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Tuesday, September 30, 2008What Cancer Taught Me About God
“To be commanded to love God at all, let alone in the darkness, is like being commanded to be well when we are sick, to sing for joy when we are dying of thirst, to run when our legs are broken.” (Frederick Buechner)
A while back I made mention of my bout with cancer as it related to a particular God encounter. Now, having two friends who are undergoing aggressive cancer therapies, I write a fuller account of that experience in hopes that it will encourage others in similar situations.
THE DIAGNOSIS
To say that my life has been richly blessed would be an understatement. I have had a fulfilling career, wonderful family, and enriching opportunities with gifts and abilities that have given me a rewarding sense of purpose and accomplishment—all which led to a lofty measure of self-sufficiency, until the winter of 2001.Angiosarcoma . . . Clinical trials . . . Quality of life . . . Quantity of life . . . were the sound bites steaming through my consciousness as I strained to focus on the oncologist’s words. After 10 days of diagnostic procedures, the biopsy results indicated that I had rare cancer. In the collective experience of the oncology group, there had been only three prior cases, with the longest survivor lasting less than one month. As I lay listless in the hospital bed, I silently gasped, “Why me, why now? Why?”
So began my test of faith.
THE LEAD-UP
Two months prior to my diagnosis, I had been praying the prayer of Jabez for God to “enlarge my territory.” My intention was to have a greater impact for the kingdom in my teaching ministry.At the time I was leading a church class in a four-week study on facing spiritual conflict. Halfway through the series, the initial symptoms of my illness surfaced. Mere coincidence? Although we are tempted to chafe at the suggestion of divinely orchestrated affliction, Scripture is full of such examples. For instance, the Apostle John tells us,
"As he went along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, 'Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind. 'Neither this man nor his parents sinned,' said Jesus, 'but this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life.” (John 9:1-3)
Did I think God caused my illness? I didn’t know. Although John’s account indicates that the blind man’s affliction was not a judgment, Paul tells us, “When we are judged by the Lord, we are being disciplined so that we will not be condemned with the world” (1 Corinthians 11:32).
What I knew, intellectually, was that we inhabit a world in decay. From the beginning, our willful action against the Creator has caused us to be hurled ever deeper down the descending spiral of suffering, disease, death, and sorrow, where we and all creation groan for relief.
What I was about to learn, experientially, is that our weakest and most vulnerable condition is where we encounter God in fullest measure. To continue reading, click here.
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Friday, September 5, 2008Social Policy and Moral Clarity
Probably each of us has had an experience that awakened our conscience to an evil or injustice—an experience that forever changed the way we looked at the world and ourselves—a moment of moral clarity that made us reflect, “I was blind, but now I see.”
As a young boy growing up in the rural South, water fountains labeled “White” and “Colored” were as normal to me as men and women restrooms. So when my grandmother took me to Woolworth one day, what caught my eye was not the separate lunch counter for “Colored”; it wasn’t even the fact that the “Colored” counter was located on a mezzanine just below the one for whites—which was a social statement, in and of itself. No, what was out of place was the “white” man sitting among all of those black people.
“Grandma, what is that white man doing there,” I asked.
Grandma quickly surveyed the lower counter and then turned back in a whisper, “Oh, he only looks white. He’s just very, very light, son.”
Somehow her answer failed to satisfy my young mind. I stole another look at the mezzanine to study the man. But try as hard as I could, the man was not “colored,” he was white. Noticing my confusion, Grandma leaned in to explain how differences in skin pigmentation can make one appear white.
For the next half hour, between sips on my cherry Coke, I glanced down at the mezzanine. It didn’t help that there were customers in our section darker than the man below. I was puzzled.
That is not to say I didn’t have prejudices of my own; I certainly did, well into my high school years. But the lunch at Woolworth was my first awareness that there was something much deeper than skin color here. In the following years, my conscience was scraped each time I returned to that scene. Nevertheless, it would be much later before another experience would bring me full-face with the evil underlying my faulty thinking. Continue reading here.
Post your thoughts and comments here.
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Saturday, August 2, 2008Darwinianity
For the past six years, pastor-turned-evangelist Rev. Michael Dowd has been going from pulpit to pulpit preaching the gospel—no, not the good news of our salvation through Jesus Christ, but of our liberation and empowerment through Charles Darwin.How’s that? The good Reverend explains:
“[Darwin gives us] a far more empirical way of talking about human nature than through stories like the original sin.”
As the New York Times's Yudhijit Bhattacharjee writes, “It explains our frailties, our addictions, our infidelities and other moral deficiencies as byproducts of adaptation over billions of years. And that, [Dowd] says, has a potentially liberating effect: never mind guilt; once we understand our sinful ways, we can get past them and play a conscious role in the evolution of humanity.”
Consider Bob Miller, an octogenarian whose string of infidelities, decades ago, led to a divorce, just as he was ascending the corporate ladder. For years Miller struggled to understand his behavior and the forces behind it. Then, a Dowd crusade came to Miller’s church.
There, the Reverend “explained” the evolutionary origin human behavior, and “Eureka!”: Miller realized that the culprit for his failures was not a fallen nature, but elevated testosterone, brought on by his corporate success.
With the burden of guilt gone, Miller reflects: “I think the physical change in my body was so strong that it completely overpowered any moral teachings and religious beliefs I had.”
There you have it--the science is in! It is not from the heart that evil thoughts, murder, adultery, and sexual immorality come; it’s from a physical law working on our chemistry. Feeling better now?
Now Michael Dowd is hawking his new book Thank God for Evolution with “Facts are God’s native tongue.” That’s a good catchphrase! Indeed, facts are God’s native tongue; facts like:
- Darwinian evolution has never been observed or reproduced even in micro-organisms whose explosive rates of replication would guarantee its validity.
- Based on a random, unguided process, Darwinian evolution has no predictive power. Consequently, Darwinian evolution has not contributed to a single technological or medical advance since it was conjectured 150 years ago.
- Information, like that found in DNA, is empirically known to originate only from intelligent causes.
- There has been insufficient time for the simplest gene, much less the simplest organism, to develop from an unintelligent process, even given all the necessary chemical ingredients.
- And then there's the fact of entropy, the universal law of physics that causes systems to go from bad to worse, unless affected by a rational application of energy.
But somehow I doubt that you’ll find those facts in Thank God for Evolution. Some you will find, according to the author, are “many of the core doctrines central to Christianity—sin, salvation, the kingdom of God, heaven and hell, Jesus as God's way, truth, and life,” unpacked in “an undeniably this-world realistic—way.”
Dowd represents this, pictorially, with a logo on the van he and his wife use in their “outreach.” It shows two fish kissing: one labeled “Jesus” and the other, “Darwin.”
Dowd calls his theological perspective “creatheistic.”
Would that be “cre-atheistic?” That seems right, considering his wife, whom he describes as his “mission partner," is an atheist.
What do you think of Darwinianity? Post your comments here.
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Tuesday, July 29, 2008A World without Truth...
...is "No Country for Old Men." Or from Kant to Chigurh in two easy steps.
Post your comments here.
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What to do about the impending global meltdown?Thursday, July 10, 2008Taking the Steam Out of Global Warming
Under the Creation Mandate, efforts to conserve natural resources, optimize energy use and efficiency, recycle, and reduce consumption and consumerism are examples of faithful stewardship. Problem is, say global warming alarmists, such voluntary measures are not sufficient to avert our cataclysmic inferno. Maybe that’s why An Inconvenient Truth pitchman, Al Gore, has not seen fit to reduce the energy consumption of his own residence, which is using 10 percent more energy than a year ago, enough to supply the energy needs of nearly 20 average homes.
What is needed, according to the climate change party line, are governmentally enforced controls like the Kyoto Treaty. But whether or not forced restrictions such as Kyoto are demanded by principles of Christian stewardship really depends on the answers to six questions:
Is the earth warming?
Is warming an overall bad thing?
Is human activity the primary cause?
Would forced standards sufficiently reduce global temperatures?
Would they be cost-effective?
Would forced standards not create more—or more severe—problems than they solve?
