Palette of a Spring Tableau

Yellow, green, and blue.

Yes, I know yellow and blue make green!  But looking out my window on this Friday afternoon, the dominant colors I see are the yellow sunshine glowing through rustling, green leaves on the nine towering trees gracing our front yard.  With a beautiful light blue sky peeking around them, as the background.

Spring days in Texas can be wonderful.  This season's temperate weather comes early for us here, but if you live up north, just know that summer's scorching heat comes early, too!  This weekend, meteorologists are predicting strong and possibly dangerous thunderstorms, with large hail and maybe even tornadoes.  But when we're not being belted with balls of ice, or cowering in our closets while warning sires wail outside, we residents of north Texas have little to complain about until June.

Weatherwise, that is.

The younger daughter of the older couple who used to live next door to us is having a garage sale, cleaning out stuff that her late mother had collected.  They're moving into the house this summer, and bringing their own furniture with them, naturally.  So the street out front has been busy all day, with people stopping by the sale.  And she's got stuff not just in the two-car garage, but the driveway, the walkway leading to the front door, and across the lawn.  Under a huge tree, she's arranged upholstered furniture like it was still in a living room.  I glanced over there briefly earlier today, and it looks like a spread for one of those high-society picnics England's country house bluebloods throw on PBS's Masterpiece Theater.

When the other next-door neighbor's kids got home from school, the neighborhood mom who'd brought them, along with her own two kiddos, all went across our sun-dappled yard, under our trees, to the other side of our home, where the garage sale is probably winding up for the day.  The kids are all blondes, and their yellow hair fluttered in the breeze. 

After a little while, all the kids - they're elementary-aged - came back across our yard, slowly this time, each one preoccupied by some prized purchase they'd made at the sale.  One person's trash is indeed another person's treasure.  More parents followed behind - the moms, waiting for dads to come home from work.

Across the street, the lawn service guys have shown up to mow and edge.  We're fortunate to have a homeowner in the neighborhood who takes so much pride in her property, her yard crew comes out about twice a week to maintain it.  Unfortunately for her, she doesn't have neighbors across from her who are as wealthy, or as immaculate!

Manicured yards are nice, but I think tidy yards are nice, too.  And a lot less hassle.  Especially when I don't have a lawn service.

Still, it all seems to fit into the late afternoon's mellow tableau.  In my mind, it's pretty close to what a sunny, mild, Friday afternoon is supposed to look like in suburban America.  We don't live in the wealthiest part of town, but our neighborhood isn't exactly deprived of its pleasures, either.  Sometimes, counting our blessings doesn't require advanced arithmetic. 

They say life is what happens when you're waiting for big, exciting events to take place.  And afternoons like this give us a good opportunity to enjoy life that isn't big or exciting.

Hey;  if those storms crash on through tomorrow and Sunday, as predicted, that big weather will be excitement enough.  Besides, we'll need the blue rain to help keep everything nice and green for a while longer.

 

Happy Pills: Overmedicated or Overly Cynical?

Prozac people.

I thought I knew about them.  They were the timid folks who wanted to live in a chemical haze to insulate themselves from anxiety and pressure.  Either that, or they were so crazy that if they didn't take their medication, they'd have to be fitted for a straitjacket.

When my Greenwich Village psychotherapist, and then my Upper West Side psychologist, both told me I needed to go on Prozac, I resisted.  The stigma of having to take a happy pill seemed almost as unbearable to me as the mental darkness that was cascading over me like unending buckets of black paint.  But my therapist - at the time, the only practicing evangelical mental health professional on the entire island of Manhattan - had already told me that if I didn't agree to be medicated, her further work with me as her patient would be pretty futile.  She'd notify my parents that she was absolving herself of any liability for my safety.  I'd been on a suicide watch, but while I didn't take that very seriously, how was she to know that I didn't?  Or wouldn't?
 
So I jumped on the happy pill bandwagon, and I've been there ever since.  I wasn't on Prozac for very long, however, before my doctors found some better medications to which I've responded more successfully.  A couple of people have asked me what I'm currently taking, and for privacy reasons, I'm won't provide that information on the Internet.  But I'll allow that I'm on a fairly high dosage, partly because I'm overweight.

And yes, I'm overweight partly because antidepressants usually prevent people from losing weight.  I stay on them, however, because I'm living proof - literally - that they can work.

Nevertheless, when critics of antidepressants respond to testimonies like mine, I can't disagree with at least part of their argument.

The pervasiveness of clinical depression in our society has indeed become a cause for legitimate concern, and not just for people who question whether medically-related depression really exists.  Just today, a remarkably candid article came out in the New York Times by Dr. Doris Iarovicia, a Duke University psychiatrist who's troubled by the fact that nearly a quarter of all incoming college students are taking prescription antidepressants.  And she believes many of these young people are being overmedicated.

To their own detriment, and to our society's.

Should all these people being diagnosed with clinical depression really be getting that diagnosis, or are doctors and therapists creating a huge market for their services to justify their own professional existence?  Has our health insurance industry, as Dr. Iarovicia suggests, inadvertently created an artificial dependency on antidepressants because pharmaceuticals are cheaper to insure than psychotherapist visits?  Are we all simply being enablers, allowing validation for somebody else's weaknesses because of our own weaknesses?  Are we more eager to hand-hold, instead of butt-kick?  Or has our society become so complex and complicated that some of us have discovered the limits of our endurance, tenacity, and persistence, and are unprepared to cope with not being able to compete with people boasting a greater tolerance for problems?

Personally, I believe that a little bit of all of that is at play in this discussion.  However, I also suspect that all of the man-made chemicals we've been pumping into our environment over the past century or so have had a negative impact on our physical and mental health.  I also suspect that as North Americans have become so sophisticated, and the nuclear family has fragmented so much through divorce, cross-country relocations, and our unique opportunities for social mobility, that the community structures God designed to help people cope with stressors have disintegrated.  Social scientists have already tried to prove as much, on both counts of ecology and community, but their results have never met with much approval from skeptics - most of whom are conservative, and consider themselves religious.

The very people who say they believe in a Deity they can't see or measure.

Hmm...

Meanwhile, the physical sciences have yet to prove that clinical depression is as real as broken arms are.  And if they ever do, it will be after overcoming a big credibility gap that exists between what patients should be able to handle, what they actually can handle, and the reasons why they can't.  After all, some people really are just wimps.  Some people really are simply lazy.  Some people truly believe they're entitled to a fun-filled, stress-free existence.  Some people live in denial regarding the fact that nobody can "have it all."  Some people are enablers.  Some of us need to make ourselves feel and look better by helping people we perceive as being more helpless than we are.  Yes!  I'm sure all of this is part of North America's depression saga.  But how does it get measured and quantified?

Hey, I'm a cynic, and I was a big cynic about antidepressants.  It took my going on them myself for me to begrudgingly admit that they can actually work.  However, if personal experience is going to be the only way to justify the efficacy of antidepressants, then people who don't need them will likely never understand why other people may.

Instead, it's much easier to deride North America's recent, widespread, and indelible embrace of mental health advocacy as so much humanistic pablum.  Too much coddling, and not enough personal responsibility.  Too much faith in feelings, instead of faith in God.  Just another way for pharmacy companies to make money.  All this medicine to treat something invisible!  Aren't we creating a society full of people who simply don't want to face reality?  Life can be hard, sad, painful, confusing, and unfair.  So what?  Buck up, force a smile on your face, and carpe diem!  That's the rest of us have to do sometimes.

So:  we have all of this doubt and ambiguity.  And the best way to respond to this doubt and ambiguity is flatly assume that clinical depression isn't real?  Or, if it is, that it's inherently a sin issue?

Now who's being unrealistic?

Jesus DOES Care How We Serve Him

"Jesus didn't care about being nice or tolerant, and neither should you."

That's the title of a recent blog entry by the popular Christian blogger Matt Walsh.

He opens his article by commenting about there being lots of heresies in our modern world.  Yet he seems blind to the fact that he's almost committing one in his own title!  Jesus didn't care about being nice or tolerant?  You better believe He did!

Walsh's provocative title is an introduction to his discussion of Christ's righteous anger displayed when He overturned the moneychangers' tables in the temple.  Walsh allows that this is the only act of violence and "intolerance" committed by Christ that appears in the Bible, but he suggests there may have been others that God merely omitted.

Now, to be fair, part of Walsh's essay is spent trying to explain why believers in Christ need to stand for truth and righteousness, and not capitulate to worldly dogma and unBiblical lifestyles.  And he's right:  We do not honor God by bending with every breeze and welcoming clever lies.  God doesn't expect us to "go along to get along."  To the extent that Walsh is saying that Christians should not be vacuous, timid, hands-off, or duplicitous, he's right.

There is a "theology of nice" out there that is not Biblical.  There is a brand of tolerance beyond the Golden Rule out there that, as Walsh puts it, says "be nice to me, I’ll be nice to you, and we’ll all be happy."  And that's not Biblical, either.

Yet Walsh wants to go further and justify belligerence, arrogance, and in-your-face rudeness by the fact that Christ once displayed righteous anger.  However, there's a difference between righteous anger, and not being nice or tolerant.

Yes, Christ chastised the religious leaders of His day.  Yes, He made them nervous, uncomfortable, unsettled, and angry.  However, was it Christ's demeanor, attitude, tone, and physical gestures that intimidated them?  Or what He said?

You'll also notice that almost everybody who was angry at Christ, who was offended by what He said, and who eventually were so hateful of Him that they killed Him, were Jewish religious leaders, and the people they were able to foment against Him.  When He interacted with those crowds, Christ usually had pity for them, not "intolerance."  Christ preached the Kingdom of God, and His message threatened them.  And it wasn't a message of socioeconomics, or politics, or even morality, as much as it was a message of God's holiness, mankind's lostness, and our need for redemption.

Indeed, doesn't the Bible speak volumes by providing only the one account of Christ really being "intolerant?"  It's that big, violent scene in the temple during what we now call Holy Week.  But what about the rich young hedonistic rulers?  Slavery?  Woefully unfair taxes?  Child labor?  No voting rights for Jews?  Political corruption?  Prostitution?  Surely homosexuality existed during that time, and may have even been part of the indulgence racket in the temple.  Yet He "tolerated" it all during His earthly ministry, never once speaking out directly against them to advocate for social change.  It was only when people made a mockery of His holy Father's sanctuary that He overturned tables.  The crass exploitation of money for religious purposes is what made Him indignant.

It's not even that being "nice" is as bad as Walsh wants to think it is.  We're supposed to "make every effort to live in peace with everyone" (Hebrews 12:14).  Again in Romans, we're to "make every effort to do what leads to peace and to mutual edification."  We're to "seek peace, and pursue it" (Psalm 34:14)

Nevertheless, Walsh reaches a disturbing conclusion.

"I think it’s time that Christianity regain its fighting spirit; the spirit of Christ," he writes, almost salivating at the opportunities such a viewpoint would afford him to be reckless in his speech and attitude.  "I think it’s time we ask that question: ‘What would Jesus do?’"

Walsh then postulates that "Jesus would flip tables and yell."

Um, no; not exactly.  Instead, Christ would expect us to model the Fruit of the Spirit, right?  Just as He did, in the temple:

• Love:  For His holy Father
• Joy:  He was about His Father's business
• Peace:  To restore order to the temple's function as a house of true worship
• Patience:  He'd already waited 33 years to do this, and His death on the cross was imminent, so time was running short
• Kindness:  He focused his righteous fury on both the buyers and sellers, not making allowances for either group, since they were both sinning (punishment can be considered a form of kindness, as a correction for an improper pattern of behavior)
• Goodness:  He was interested in preserving His Father's holy virtue
• Faithfulness:  He was remaining true to God's holiness
• Gentleness:   His anger at the moneychangers stemmed in part from His concern about the temple being open and available to all who would come and worship, not just those who could afford to participate in this financial abomination ("My house will be called a house of prayer for people from all nations")
• Self-Control:  In His anger, He did not sin, even as "zeal for His Father's house consumed Him" (Psalm 69:9)

Let's not let people like Matt Walsh badger us into presuming a false narrative of combative, antagonistic, and pugnacious bravado when it comes to interacting with other sinners in our society.  We're not here to change hearts and minds; only the Holy Spirit can do that.  We're here to live out the Gospel of Christ, so that people may see our testimony, and give praise to God.

Yes, there is a lot of immorality all around us, and lots of blasphemies and heresies.  But how much worse are times now than when Christ walked this same Earth?  Besides, He told us that we'd have troubles, but that He'd already overcome them.  So let's not put words in His mouth, and panic about the plight we see for our society.

We can stand for truth and model the Gospel of Christ at the same time.  Or, we can stand for truth, and mock the Gospel by assuming things it doesn't teach.  And frankly, no matter which strategy we choose to follow, lots of people may become hostile towards us.

But if they're really hostile towards Christ, and not us, we know we're serving Him well.

Lay Aside Each Earthly Thing

Some children see Him lily white, The baby Jesus born this night.
Some children see Him lily white, With tresses soft and fair.
Some children see Him bronzed and brown, The Lord of heav'n to earth come down.
Some children see Him bronzed and brown, With dark and heavy hair.

Some children see Him almond-eyed, This Savior whom we kneel beside.
Some children see Him almond-eyed, With skin of yellow hue.
Some children see Him dark as they, Sweet Mary's Son to whom we pray.
Some children see him dark as they, And, ah! they love Him, too!

The children in each different place Will see the baby Jesus' face
Like theirs, but bright with heavenly grace, And filled with holy light.
O lay aside each earthly thing, And with thy heart as offering,
Come worship now the infant King. 'Tis love that's born tonight!


Have you ever heard this unpretentious Christmas carol?  Years ago, my parents had a record with this song on it, and they played it often when I was a kid, back in upstate New York.  I haven't heard it since.

Which, apparently, proves I'm not a James Taylor fan, because when I went searching online for this carol's lyrics, his version of it is all over the Internet.  Originally, however, musician Alfred Burt, the son of an Episcopalian minister, composed it in 1951.

From all of those Christmases as a child, I still remember this carol today, because it reminds me about the dangers of ethnocentrism, even though I had no idea what "ethnocentrism" was when I was little.  It's the song that was running through my head when I commiserated about Son of God, that troublesome movie by Roma Downey.

We white evangelicals of European descent presume that our Savior looked mostly like us.  But aren't our presumptions based more on ethnocentrism than literal reality?  How likely is it that, like Burt's carol, Christ-followers of every ethnicity tend to mentally compose their presumptions of Christ's appearance upon their own?

Obviously, even though He's immortal, Christ is alive, which means his skin color and ethnicity is fixed, real, and biological.  Being Jewish, with a mother from the southern shores of the Mediterranean, Christ's human characteristics likely tilt towards an olive-toned complexion, with skin a bit darker that an ordinary Caucasian's, and hair more black than brown.  Conventional Asians and Africans probably wouldn't see obvious resemblances to themselves in Christ's appearance, but then again, most whitey-whites like me wouldn't, either.

As I've grown up and matured - well, theoretically, anyway! - I don't really think much about what Christ looks like anymore.  When we're kids, we spend much more time processing such things in our little brains, developing an ability to differentiate between various characteristics, shapes, colors, and such.  We're discovering how we fit into the social environment around us.  Recognizing different ways different people look and act is part of our socialization.

But how much of that process really gets left behind as we mature?  As adults, maybe we Christ-followers care less about what Christ looks like, but again, like Burt's carol, might we mistakenly apply other characteristics to Him that the Bible never tells us He has?

For example, a recent disagreement has broken out on a couple of popular evangelical websites about Christ being a "friend of sinners," and the extent to which Christ would endorse certain lifestyles, habits, and versions of morality.  Some adults see Him reaching out to gays in a way that affirms their desire to marry somebody of the same sex.  But other adults see Him loving sinners, but not their sins, and encouraging the former to abandon the latter.

Some adults see Him as a great social welfare advocate, preaching wealth redistribution and the evils of moneymaking, while some adults see Him as encouraging the hoarding of profits people earn as the result of honest work.  After all, it's the love of money that's the root of all sorts of evil, not money itself.

Some adults see Him as a red-blooded American right-wing Republican, a swashbuckling champion of individuality, freedom, and fun.  Meanwhile, however, some adults see Him as an apolitical moralist who created the institution of government, and told His followers to "render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's."  And that Biblical freedom is not political freedom.

Some adults see Him as a pop culture icon, readily adaptable to changing styles and fashions, and totally fine with going with the flow.  Other adults see Him as rigidly ascribing to His Father's holy decrees, some out of legalism, and others simply because we're called to be separate; "in the world, but not of it."

And then, of course, there are all of the other adults who see the nuanced degrees of differences, exceptions, and interpretations between these more popular visions of Christ.  We believe that since the Christ in Whom we're to believe isn't explicitly described for us in the Bible, that we're entitled to a certain degree of flexibility when it comes to envisioning how and why we believe in, trust in, and serve the Son of God.

Meanwhile, I keep being drawn to the last few lines of this carol by Alfred Burt.  Not as a universalistic panacea for all that ails Christ's Earthly body, but as a refrain of authentic worship that is more profound that we normally expect in such songs:

O lay aside each earthly thing, And with thy heart as offering,
Come worship now the infant King. 'Tis love that's born tonight!

Do we love Christ more than we love ourselves?  Do we love others more than we love ourselves?  Do we love our ideas, preferences, lifestyles, money, skills, interpretations, idols, and even our fears more than we love Christ?

Yes, how we "mature" Christians see Him should have a lot more to do with His truth than His skin color.  Unfortunately, the way some Christians want to see Christ seems to have less to do with unpopular morality, His relationship with our holy Father, and the penalty of our raw sins from which His death frees us, and more to do with easy, rationalized, sophomoric trendiness.

Let's not forget that God looks at our hears, and knows the degree of our allegiance to His Word.  So Whom are we fooling?  The more that Christ is "King" of our lives, and not simply a pawn of our myopic worldview, how we see Him will probably bear less resemblance to the world around us.  And it'll probably show, when contrasted to the world around us.

The apostle Paul put it rather succinctly in Colossians 2:8:  "See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world rather than on Christ."

It's not just little children who need to lay aside each Earthly thing!