. But eating your vegetables is a good idea because one day you might have a child. And when your tiny tyrant throws a tantrum at the table, you can understand that though eating vegetables might seem like the end of the world for precious little Billy, it most assuredly is not the end of the world and you can rest easy knowing your son or daughter, who you love dearly, will grow up healthy and wise because you didn’t give in to their tears. I am ever so grateful to my outreach leaders, Greg and Corrie Burgers, for humbly serving and encouraging our team with unconditional love and for extending to me such utterly, undeserved grace and for ultimately being superb examples of Christ in a way that continues to impact my life. Thank you from the depths of my heart.

In September of 2014 I dove head-first into my commitment as an outreach leader-in-training and then co-lead my first trip to Asia in January of 2015. We took a team of seven students to Bali, Indonesia for four weeks and then traveled to Papua New Guinea for our remaining six weeks. This outreach was a test of love and faith. We believed and prayed relentlessly for our students’ growth and the Holy Spirit to work in the hearts of the locals . On the penultimate day of our outreach we witnessed incredible breakthroughs in our students and the following day an entire village received Jesus as their Lord and Savior. God is love and God is faithful..

Before I had left for Indonesia I had expressed to our base director that I was willing to volunteer in our accounting office and so after our students’ graduation in June I was granted extended leave for the summer to visit good friends back on the mainland and then returned to Honolulu in September as an assistant to our accountants. I quickly discovered that our accountants Dave Stone and Jhun Camacho work hard. All day. Not just in the office.
Dave has a family and runs a non-profit organization that provides people with computer and language skills so they can get jobs. He’s often up all night taking care of our base’s finances and processing support for missionaries across the globe. Somehow he still finds time to play basketball with his son and during tax season I doubt he sleeps.
Jhun served as a missionary in India for nearly two decades before God called him and his wife to YWAM Honolulu where he demonstrates faithfulness in everything he has been given and possesses an unparalleled work ethic. Jhun is a father of three sons, an auto-mechanic, and when he’s in the office he listens to the Bible online.

Above all, these men gain their strength through their Savior. They don’t do anything in their own power alone. They constantly rely on God for wisdom and provision and the ability to do what has been set before them. They don’t just do tasks for the sake of doing them. Everything they do is in servitude to, and for the glory of God, the Creator of all things and the One who gives us life abundantly. The woman in Cambodia that one of my students led to Christ this past spring may have never had the opportunity to hear the Gospel without these two men who pour out everything as a sacrifice for our King. I’m grateful for my dad and men like these that have shown me the value of hard-work and how to lean on God always.

After a quarter in our accounting office, I once again found myself poised to lead another group of students through their ten weeks in Asia. In April we set out for Cambodia where we spent seven weeks with local YWAMers sharing the Gospel and aiding the community in any way that we could. Our team of eleven students were remarkable testaments of the love of Jesus. Through their words as well as their actions, they chose to exhibit Christ to each other, to our contacts, and to their leaders. Through this love for one another, our work was made effective. From Cambodia, we flew to Tokyo, Japan for our final three weeks of outreach. There we worked with a sub-set of Campus Crusade focused on high school students through which our team was given the opportunity to speak with over two-hundred first year students in their classrooms about hope in Jesus Christ. Also, we rode the subway many, many times.

And that brings us to now. Our January students of 2016 have graduated and gone, though many are returning in September either as staff members or secondary school students. During the summer we take a break between schools to maintain our property and reach out to our community. Right now I’m fulfilling the last few weeks of my commitment by working in the kitchen and doing general tasks around base. Tuesday nights I help with an ESL class that we run in Chinatown as a way to connect with our ever-growing Asian population and Thursdays we host a worship night which is always a highlight during my week. Ben, our tech guru is home in Alaska for three weeks so I try to do things with our soundboard while he’s gone. To my knowledge, I have yet to set anything on fire.

So what’s next? Before I became a volunteer with YWAM, I believe that God said to go to YWAM Honolulu so that He could prepare me for the rest of my life and as far as I know, He hasn’t told me to leave. In the fall I’ll be filling the role of DTS Administrator for a yet to be determined amount of time. Right now, Spencer and Madison Lemer co-direct our DTS and have been doing the jobs of three people since they stepped into leadership. They are two of the most remarkable people I’ve ever had the privelige to work with and I’m thrilled with the opportunity to continue serving under them. Madison is also pregnant with their first child, due in October,

I’m excited to be here in Honolulu. I’m grateful for the people that God has used to teach me, and I appreciate their passion to follow God with everything they have. The next portion of this entry is something I wrote while I was in Cambodia as part of a larger collection of other stuff I’ve been writing and hope to write in the future.

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"It wasn’t until my DTS that I discovered my love for America. What I found during my missions school in Honolulu was not something that caused me to fall in love with my nation. What I found were kind, good-humored people from other countries all around the world that sometimes poked fun at the country in which I was raised. At some point during my youth I had decided patriotism was a little bit uncool and therefore decided that I would have nothing to do with it. Nothing overtly American appealed to me; I didn’t even like the colors red, white and blue. But when I first heard a Canadian take a crack at the USA, my first reaction was not to laugh good-naturedly as I’ve learned to do now. Instead my reaction was one of indignation. I wanted to educate my Canadian comrade in how thoroughly ridiculous his home was with its moose and mounted police and how he must be equally ridiculous for living there and how he should feel inferior for using Monopoly money to buy maple syrup and fake bacon.
It turns out that I was very proud. I possessed the kind of pride that is in direct opposition to God and everything that He would have me be. In addition to this cancer, I also had what I now like to think of as a "healthy sense of pride" in my country. I’m not really sure if there is such a thing as a "healthy sense of pride" and it’s probably worth noting that I think God has redeemed my patriotism by transforming it into a passion for my nation and a desire to see America worship God once again instead of itself, but what I actually want to point out is this: I didn’t know I loved something until it was poked; what I thought didn’t exist within me was merely hiding. A few years later something would happen of the same sort.

I was nearing the end of my first two-year commitment with YWAM and weighing my options. I was interested in finishing school and moving back home to New York but God had been gently working in my heart and so I found myself considering another commitment to YWAM Honolulu. It was during this time that I met Marvin. I don’t know where Marvin is from, whether or not he is married, if he has children nor his last name. But I am thankful for Marvin and this is why.

I was sitting with ten of my students in a well-lit classroom on the third floor of what was called The Yellow House in sweltering Battambang, Cambodia when Marvin told us he used to be a staff member at YWAM Honolulu but then wanted to actually do something with his life so he decided to leave. He then alluded to the possibility that we could also do something with our lives, but most certainly not at YWAM Honolulu. We all sort of laughed and several of my students glanced at me to see my reaction. I chuckled and mustered a smile. But my smile probably looked more like a grimace because I’m not good at faking smiles and the reason I was faking this one was because I was both shocked and angry, but mostly angry. Clearly Marvin had had a bad experience with YWAM Honolulu and it’s probable that his misgivings could be justified, but any Christian should know that Jesus didn’t pay for our new lives in Him so that we could have bad experiences and especially not so we would hold on to them for nearly fifteen years. When we become Christians we give up the right to have bad experiences and we certainly give up the right to be wounded and then harbor unforgiveness in our heart; which is exactly what I had to remind myself of later that afternoon. How dare he say those things, and how dare he say them in front of my students? I was angry at Marvin but I decided to forgive him. He had poked my pride which was probably a good thing and maybe he was just bad at sarcasm. It was then that I realized I loved YWAM Honolulu. In addition to illuminating my pride, I had discovered a passion for my YWAM base and hearing someone drag its name through the mud made me a little bit furious. Today, I’m thankful for Marvin. I’m thankful for Marvin because from that moment forward I no longer looked at YWAM Honolulu as a stepping stone in the staircase of my own life but instead I understood that my life should be laid down in obedience at the foot of a cross bathed in my King’s blood where others might step on me to meet their royal Father. Through God’s gentle prodding and Marvin’s salty remarks I came to realize that the place I had been lead to was a place I loved. And by God’s grace, it’s where I was allowed to stay. The very next day I told our DTS Director that I would be with him as long as he needed me."
Thanks for reading! If you've made it this far, you should know that it is not my intention to offend our frozen friends in the North. Canada is a beautiful place with splendid people that possess kindness and courtesy far greater than their neighbors to the South. As for Marvin, I love him. He is serving God in a great way and has no doubt made vast sacrifices and impacted many people for the benefit of our King and this world. I'm sure he could teach me a great deal on what it means to live a life worthy of Christ's call.