Gary L. Thomas's Blog, page 46

She Married Him Anyway

A recent news article caught my eye: a would-be bride caught her soon-to-be husband sexually assaulting an inebriated bridesmaid the day before the wedding. What astonished me even more was the last sentence of the article: friends of the couple “confirmed” that the ceremony went on as planned…

My heart rejoices at the healing and mutual support that a wise marriage brings. I love officiating at weddings and attending weddings of young people and those who are getting a new chance at love later in life. But when I hear that a would-be bride sees such monstrous behavior and still walks down the aisle, I can only imagine what a lifetime of horror lies ahead.

Admittedly, this couple’s case is extreme, but I recently received another email that began (paraphrasing), “I wrote to you several years ago and you warned me of several red flags in my relationship. Against your advice, I went ahead and got married and now I need your help as to what to do next.”

These news reports and these kinds of emails makes me want to re-post a past article this week, just to keep it fresh.

 

Please Don’t Marry Him

My heart is grieving.

I’ve received several Facebook messages from women who asked my advice about a dysfunctional dating relationship when The Sacred Search first came out several years ago. Each one noticed several “red flags” in their dating relationship and asked me if I thought they should be concerned.

In every case, the answer was a clear “YES!”

“Thank you so much,” was the typical reply, and then they went silent.

Now I’m getting a second round of Facebook messages, and since Facebook brings up the previous correspondence, I’m reminded of prior conversations.

It breaks my heart. Let me paraphrase a few:

“He said he was sorry, we ended up getting married, and now I’m the only one who seems to care about our relationship.”

“I’m doing everything I can to save my marriage, but he refuses to see a counselor.”

“You were right. He’s a sex addict.”

“I guess now I should have listened. Turns out he’s gay.”

Let me state this as clearly and as forcefully as I can: A dysfunctional dating relationship sealed by marriage doesn’t make any problems go away; it simply cements you in a dysfunctional marriage.

Marriage won’t improve your man. Marriage won’t change your man. (The same is true of a woman, of course.) Marriage simply weds you to your partner’s problems.

When you raise a significant issue in dating and the man or woman responds by crying and saying they’re sorry, nothing has changed. They’ve been caught, they don’t want to lose you, but it doesn’t mean they will repent. It doesn’t mean their character will improve. It just means they cried.

That’s it.

Give them a Kleenex, but don’t give them a ring—at least not until you see substantive, long-term change.

If you don’t witness character transformation before marriage, you’re foolish to expect it after marriage. A mature person—the kind you want to marry—is always growing and always open to biblically based conviction. He or she walks in grace, so they humbly realize they’re not perfect and will not be overly defensive when a loved one points something out with gentleness and understanding.

If this dynamic isn’t true in dating, it won’t be true in marriage.

Never marry someone hoping they will change. Marry someone because they already have changed.

One woman told me she couldn’t bear to “just give up on four years of my life.” Now she may be headed for divorce and will have to give up seven years of her life. (I don’t look at it that way, but she does.)

Another woman thought marriage would “solve” the sexual issues her potential husband struggled with. Sadly, it didn’t. It almost never does. It just exposed them for what they really were.

I take no pleasure in saying, “I told you so.” None. And I’d never put it like that anyway. This post is for single men and women who, deep down, know there are serious issues with the person they are dating, but who are too afraid to admit it or act on it.

Your fear of breaking off the relationship should be obliterated by the fear of making a foolish marital choice, which is far, far worse.

Trust in God. “Those who know your name will trust in you, for you, Lord, have never forsaken those who seek you.” (Psalm 9:10)

He can help you have the difficult conversation. He can soothe the heartache. He can lead you into the “green pastures” of a mature, healthy relationship—but not if you stay stuck in the barren desert of a dysfunctional relationship.

My wife and I have a single friend who is a godly, strong, and gifted woman. She’s overheard some of the conversations (without identifying details, of course) and recently told us, “Hearing these stories makes me feel a whole lot better about my situation.”

It truly is better to be a little frustrated in your singleness (if, in fact, you are frustrated at all) than to think a dysfunctional marriage to a dysfunctional man or woman would be better because at least you’d be married.

Legions of men and women, miserable in their brand new dysfunctional marriages, would disagree with you.

Please, please, please: marry an emotionally aware, relationally gifted believer who is humble, spiritually alive, and sexually whole. If you compromise on any of these, you will have a long time to regret it.

Unfortunately, I’ve had to disable messages on my author page because I just can’t keep up—and the advice wasn’t often heeded, anyway. It was used for singles to vent their frustrations, but all that did was make them feel momentarily better so they could continue in an unhealthy relationship.

Anything I’d say to these people, I’ve poured into The Sacred Search, so I’ll point you there. A good marriage is a wonderful, beautiful experience—the gift that keeps on giving. But marriage to a toxic person can rip you up emotionally and spiritually. Please don’t run through the red lights and ignore the red flags—turn around and walk away from a destructive dating relationship.

The post She Married Him Anyway appeared first on Gary Thomas.

Finding Freedom from a Toxic Attack at Work

We all have limited energy and our family deserves the best “us” we can offer in the midst of work and life in general. Part of protecting your marriage and your peace of mind so that you can devote yourself to loving your family involves learning how to protect yourself from the toxic people who drain you, deplete your emotional resources, and who leave you so distracted that you barely have anything left to give to your family when you arrive home.

In my book I tell the story of Greg, whose coworker Aaron was as toxic as they come. Aaron gleefully attacked others and took a special pleasure in creating offensive nicknames for coworkers. He was controlling and political, policing the entire office (even people who didn’t report to him), to make sure they submitted to a policy he had lobbied to get passed. He was also a master sleuth at uncovering personal secrets and launching them into a juicy gossip chain (“Do you want to know why Janice really had to take some time off?”). He blatantly lied about coworkers to pit one person against another so that he could play both sides as a “comforting defender.”

The toxic work environment impacted Greg’s mental state, his family life, and his sleep. He needed the job, but Aaron was making his workplace torturous. It was so bad Greg admitted to me that he couldn’t leave Aaron at the office. Mentally, Aaron followed him home and haunted him at night. Greg’s wife or one of his children would start talking to him in the evening and Greg missed their entreaties, still mentally back in the office, second-guessing what he had said or done, trying to figure out a way to make sense of what felt like a crazy situation.

This all happened decades ago when I was as naïve as they come, so I wasn’t able to help Greg at all. “Toxic” wasn’t even in my vocabulary. I thought our faith could be especially proven true when we were the heroes who God used to breakthrough to “reach” and “heal” the toxic people no one else could help.

Many years later, this is the advice I wish I had given Greg (and this part isn’t in the book):

 

Don’t bother trying to understand or “fix” toxic people; that’s wasted energy. Even trained psychologists have been known to fire particularly troublesome clients. This is a Christian posture of humility. Most of us can’t perform a root canal, nor can we perform the relational therapy most toxic people need. Focus on being the best employee you can be and devote your other thoughts to loving your family well.
Don’t let misplaced guilt (that you should be able to “rescue” or “save” them) keep you in a toxic situation. In the Gospels, Jesus walked away many times from those who challenged him or hardened their hearts against him. If a transfer isn’t possible or your boss won’t step in, “mentally” quarantine the co-worker as much as you can by keeping your relationship strictly professional and by refusing to think about him or her when you don’t have to. A good friend of mine used a pond midway between his office and home as a symbol to dump work related concerns on his way home and to begin praying that God would free his mind to be fully present as a husband and father when he pulled into his driveway.
One of the best antidotes for toxic relationships is healthy relationships. Build positive relationships at the office and find refuge there. Use the toxic situation at work to make you even more determined to be a fantastic spouse and encouraging parent at home, and a good friend to others on the weekend. Pray for a co-worker who doesn’t yet know the Lord and ask God to engineer an opportunity to share your faith in a compelling and compassionate way. Be ever more determined to have positive relationships that distract you from the toxic attack.
King David was assaulted and attacked by numerous toxic people (including many who wanted to murder him) throughout his life but notice how the psalms he wrote are filled with exuberant celebrations of God, extolling God’s character, acts, and magnificence. I’ve found that when I must be around toxic people, meditating on the character and excellence of God in the morning is like brushing my teeth after a bad-tasting meal. Learn to renew your mind by reveling in God’s glory rather than a co-worker’s toxicity.
Remember that your first priority is your family. If a work relationship is making you so weak that you can’t be “present” when you’re at home, you need to approach the appropriate authorities at your company so that they can address it, or seriously look for another job. Life is too short to let toxic people tear you apart and mentally invade your family life when you get home. I’ve talked to many people who have made such transitions, and you can literally see a difference in their countenance once the deed is done. They invariably say, “Why didn’t I do this a year ago?”




whentowalkawaybook.com

Family relationships are tough enough even when we’re at our best. Learn to leave toxic assaults at work. Nobody pays you enough to bring those toxic assaults home. Follow the example of Jesus and learn when to walk away.

The post Finding Freedom from a Toxic Attack at Work appeared first on Gary Thomas.

Toxic People Aren’t Your Fault

If you adopt a wolverine and pour all your love into that animal; if you treat it like a puppy, hugging it and feeding it and playing with it; if you give it the very best care anyone has ever given to a wolverine, the day will still come when that wolverine will attack you, because no matter how kindly you treat a wolverine, it is still a vicious, wild animal, and in the end, its nature will win.

If you marry a toxic person and show extraordinary love, concern, care and compassion; if you are faithful in matters of kindness, communication, conflict resolution and sexual intimacy; if you go out of your way to be a model spouse to a toxic person, that toxic person will still most likely turn on you because that’s what toxic people do.

It’s not your fault.

It doesn’t mean you failed at love.

It just means you married a toxic person.

When Judas betrayed Jesus, Jesus didn’t beat himself up for not doing enough for Judas, for not coming up with the right words to correct and exhort Judas, for not loving him perfectly, for “missing” what, in hindsight, could seem obvious. On the contrary, Jesus released Judas to go and do what he was going to do.

What does this tell us? We have to let toxic people own their toxicity and not internalize it as a failure on our part.

A mom spoke to me with hurt in her eyes because her school district began blaming bullies on poor parenting. You can’t discipline a bully, the school seems to be saying, when the fault really lies with the parent.

This mother is distraught because she has two children who are model students and citizens at school, and one who enjoys being mean. She’s tried everything—prayer and fasting, counseling, time outs, etc. She feels like a failure as a parent. The school treats her like a failure. Throughout her life, if someone confronted her for something she was doing wrong, she could own it, repent and change it. But how can she own, repent and change what someone else—in this case, her son—is doing?

One of the most startling discoveries for me when writing When to Walk Away was the connection between control and evil. God calls us to choose (Josh. 24:15) and leaves the decision with us. The New Testament talks of demonic possession, but it doesn’t speak of “God possession.” Controlling or dominating someone is evil. So it stands to reason that if we can’t (and shouldn’t try to) control someone, then we can’t own or be responsible for others’ toxic behavior. Self-control is a fruit of the Spirit (Gal. 5:23); controlling others is a Satanic strategy.

Focus on yourself. Do what you know to be right. Call others to do what is right. When the relationship warrants it, admonish, correct and speak up. Do your part to love and serve and forgive and encourage as parents, friends and spouses are called to do. But if a toxic person acts in a toxic way, don’t own their response. You can’t. Own yours. Did you do what God called you to do? Then you were faithful, regardless of the outcome.

Don’t beat yourself up because you didn’t do everything perfectly, as if that would work anyway. We can safely assume that Jesus was perfect with Judas, but that didn’t “work” in the way we define “working” if “working” means toxic people always repent and change.  

It is spiritually healthy—essential, even—to own our “stuff,” to humbly accept our weaknesses, receive correction, apologize and make changes, and walk in repentance and accountability. For most of us, that’s a full-time job, spiritually speaking. But we can’t own and be responsible for the “stuff” of others. So just stop doing that. Stop owning that.

Wolverines will be wolverines regardless of how you treat them.

The post Toxic People Aren’t Your Fault appeared first on Gary Thomas.

You Can Have a Ministry More Powerful than You Realize

The point of walking away from toxic people is to walk toward reliable people, hopefully those whom God has supernaturally appointed to be touched in a special and powerful way, and who will be faithful to, in turn, reach others. It can sound arrogant to think that our time is so important or that we can make a difference, except that, for Christians, our calling and empowerment come from God, not us: “For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do” (Ephesians. 2:10).

Those who early order When to Walk Away by October 7 will receive an additional free digital download of a book I wrote some years ago, originally titled The Beautiful Fight and re-released as Holy Available.  I set out to write a book on accepting Christianity as more than an historical reality but also as a present power, particularly by offering the parts of our bodies—our eyes, mouths, ears, minds, hands and feet, and hearts—as tools for God’s service. John Ortberg wrote, “The first chapter alone is worth reading many times. This is beauty and struggle. This is the death that leads to life.”

Holy Available is a good compliment to When to Walk Away by presenting a positive healthy view of the impact every believer can have if we truly surrender to God and use every moment for his glory and service.

Here’s an excerpt to give you a taste, from the “Hands and Feet” chapter:

 

Walking through the Narita airport in Tokyo, Japan, my oldest daughter, then barely a teenager, spoke one of her classic “Allison” phrases: “I feel like such an outsider,” she said.

I laughed and replied, “That’s because you are.”

Our trip eventually took us into Singapore, an impressive, cosmopolitan country. As we strolled past the Clarke Quay, I began praying for the people, including those who would hear me speak in a few days.

My mind wandered to an article I had read about a rising “sexual tourism” in Thailand, in which young women and men were often lured into the country with promises of false jobs, and then virtually imprisoned and forced to sell themselves into sexual service for tourists.

Because I was an outsider in Singapore, I thought of what I was bringing to the country: Truth, I hoped; encouragement; a manifestation of the risen Christ; a passion for God. All of these things would be good gifts, precious splashes of glory that I prayed God would spread through me.

But a war also rages within me. Like the “sexual tourists” in Thailand, I could bring something much different: My lust; my pride; my selfishness. It brought me up short to think about it. I really can bring lust into a country with me, as well as greed, arrogance, prejudice, and condescension.

Or, I can bring Christ.

Because of the ascension of Jesus and the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit, I can literally bring Christ into a country, if indeed Christ is real in me. Paul said, “I no longer live, but Christ lives in me…” (Gal. 2:20).

What a thought!

But let’s bring it home: Every time you enter a room, you bring something with you. If you allow your thoughts to roam into impure places, at that moment, you are both creating and bringing lust into your environment.

When you walk along a sidewalk, stroll through the marketplace, or gather at a church, what are you bringing with you: judgment, malice, or the Spirit of Christ?

When you walk into your house following a long day at work, do you bring selfishness, negativity, harshness, condemnation—or the meekness and gentleness of Christ?

When you go to church on Sunday, what marks your manner, more than anything else? Christ, or some spiritual failing? Do you bring encouragement or criticism, judgment or grace?

It was a stunning thought for me to realize that wherever I go, I can cast off splashes of glory or showers of sin. What do I want to leave behind?

In this instance, now walking toward the famous Mer Lion, it dawned on me what a force each one of us can be in this world. Our “private” battles have a very public effect, for what we cultivate in secret shapes the world we live in.

When we talk about Christ making a real difference with our hands and feet, we must come to grips with the fact that, by God’s decision, we are all forceful beings. We shape this world. We impact it. We mold it. In fact, it is impossible to walk on this earth and not make a difference of some kind.

May this difference be the presence of Christ rather than toxic sickness!

If you go to Whentowalkawaybook.com and click on the pre-order button, you’ll see the sign-up for your free download of Holy Available. I’ve already mentioned how valuable pre-orders are in the life of a book, so thank you to all who take that step.

The post You Can Have a Ministry More Powerful than You Realize appeared first on Gary Thomas.

Being Okay with Others Not Being Okay with You

Historically,
I’ve been rather weak in this regard. I hate it when people aren’t okay with
me. Even toxic people. That weakness gives them a power they don’t deserve and
potential control that they love to exploit.

I
got a cryptic request from a lawyer recently who asked me who some of my
favorite classical writers were. I sent him a list, and then he explained he
was reviewing Sacred Marriage to see if it was “acceptable” for his
church to read. His requests were part of his process of looking for ammunition
and “suspect sources” that I rely on.

This
lawyer was suspicious that no one “famous” had endorsed Sacred Marriage,
but when the book first came out 19 years ago the publisher didn’t seek any
endorsements (I don’t remember why). He then followed up with an email about his
conclusions: my book had “many fine quotes” but was troublesome and likely even
blasphemous. He was writing a review and wondered if I would talk.

If
you want freedom from toxic people, you have to learn how to be okay with
others not being okay with you.

Perhaps
foolishly, I agreed, but it wasn’t really a discussion. I was dumb founded by
how petty many of his criticisms were and how confident he was in his
small-mindedness. He was deeply offended that I called Fenelon a “Christian”
because Fenelon was born after Calvin and didn’t become a Calvinist. He was
gravely concerned that in the book I mentioned how my wife read Guideposts magazine
(which had been a gift subscription from my mom), and even though I say in my
book that Guideposts (which was, he informed me, founded by Norman
Vincent Peale) isn’t really the kind of thing I read, he wanted me to know that
many Christians would be asking “Why is Gary letting his wife read Guideposts?”
The audacity of this question, why I would let my wife read Guideposts,
paints a picture of marriage that is completely foreign to me. And, among
many other things, he was deeply troubled by my recounting of Leslie’s story in
Sacred Marriage. After being cheated on and abandoned by her husband,
and left with minimal financial resources, Leslie saw a beautiful Easter lily
and said in a short prayer to God that she would love one of those. She didn’t
have the money to buy one, but the very next day someone left one on her desk,
which Leslie received as a gift from God. “That’s mysticism!” my
lawyer-critic challenged.

I
could see we weren’t going to get very far so I mostly listened, sometimes even
laughing (not intentionally or trying to be mean; the laughs sprang from genuine
puzzlements) when he made another point that astonished me. Some other comments
were more substantive, of course, but it was difficult to keep up.

When
his review was finished and (surprise, surprise) his conclusion was reached
that it still wouldn’t be “safe” for most people in his church to read Sacred
Marriage he wanted me to react point by point to his critique after he sent
it to me. I declined. He wrote a couple more times, saying all I had to do was
write “agree” or “disagree” with every assertion. I’ve found that toxic people
don’t like to give up. They don’t like the word “no.” They still want another
piece of your time.

I
think he may have been bothered that I told him I was praying God would bless
him with humility—not in a mean or snarky way, but as a genuine blessing.
Still, it was difficult for me not to respond, and his attacks kept coming back
to my mind because I know he’s going to post the review and I know that people in
his church will be told it’s not safe to read Sacred Marriage. It took a
couple days for me to “mentally” walk away. I can still be rather weak in this
regard. My publisher told me that we should reach one million copies sold in
October. One lawyer’s review among the hundreds that have been published, and
one church putting it on the “forbidden” list won’t define it, but I can be so
weak, it still troubled me.

In
the midst of my weakness, here’s what I’ve learned: you can’t please toxic
people without hurting or offending the faithful. Toxic people force you to
choose. To make them happy is to often grieve God and wound others. To please him,
I’d have to demand that my wife not read Guideposts (she hasn’t for decades,
but not because I don’t “let” her). I’d have to tell Leslie it’s inappropriate
to believe that God provided her with that Easter lily. And I’d have to tell
others it’s not “safe” to read anyone who didn’t become a Calvinist or agree
with Calvin if they were born in or after the sixteenth century. (For the
record, I also quote John Calvin approvingly in Sacred Marriage, as well
as John Owen, who systematized Calvinism. My theological mentor in seminary—and
the person whom I currently read as much as anyone else—was none other than Dr.
J.I. Packer. I just don’t restrict my reading—or quoting—to Calvinists.)

To
be a healthy person is to have the courage to let toxic people oppose you, hate
you, and say awful things about you.

In
When to Walk Away I have an entire chapter on Nehemiah, who brilliantly
sidestepped many toxic challenges. The chapter was getting too long so I had to
cut it considerably, and one thing I don’t point out in the book is the selfish
side of Tobiah’s attack against Nehemiah. Tobiah was enmeshed in Jerusalem’s
social and political establishment. He could both request and grant favors, the
kind of guy that contemporary people would say exists in Washington D.C.’s “swamp.”
One of these favors (J.I. Packer addresses this in his book A Passion for
Faithfulness, and I’m leaning on his insights here) was getting a temple
storeroom reserved for his personal possessions. Eliashib, the high priest in
charge of the temple, allowed Tobiah to take over this part of the temple. It
was supposed to be reserved for offerings and sacred purposes, but Eliashib allowed
Tobiah to use it as a personal storehouse.

When
Nehemiah found out about this, he personally threw all of Tobiah’s goods out of
the storeroom and into the street (Neh. 13:8). The language makes it sound like
Nehemiah did this personally, and the verb used literally means “threw.” This
wasn’t a polite repositioning; it probably looked more like a reality show
altercation.

Imagine
Tobiah’s fury! He had been getting a free deal but now his personal control
over God’s temple was over. For Nehemiah to placate Tobiah, he’d have to accept
the selfish misuse of God’s temple. Nehemiah chose to please God; “I put back
into [the storerooms Tobiah had taken over] the equipment of the house of God,
with the grain offerings and the incense” (Nehemiah 13:9).

Taking
time trying to please a toxic person will keep you from using that time to
invest in healthy relationships and discipling reliable people. Don’t divert
healthy possessions, time, thoughts or mental energy trying to make a toxic
person feel a little better about you. You can’t do that without taking that
time and energy away from a more worthwhile pursuit.

Value your time. Toxic people won’t. I’ve learned
that they will keep sending emails until I finally don’t even respond anymore. It
feels rude to me to stop responding, but their arrogant demands are also rude.
Normal people can accept a “no thank you.” Toxic people usually won’t.

One
of the verses that I write about in When to Walk Away, a verse that has
become a new daily encouragement for me, is the very last verse of Nehemiah
(13:31), when Nehemiah prays “Remember me with favor my God.” I want to
be remembered with favor by God. It doesn’t matter what an Amazon reviewer
says. It doesn’t matter what people say on Facebook or Twitter. It doesn’t
matter what a proud lawyer thinks.

What
matters for me and for you is how God views what we are doing. Other church
members may bad mouth you. An ex-spouse may pummel your reputation. Perhaps
even your children or parents will hold you in contempt. That’s always
unfortunate and hurtful. But sometimes, to be remembered with favor by God
means being held in contempt by toxic people. And that’s okay.

It’s
a mark of spiritual maturity when we can learn how to be okay with others not
being okay with us.

Want to begin reading a pre-release copy of When to Walk Away today? You can, if you join the When to Walk Away launch team. Click here for more info!

The post Being Okay with Others Not Being Okay with You appeared first on Gary Thomas.

Pruning Toxic Relationships Out of Our Lives Isn’t Unchristian; God Does it Too!

I want to make your life much easier, more joyful, less stressful, more productive, healthier, and richer relationally and spiritually.

You up for that?

I grew up in Washington State, famous for its rain in the West and its apples in the East (Washington produces about 2/3 of our nation’s apples grown for immediate consumption).  

To grow great apples, a farmer must nurture great trees, and the way a farmer does that is by cutting off every branch that doesn’t produce good fruit. If a branch produces no fruit, it’s depleting the rest of the tree’s output. If it’s producing sub-standard fruit, it’s taking up space from a future branch that could hold delicious fruit. If it has diseased fruit, the disease might spread to the healthy branches, so it must go.

The wise farmer, the farmer who stays in business, the farmer who actually makes money and feeds his/her family well, cuts off the harmful, disease ridden, or barren branches without apology and with great expectation of what will replace it.

Your life is like a tree and people are the branches. Learning to handle toxic people is learning that, sadly, some branches (relationships) need to be cut off. Beginning a friendship isn’t a commitment to continue it until the day you die. Ministering to a person one day isn’t an iron-clad commitment to walk with them through every crisis for the next forty years. If someone is making you a less involved, less energetic, less caring person in your top-priority relationships, it may be time (and probably is time) to do some pruning.

Pruning isn’t about our comfort as much as it is about our productivity. Most of us want to be involved in people’s lives; we’re certainly not looking to increase “Netflix” time, but hopefully we want those relational encounters to be productive rather than wasteful.

I’m amazed at how our refusal to prune can put even strong and capable people in comical situations. I spent time with a high-powered married couple whom God is using on a national and even international scale. They confessed to me that when one particular woman rang their doorbell they both hit the floor, staying as quiet as they could, wanting her to just go away as they prayed she wasn’t able to see them through the windows. This is not a weak couple! Yet they found themselves in a comical, sit-com like situation because they hadn’t been able to directly “prune” this woman out of their lives. If you find yourself in a situation like this; if you wonder if it would be easier to get a new phone so they can’t contact you, switch churches so you won’t see them even once a week, move to a new house so they can’t find you, or even make your home in a new country, you almost certainly have some pruning to do.

For some of you particularly sensitive people (and I love you for this!), it may seem harsh to prune someone out of your life. It may not sound very “Christian.” But consider the words of Jesus: “I am the true vine, and My Father is the vineyard keeper. Every branch in Me that does not produce fruit He removes, and He prunes every branch that produces fruit so that it will produce more fruit.” (John 15:1-2)

God Himself does this!

The Jesus who told us to pray for more workers (Luke 10:2), who told us to seek first His kingdom (Matt. 6:33), who spoke with such urgency about our task (“We must do the works of Him who sent Me while it is day. Night is coming when no one can work” John 9:4) wants us to see that fruitfulness matters. Unfortunately, we live in a day where our faithfulness is defined by “piety” (avoiding sinful actions) more than it is by fruitfulness. You can make a strong case that God is at least as concerned with fruitfulness as he is with piety (witness his praise of King David, for starters). I don’t have a problem with pursuing piety; it’s just that piety without service is a sub-par faith.

If we value fruitfulness as much as Jesus does, then all of us—literally, all of us—will need to be more intentional about cutting some less than fruitful encounters and relationships out of our lives from time to time. Doing so isn’t an act of cruelty; it’s an act of discipleship and service. Another way of putting this, as shocking as it may sound, is that worshipping God may mean walking away from certain people so that you can walk toward the people he has prepared just for you.

It’s not that we don’t want to be bothered; as Christians, we live to be bothered! Instead, it’s about taking yourself and your calling more seriously. Be a tree that produces an abundant harvest. You won’t harvest great apples in the late summer and early fall if you’re not pruning in the winter.

Please, take a few moments and pray over this post. I believe God may have had someone in your life in mind when he led me to write this post. Ask God to reveal to you those unhealthy encounters—the ones you hide from, the ones that drain you, the kind that leave you lying on the floor of your house hoping the person knocking on your door won’t know you’re home, the one whose very name lighting up on your phone can spike your blood pressure—and take the hint. God wants you to be free to focus where He’s leading.

Maybe it’s time to do some pruning.

For more on this, please check out Gary’s upcoming book, When to Walk Away: Finding Freedom From Toxic People, now available for pre-order (the publication date is October 8).

The post Pruning Toxic Relationships Out of Our Lives Isn’t Unchristian; God Does it Too! appeared first on Gary Thomas.

When Dealing with a Toxic Person, the Problem isn’t Your Nose

After I had been hitting my head against a wall dealing with a toxic individual, asking myself “Why?” and “How do I fix this/handle this/deal with this?” a wise friend, Dr. Steve Wilke, dispensed some life-changing advice. He urged me not to deal with it but to simply walk away.

“I want you to go through the book of Luke and count how many times Jesus walked away from people or let people walk away from Him. You’ll be amazed.”

As I’ve said before, I’m not clinically OCD, but I live in the neighborhood right next door to it, so when a counselor tells me to count something in the book of Luke, I have to go through all four Gospels. I documented every case and came up with forty-one instances (all of them are listed in an appendix of When to Walk Away: Finding Freedom from Toxic People). While some of the citations refer to the same incident, and of course others might disagree with some of my interpretations, there are still at least a couple dozen occasions where an interaction with Jesus didn’t result in the other person agreeing or changing, and Jesus let the situation stay that way. Jesus didn’t give chase or further explanation, and he didn’t question himself or count himself a failure.

This was life-changing for me. I always looked at such interactions as failures on my part. Perhaps I wasn’t hearing God correctly. Maybe there’s just something annoying about me. Maybe I was lacking in my knowledge of the Word or was too compromised by sin or hidden attitudes. If only I could get closer to God and walk with more integrity, then that person would change and/or see the truth.

In other words, it was usually what is wrong with me?

But nothing, of course, was ever wrong with Jesus, so maybe I was asking the wrong question.

Some of you may, like me, come across a toxic person who—as an analogy—has horrendous breath, and if you’re like me, your first thought is, “What’s wrong with my nose? God, would you please heal my nose? I don’t want to think that this person stinks. Probably I’m being too sensitive or setting this person off. Please, fix me.”

But the problem isn’t your nose. The problem is the toxic person’s bad breath. Your nose is actually God’s protection, telling you there’s a problem and to stay (or walk) away.

Some of you won’t understand how willing some of us are to let ourselves be bullied or to blame ourselves or to think we’re the problem. For those of you who can relate, I believe When to Walk Away can offer some much-needed and life-changing perspective. It was astonishing to me to read the Bible with Dr. Wilke’s perspective. While not all of the forty-one occurrences could be interpreted as necessarily engaging “toxic” people (some were just needy people or close-minded people), Jesus displayed a unique freedom to speak the truth and let the person choose whether to take it further. Sometimes, even when people begged Jesus to stay, He still felt tremendous freedom to leave and disappoint them. I saw how Jesus responded exclusively to His Heavenly Father’s will (even above His immediate family), not the flattery, needs, or attacks of people. I wanted that freedom, and spent an entire year reading the Bible through that “walk away” lens, coming away astonished at all that was “new” in the Bible that I had read dozens and dozens of times.

Here’s just one example of Jesus walking away, taken as an excerpt from the book:

 

One of the most painful passages for me to read in Scripture occurs after Jesus demonstrates His power before a city by sending an entire herd of pigs tumbling over a cliff.

Having been visited by Jesus, these farmers were among the most blessed people in the history of the world by getting to hear God speaking in the flesh. When Jesus got in the way of their pig farming though, the loss of their business blinded them to the glory of the person standing in front of them. In a crude sense, this town chose pork chops over salvation:  “Then the whole town went out to meet Jesus. And when they saw him, they pleaded with him to leave their region” (Matthew 8:34).

Can you imagine an entire town looking at Jesus—the Messiah we love, the one we wish we could talk to face to face, the one we’d pay a years’ salary to get a personal audience with for one hour—and pleading with Him to leave?

And yet Jesus didn’t argue. We’re told that “Jesus stepped into a boat, crossed over and came to his own town” (Matt. 9:1-2)

He walked (or in this case sailed) away.

There’s a terrible messianic complex in many of us that thinks if we were more intelligent, a little holier, if we fasted and prayed a bit more, then everyone we shared the truth with would agree with us and welcome God into their hearts.

That didn’t happen for the real Messiah and it certainly won’t happen for us. It’s okay to walk away when people resist the truth. And it’s okay to let them walk away.

 

How do we know when to walk away? How do we distinguish between “toxic” people and “difficult” people? (It’s very important to do so.) How do we balance the Bible’s call to love the “unlovable” with Jesus’ example and admonition to “shake the dust off your feet” (Matt. 10:14)? What do we do when the toxic person is a family member or works at our office? That’s what this book explores, and it applies this principle to every relationship you can imagine: work, friends, family, church, etc.

I’m excited to finally be able to share all that God has taught me. After Dr. Wilke challenged me, it felt like I had been given a brand-new pair of glasses that helped me see clearly where before I had been blinded to so many obvious truths.

How You Can Help Spread the Word

In today’s publishing world, I can’t overstate the importance of pre-orders for a book’s success. Pre-orders alert the publisher and sellers that there’s an interest. Publishers and book sellers are, in the end, businesses that become very interested in something that shows the potential to take off. When you pre-order a book, it’s like purchasing three books after it comes out. If you purchase a book for yourself and two friends before it comes out, it’s like you’ve just purchased ten books.  If you think this is a message that you and others could benefit from, please consider pre-ordering from wherever you buy your books: your local bookstore, Amazon, Christian Book Distributors, Barnes and Noble, etc. When these entities see early interest, they’ll take the lead in featuring it and you’ll help spread the word even wider. I would be so very grateful for each reader who takes the time to do this.  And you don’t have all that long to wait; the date of publication is October 8. Thank you in advance!

The post When Dealing with a Toxic Person, the Problem isn’t Your Nose appeared first on Gary Thomas.

Surprisingly One of the Best Things You Can Do for Yourself…

I’ve been in several marathon training groups that begin meeting months before a marathon. It’s astonishing to see how a little bit of daily training takes very ordinary, often very unathletic people, and gently but steadily leads us to a place where we can start running twenty-six miles around breakfast time and finish sometime before lunch.

If
we took spiritual progress this seriously—and we should (Matt. 5:48)—what
“spiritual workout” will move us steadily and consistently toward spiritual fitness?

William
Law, a classical writer who taught the church almost three centuries ago, says
that one of the most effective workouts we could ever perform for ourselves is regularly praying for
our children’s spiritual welfare.

How
does praying for our kids help us grow?

Law
makes the sensible connection that if a parent is praying regularly for their
children’s spiritual growth, that parent is going to be compelled to excel in
the same virtues they long for their children to embrace. “How naturally would
a parent grow ashamed of lacking the very virtues he or she thinks necessary
for their children?”

Psychologically
and spiritually, when we want something for our children, it reinforces to our
own minds how important that same thing is for us. That’s why praying for our
children to grow in faith and character is one of the most effective ways of
reminding ourselves of what we need to aspire after.

Jenna
was beside herself trying to get her oldest daughter (8) to be more patient
with her younger sister. She began praying regularly that God would help her
daughter to encourage her sister rather than resent her whenever she made a
mistake. When the younger sister spilled some glitter all over the floor, the
older sister cried out, “You’re such an idiot!” There was a moment of painful
spiritual revelation when Jenna realized her daughter was repeating verbatim what she had heard Jenna say of
another driver who cut in front them on their morning trip to school. With
sincere conviction, Jenna realized she was praying for her daughter to stop
being like…her mom. It’s not a surprise that Jenna began praying for more
patience for herself whenever she got into the car with her children.   

Another
benefit of regular intercessory prayer for our children is that when we
earnestly call upon God to show favor to our children, it naturally makes us
want to maintain a clean heart before God. William Law writes, “If a father
considered himself as an intercessor with God for his children to bless them
with his prayers, what more likely means to make him aspire after every degree
of holiness that he might thereby be fitter to obtain blessings from heaven for
them? How would such thoughts make him avoid everything that was sinful and
displeasing to God, lest when he prayed for his children God should reject his
prayers?”

James
5:16 tells us that “the prayer of a righteous person is very powerful in its
effect.” So if I want to be spiritually “fit” to be an effective intercessor
for my children, I’m going to watch my life, in the same way someone training
for a marathon might think twice about having that second helping of ice cream. 

The
third thing regularly praying for our children accomplishes is that a life of intentional praying inspires a
life of more intentional training. If we pray to God that he will work in
our children’s hearts, we’re going to want to become his assistant, a partial
answer to our own prayers. For example, if we pray that God will move them to
value eternal things, we’re less likely to fall into affirming worldly
achievements. If I ask God to give my children hearts of purity, I’m not going
to bring impure shows into my home, which would undercut my prayers. If I ask
God to make my children love kindness, I’m going to think up ways for them to
use Christmas, as an example, to display kindness to others rather than just
focus on their own wish lists. If I pray they will hunger for God’s Word, I’m
going to scour bookstores for Bibles and helps that make the Bible come alive
to my young children.  

All
of these benefits begin with praying
for our children: earnestly, passionately, and persistently. Because of God’s
kindness, these prayers will surely bless our children. The surprising news,
according to William Law, is that they will bless us—the parents who pray—just as
much.

The post Surprisingly One of the Best Things You Can Do for Yourself… appeared first on Gary Thomas.

The Remembrance of Death

An excerpt from Thirsting
for God: Spiritual Refreshment for the Sacred Journey by Gary Thomas
(Harvest House Publishers, 2011)

Living in a Dying World:
The Remembrance of Death

When sportscaster Glenn
Brenner died at the age of 44 in Wash-

ington DC, the city was in shock for several days. Why? After all, the city had been dubbed the murder capital
of the United States, and victims of violent crime die there virtually every
day—sometimes a half-dozen a night. Yet radio talk-show hosts devoted entire
mornings or afternoons to Brenner’s death. The newspaper covered it in every
issue for a week. One television station ran a half-hour memorial program.

The city was stunned by the suddenness of
the death. It forced people to remember that death doesn’t always wait until
we’re 95. Sometimes it sneaks up on us in our forties. As people called talk
shows to express their shock, they repeated a familiar refrain: “It was so
sudden; so unexpected. He was so young, in such good health, and then all of a
sudden…I just can’t believe it.”

Brenner had recently completed a marathon.
He was young, healthy, humorous, and successful, but all of that became
irrelevant when a brain tumor took his life. Death didn’t take into account his
cardiovascular capability. It didn’t inquire about the number of children still
depending on him or his vocational success or how beloved he was in the capital
city. Death doesn’t ask questions; it doesn’t review résumés. It just comes.

The city was
unsettled by death’s rude intrusion into its life. Denial was no longer
possible, and people were forced to consider that maybe there’s more to life
than we have been told. Maybe we need to make some inquiries and answer a few
questions before death comes to knock on our door.

Every now and then we sneak a peek at the
obituaries and look at the ages of those who have died. When we see somebody
our own age or even younger, we involuntarily wince. We grope for the cause of
death—please don’t let it be a heart attack or cancer, we hope. We want to be
immune from that, at least for now.

Our denial means nothing to death because
death doesn’t have to ask our permission. Death is coming. Every day is
somebody’s last.

The Denial of Death

In spite of the prevalence of death, we
prefer not to talk about it. In this we’re similar to previous generations.
Fénelon wrote of this denial centuries ago:

We consider ourselves
immortal, or at least as though going to live for centuries. Folly of the human
spirit! Every day those who die soon follow those who are already dead. One
about to leave on a journey ought not to think himself far from one who went
only two days before. Life flows by like a flood.  1

Most of us recognize that we will
eventually die—but decades from now, not today, not this week, not this month,
not this year. Death is a foreigner, not a close neighbor.

We live our lives while clutching fiercely
to this illusion. How else can we explain the fact that so many die without a
will? We live without making a will, not because we believe we’ll never die,
but because we don’t expect to die this week. Thus we have more important tasks
to take care of, meetings to attend, things to buy, walls to paint.

Why do we deny death? Fénelon believed we
avoid the thought of death so we are not saddened by it. But this, he said, is
shortsighted. “It will only be sad for those who have not thought about it.”  2
William Law wrote that the living world’s brilliance blinds us from eternity
and the reality of death. “The health of our bodies, the passions of our minds,
the noise and hurry and pleasures and business of the world, lead us on with
eyes that see not and ears that hear not.”  3

Part of this denial comes from the company
we keep. During the seven years I studied in college and seminary, I attended a
church with a congregation that was predominantly young. During those seven
years, one person in the congregation died, and it was big news.

My first position after seminary was in a
more historic church with a predominantly older congregation. The first church
had required two rooms to break up the nursery, but this church couldn’t round
up enough babies to fill more than two or three double strollers. During our
first six months, we had three funerals.

Young people have a distorted view of
life. They can forget that funerals are waiting on the other end of weddings
and baby showers. When we segregate ourselves—when we don’t know anyone who is
suffering from arthritis—we can be lulled to sleep.

Law insisted that most people will regret
delaying the thought of death. When death approaches, it is often too late to
make amends. Law demonstrated this by describing a symbolic character who, on
his deathbed, bemoans his absentmindedness:

Do you think anything
can astonish and confound a dying man like this? What pain do you think a man
must feel when his conscience lays all this folly to his charge, when it shall
show him how regular, exact, and wise he has been in small matters that are
passed away like a dream and how stupid and senseless he has lived, without any
reflection, without any rules, in things of such eternal moment as no heart can
sufficiently conceive them!  4

One magazine writer
told the story of a shopper who died from a massive heart attack in front of
the frozen pizza section of a supermarket. The writer ruminated about the
woman’s last thoughts. “Should I get pepperoni or vegetarian?” Or maybe, “How
about triple cheese?” The shopper was seconds away from eternity, on the
threshold of entering a new era, and she didn’t even know it. Her mind
was occupied with the trivial.

This unexpectedness of death should
encourage us to take a second look, to reconsider our pleasant denial, to admit
that, yes, death might visit us as early as this week.

The Remembrance of Death Serves Life

William Nelson, a Union general in the
Civil War, was consumed with the hostilities in Kentucky when a brawl erupted
in his fort and he was shot in the chest. He had faced many battles, but the
fatal blow came while he was relaxing with his men. He was caught fully
unprepared. As men ran up the stairs to help, the general had just one request:
“Send for a clergyman; I wish to be baptized.”

He never made time to be baptized as an
adolescent or a young man, and he had too many pressing concerns while in
command. In half a second, the general’s priorities had been turned upside
down. The war raged on, but suddenly his interest had been captivated by
another world. Who cared about Robert E. Lee now? And it was too late to bother
with a doctor. Get me a clergyman! With only minutes left before he died, the
one thing he cared about was preparing for eternity. He wanted to be baptized.

Thirty minutes later he was dead.

How was this general served by the
remembrance of death? Hardly at all, because he remembered it too late. To help
us avoid such a gross oversight, Thomas à Kempis urged, “Thou oughtest so to
order thyself in all thy thoughts and actions, as if today thou were about to
die.”  5 Law expounded on this:

I can’t see why every
gentleman, merchant, or soldier should not put these questions seriously to
himself: What is the best thing for me to intend and drive at in all my
actions? How shall I do to make the most of human life? What ways shall I wish
that I had taken when I am leaving this world?  6

When we find out we have only 30 minutes
left to live, as General Nelson did, we can’t do much more than prepare our own
souls. Even worse, the moment of death could prove that our whole life has been
a lie.

As vice president, George H.W. Bush
represented the United States at the funeral of former Soviet boss Leonid
Brezhnev. During the secular service, Bush witnessed a silent protest carried
out by Brezhnev’s widow. She stood motionless by the coffin until seconds
before it was closed. Then, just as the soldiers touched the lid, Brezhnev’s
wife performed an act of great courage and hope, a gesture that must surely
rank as one of the most profound acts of civil disobedience ever committed.

Brezhnev’s widow reached down and made the
sign of the cross on her husband’s chest.

There, in the citadel of secular,
atheistic power, the wife of the man who had run it all hoped that her husband
was wrong. She hoped that there was another life and that that life was best
represented by Jesus, who died on the cross. She hoped that same Jesus might yet
have mercy on her husband.

The thought of death came too late for an
American Civil War general and a Soviet head of state—will it come too late for
us? When your body is lying in the coffin, when your life is being remembered,
do you want your surviving spouse or kids or friends to think, “Everything he
gave his life for was a fraud. It was wasted. But now, perhaps God will have
mercy for him giving his life over to such useless aims, and still usher him
into His eternal kingdom.”

Virtually every classic writer holds up
the remembrance of death as an essential spiritual discipline. It will help us
to live a life that is celebrated rather than mourned. “The man who is really
concerned to live well must possess himself continually of the thought that he
is not to live long.”  7

Making Death Our Servant

David is dead,” my wife said. “His parents want you to speak at
the funeral. They’re burying him tomorrow.”

I had spent the day with my kids at a
local fair. We had been riding kiddie roller coasters, braving gravity-busting
wheels, and digesting cotton candy. We got home late at night, and the
funeral—a three-hour drive away—was scheduled to take place in about 13 hours.
It was difficult, as you might imagine, to shift gears so suddenly.

The funeral was a particularly sad one
because David died in prison. He poked heroin into his veins once too often,
and on one occasion, the HIV virus was clinging to the needle. David developed
AIDS and slowly wasted away. He was in his early thirties.

I tried to comfort his parents: “God knows
what it’s like to watch a son die in his early thirties,” I said.

Lisa and I decided to take our children to
the funeral. On the way, we talked to them about what we could learn from this
sad passing. “If somebody tells you what you’re missing out on when you refuse
to take drugs, I want you to remember this,” I said. “Think of a young man
giving up the rest of his life, dying without a wife, without kids, locked
inside a prison cell. That’s where drugs will take you. That’s what you’re
missing when you say no to drugs.”

I struggled through the service, trying to
find words to reach out to those who had come to say good-bye. “David is gone
now,” my talk began, and I searched for lessons we could learn. The classic
Christian writers helped me by teaching me that even tragic deaths can provide
valuable truths—if not positively, then negatively. In fact, these writers urge
us to use death by extracting the message out of each one, thereby
making death our servant. Let’s see how the remembrance of death can serve us
today.

Pure Perspective

Imagine a number of men
in chains, all under sentence of death, some of whom are each day butchered in
the sight of others; those remaining see their own condition in that of their
fellows, and looking at each other with grief and despair await their turn.
This is the image of the human condition.  1

In this quote,
Blaise Pascal captured the reality of the human condition.

The remembrance of death acts like a
filter, helping us to hold on to the essential and let go of the trivial.
Climacus pointed out that a “man who has heard himself sentenced to death will
not worry about the way theaters are run.”  2 His point, of course,
is that all of us have been sentenced to death. It’s just a matter of time, so
why let trivial matters captivate our hearts?

Eternity certainly does turn everything
around. I’m reminded of this every year when I prepare my tax returns. During
the year, I rejoice at the paychecks and extra income, and sometimes I wince
when I write out the tithe and offering. I do my best to be a joyful giver, but
I confess it’s not always easy, especially when I have other perceived needs
and wants.

At the end of the year, however, all of
that changes. As I’m figuring my tax liability, I wince at every source of
income and rejoice with every tithe and offering check—more income means more
taxes, but every offering and tithe means fewer taxes. Everything is turned
upside down, or perhaps more appropriately, right-side up.

I suspect judgment day will be like that.
The things that bother us now and force us out of our schedules—taking time out
to encourage or help someone, for instance—will be the very things we deem most
important. Today, we may not be too happy about having to skip a movie so we
could paint an invalid’s house, or we may regret missing a meeting so we could
visit a prisoner or sick person. But in eternity, the movie and the meeting
will seem much less important, and we will be glad we took the time to do those
acts of kindness.

Perhaps this is why Fénelon writes, “We
cannot too greatly deplore the blindness of men who do not want to think of
death, and who turn away from an inevitable thing which we could be happy to
think of often. Death only troubles carnal people.”  3

We can maintain a pure perspective on what
truly matters by viewing life backward—through the lens of the reality of
death.

The Passion Filter

The remembrance of death also serves us by
filtering our passions. Pascal wrote, “To render passion harmless, let us
behave as though we had only a week to live.”  4 Notice the
practical element in Pascal’s teaching: Remembering death can take the heat out
of sinful passions.

Climacus joined him in this counsel. “You
cannot pass a day devoutly unless you think of it as your last.”  5
He called the thought of death the “most essential of all works” and a gift
from God.  6 “The man who lives daily with the thought of death is
to be admired, and the man who gives himself to it by the hour is surely a
saint.”  7

Law suggested we make moral choices based
on the way we’ll feel on our deathbeds. “The best way for anyone to know how
much he ought to aspire after holiness is to consider not how much will make
his present life easy, but to ask himself how much he thinks will make him easy
at the hour of death.”  8

What man in his right mind would continue
contemplating an affair if he really believed he might not wake up in the
morning? What person would risk entering eternity in a drunken stupor? What
fool would ignore his loved ones and his God for one last night so he could
make another quick ten thousand dollars just before he died?

Thomas à Kempis took an even larger view,
arguing that the remembrance of death is a powerful force for spiritual growth
in general.

Didst thou oftener
think of thy death than of thy living long, there is no question but thou
wouldst be more zealous to improve. If also thou didst but consider within
thyself the infernal pains in the other world, I believe thou wouldst willingly
undergo any labor or sorrow in this world, and not be afraid of the greatest
austerity. But because these things enter not to the heart, and we still love
those things only that delight us, therefore we remain cold and very dull in
religion.  9

When we schedule our
priorities and follow our passions without regard to eternity, we are
essentially looking into the wrong end of a telescope. Instead of seeing things
more clearly, our vision becomes tunneled and distorted. We miss the big
picture. Law described this skewed perspective:

Feasts and business and
pleasures and enjoyments seem great things to us whilst we think of nothing
else; but as soon as we add death to them, they all sink into an equal
littleness; and the soul that is separated from the body no more laments the
loss of business than the losing of a feast.  10

Only the denial of death allows us to
continue rebelling against God. Only because we presume sometime in the future
to set things right do we consider letting them go wrong now. Some of us will
be surprised in our presumption; eventually our spirits will be dulled until we
forget we are presuming, and like all the rest, death will catch us by
surprise.

That’s why Thomas à Kempis urged us,
“Labor now to live so, that at the hour of death thou mayest rather rejoice
than fear.”  11 That hour is coming. If it comes tonight, will you
be able to rejoice at your state? Or does the mere thought strike fear into
your soul? More is involved than just our eternal destiny. God’s mercy may well
pass us into His eternal presence, but do we want to enter heaven after
faithfully serving God to the best of our ability, or after some desperate,
last-minute confession, realizing we have wasted our lives?

I want to enter death tired. I want to
have spent what energy God has apportioned me. The cross-country races that
were most satisfying to me when I was young were not the ones I won most easily
but the ones that took everything I had to win. Weariness produced by hard,
diligent labor is a reward, not a curse. An eternal rest awaits all who know
Christ, so why are we preoccupied with rest now?

Death’s Comfort

Death can be a consoling thought
for those who face particularly difficult losses or trials in this world.
Fénelon reminded us, “St. Paul recommends to all Christians that they console
themselves together in the thought of death.”  12

Christians, above all people, have reason
to be consoled through death. Although we are last on earth, we will be first
in heaven. Those who mock our faith and have a sadistic pleasure in polluting
our collective soul with their perversion won’t have a voice in heaven. The
lost loved ones we miss so much are waiting for us on the other side of time.
Our disabilities or broken-down bodies won’t torment us in heaven. Instead,
we’ll rejoice as we meet new and improved versions of ourselves without the
aches and pains and without the propensity to sin.

And even more importantly, death ushers us
face-to-face into the fulfillment of the cry of our hearts—fellowship with the
one true God—and this is our greatest consolation of all. All sincere
Christians experience at least a bit of loneliness because we long for a more
intimate walk with our God—a walk that we will realize beyond our dreams once
we pass the threshold of eternity.

To experience the pain of death is normal
and healthy. Jesus, after all, wept at the death of Lazarus. But death can also
bring hope, not for what it is, but for what God promises us on the other side.
The Christian life doesn’t make complete sense without the consoling thought of
eternal life. Paul himself said we should be pitied above all others if the
Christian faith is only for this temporal world (1 Corinthians 15:19).
John Calvin said we haven’t matured spiritually at all if we don’t actively look
forward to the day of our death.

Keeping Death Alive

When I lived in Virginia, I occasionally
attended a Wednesday Communion service at an Episcopal church that dates back
to the eighteenth century. As is common with many older churches, the building
is surrounded by a graveyard. Every week I walked past the grave markers on my
way in and out.

That short walk did almost as much for me
as the service itself. I was reminded as I faced the second half of the week
that one day, my body, my bones, would be lying in the ground. My work
on earth will be done. What will matter then? What should matter now in light
of that?

I am fond of old graveyards—not in a
morbid way, but in a way that inspires me like nothing else. I want to use
death the way Thomas à Kempis used it.

Happy is he that always
hath the hour of his death before his eyes, and daily prepareth himself to
die…When it is morning, think thou mayest die before night; and when evening
comes, dare not to promise thyself the next morning. Be thou therefore always
in a readiness, and so lead thy life that death may never take thee unprepared.  13

William Law urged that we make the subject
of death the focus of our prayers every evening.

The subject that is
most proper for your [evening] prayers is death. Let your prayers therefore
then be wholly upon it, reckoning up all the dangers, uncertainties, and
terrors of death; let them contain everything that can affect and awaken your
mind into just apprehensions of it. Let your petitions be all for right
sentiments of the approach and importance of death, and beg of God that your
mind may be possessed with such a sense of its nearness that you may have it
always in your thoughts, do everything as in sight of it, and make every day a
day for preparation for it.

Represent to your imagination that your bed is your grave…Such a solemn resignation of yourself into the hands of God every evening and parting with all the world as if you were never to see it anymore, and all this in the silence and darkness of the night, is a practice that will soon have excellent effects upon your spirit.  14

Scupoli urged the remembrance of death by
using one of the most common aspects of living: “When walking, think how each
step brings you one step nearer to death.”  15

Another way I keep death alive is by
living in the communion of saints. I’ll post a picture here or a quote there of
someone whose faith and life has encouraged me as a reminder that work has an
end. If the world can get by without a Dietrich Bonhoeffer or a Blaise Pascal
(both died in their thirties), it can get by without me—and one day it will. I
have a limited time to use, and it may be much shorter than I realize.

When contemporary saints die, let’s
benefit from their deaths as much as we benefitted from their lives. The
passing of Dr. Klaus Bockmuehl, who mentored me in seminary, gave me great
pause and still touches me today, two decades later. Wise shoppers clip
coupons. Wise Christians clip obituaries.

But the supreme way
for a Christian to keep the thought of death alive is, of course, to remember
the crucifixion of our Lord. Jesus died proclaiming, “It is finished.” What a
wonderful and triumphant way to die—knowing that you’ve completed the task you
were sent here for. What is your “it”? Determine what you must
accomplish so that at the hour of your death you can look up to heaven and echo
the apostle Paul’s words: “The time has come for my departure. I have fought
the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Now there is in
store for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge,
will award to me” (2 Timothy 4:6-8).

Just before my family moved from one state
to another, Gordon Dunn, a dear missionary in his eighties, invited Lisa and me
over for a good-bye dinner. As the night wore on, Gordon pulled me aside and
opened up his well-worn Bible to Acts 26:19, where Paul tells Agrippa, “I was
not disobedient to the vision from heaven.”

“Gary,” Gordon said as he looked me in the
eye, “at the end of your life, will you be able to say, as Paul did, that you
were not disobedient to the vision given you from heaven?”

I’ve never forgotten that conversation. I
particularly try to remember it—as well as Christ’s words on the cross—every
time I participate in the Lord’s Supper. Every time we take Communion, we
should do so with the awareness that, just as Christ’s work on earth had a
beginning and an end (as He ministered in a human body), so the mission He has
given us has a beginning and an end.

One of my editors
told me of a fellow writer, not well known in the United States, who died at a
relatively young age. He had worked tirelessly to get Christians more actively
involved in the arts. His life was a testimony to God’s grace and creativity.
By all accounts, this man had been a faithful husband, a good father, and an
earnest servant of the gospel.

Many tears were shed at the funeral for a
man most thought should have had several more decades to live. Yet as his
casket was picked up by the pall bearers and carried down the church aisle,
something curious happened: Mourners turned into celebrators. The crowd erupted
into a spontaneous standing ovation. This was a life well lived; a life in
which death revealed a victory, not a defeat; a life marked by faithfulness and
service. It deserved a raucous cheer.

May we all live in such a way that our
passing evokes a standing ovation, not only by believers on earth but also by
the saints and inhabitants of heaven.

Keeping death alive is one of the most fruitful spiritual disciplines we can ever practice. “Death is the destiny of every man; the living should take this to heart” (Ecclesiastes 7:2).

The post The Remembrance of Death appeared first on Gary Thomas.

Deception and Disillusionment

Lisa
and I enjoyed a respite from Houston’s heat and humidity in mid-August after I
taped a couple shows for Focus on the Family (on the upcoming When to Walk
Away: Finding Freedom from Toxic People) and we drove out to Glenwood
Springs, Colorado for a few extra days.

Lisa’s
ideal vacation means five or six events a day, while my ideal vacation envisions
zero or one scheduled activities, so we usually compromise at four or five. On
our last day, after three very full days, Lisa figured we could fit in a “quick
walk” to go see Doc Holliday’s grave (after we picked up her morning
coffee at Deja Brew, of course). I had run thirteen miles the day before and
then went for a seventeen-mile bike ride with Lisa through Glenwood Canyon, but
a short walk sounded like a good way to stretch out some sore legs before driving
back to Denver and getting on a plane.

What
I didn’t realize until we arrived is that the sign we were walking toward
signified a trailhead; the actual grave, Lisa told me (after we got
there) was “one half a mile up the hill.” I hadn’t realized there was half a
mile or a hill, but now that we were there…

We
walked straight up to some wonderful views but my runner’s sense of distance
kicked in and I said, “this seems longer than half a mile.”

“Well,
it’s actually seven-tenths of a mile,” Lisa admitted.

“You
mean, you lied to me?”

She
put on her cute face.  “I try not to.”

“How
do you try not to lie?”

“It’s
hard sometimes.”

I
laughed because after thirty-five years of marriage Lisa knew that the OCD part
of me wasn’t going to turn around until we got there. She had me and we kept
walking straight up.

When
we got to the top, the disillusionment set in. I’ll be honest—there was zero
draw for me to visit Doc Holliday’s grave to begin with. Holliday was a gambler
and dentist who became famous largely for a thirty-second gunfight at the O.K.
Corral. He died destitute and alone at the age of 36. Hollywood has kept his
legend alive (nearly three dozen actors have played him, and he was even
depicted in a Star Trek episode) but how can a gambler and failed
dentist who took part in a thirty-second gunfight be worthy of such remembrance?
Is that really a life to celebrate?

So
I was already skeptical when we finally got to the top of our climb and a sign
pointed left. What we came to, however, wasn’t a gravesite; it was a memorial
marker. Since Holliday died destitute, his grave was covered with a wooden
marker that had long since disintegrated. Cemetery records were lost in a fire
so nobody knows where Doc Holliday is actually buried. The monument says his
bones lie somewhere in the cemetery but even that’s a stretch; he could have
been buried in a nearby area called “the Potter’s Field,” so all they really
know for sure is that he is buried somewhere on the mountain where we
were standing.

Which
means, deception got me to a place that was a huge disappointment.

Just
like our end-of-vacation walk, much of life is built on deception and
disillusionment. What really matters in life and marriage, and what is truly
satisfying? If we don’t know the answers to these two questions, our families
will suffer accordingly.

I’ve
been reading William Law again and in convicting fashion he lays bare the folly
of most human endeavor. Law writes about how silly it would be, and how crazy
everyone would think this, if a man tired himself out, ignoring his family and
compromising his health, in order to say he died owning a thousand pairs of
boots-and-spurs. It’s almost funny—who needs a thousand pairs of
boots-and-spurs? Then he asks (which is where the conviction gets poured in)
how this is any different from someone who dies with a thousand pounds he or
she can no longer spend, and it’s not so funny; it’s painful.

This
is a world that tells us to value and pursue everything that doesn’t matter. It’s the great
deception. We’re deceived that there is something exciting and fulfilling at
the “top” if we’ll just keep climbing. The “top” could be wealth, fame, beauty,
health, excitement, pleasure, romance, or achievement. It must be
satisfying—everyone says it is—so we struggle through the climb to get ever
closer, avoiding a lot of other things, ruining or ignoring our relationships, only
to be radically disillusioned at the top when we realize it’s all an illusion.

Have
you ever asked yourself why the most famous people usually end up with the most
messed up lives of addiction, multiple failed marriages, and ruined health? They are the
few who have “won” the race everyone says matters, but at the finish line they
realize it’s not fulfilling and the race isn’t worth running, let alone
winning. There must be something more, so they turn to drugs or alcohol, or
another romantic tryst…

While
in Glenwood Springs, Lisa and I spent an early evening at the Iron Mountain Hot
Springs. In one pool, Lisa and I heard a group of women discussing an
astonishing number of medical options to keep women looking young. What they
did to their faces, injected into their bodies, paid to undergo treatments, and
the effort they spent investigating new options (“this is what all the
Kardashians are doing now,” one woman opined) was quite astonishing.

Lisa,
who is often mistaken for my daughter to begin with, asked me if I wished she
was more into that stuff. “What were you thinking listening to them?” she asked
when we got into another pool.

“All
I could think of was William Law’s admonition that women and men should earnestly
pursue humility, patience, generosity, faith, compassion, courage, kindness,
and forgiveness with the same intensity that those in the world pursue wealth,
fame, worldly achievement, and physical beauty.”

The deception is that looking like you’re twenty-five when you’re fifty, or
fifty when you’re seventy, is somehow worthy of more time and money and
attention than growing in Christlikeness whatever your age may be. It’s not
easy to employ self-denial and then to value the things of God more than the
things of this world, which is probably why so few of us ever walk that
path—even those of us who call ourselves Christians.

This
is why we have to beware of disillusionment: the empty promises of the world
never deliver. It’s like an infatuation that is so intense for a few
months but then mocks and taunts us as it fades.

Doc
Holliday is celebrated, but really, why should we care? Should we erect grave
memorials to the many modern-day gang members who have survived numerous
thirty second gunfights?

If
you spend your life pursuing things that don’t really matter; if you think a
successful life is defined by how much money you leave behind; how many people
you were able to sleep with; how many dresses you wore that received
compliments; how many shoes are in your closet, or how low your handicap was at
golf; when you die, will any of that matter? Will you look as silly as the man
who ignored his family and health to ensure he died with a thousand pairs of
boots-and-spurs?

Everyone of us is being lied to. I believe if we are not “seeking first the kingdom of God and his righteousness” as Jesus urges us to in Matthew 6:33, we are settling for a lesser life, a life based on deception that will result in disillusionment. When we see the glory of the Kingdom unfiltered, and the beauty of life when everyone lives in submission to God, we will ask ourselves, “How could I be enamored with any other world or any other way of life?”

The
Christian classics urge us toward a spiritual discipline called “the
remembrance of death.” John of the Cross, for example, lived with
skulls in his cell (and even fashioned one into a bowl) to remind himself of
where he was—and all of us are—headed. When we are on our deathbed, how will we
have wanted to live? Will we celebrate the sins we gave into or will we mourn
them? Will we regret the works of faith we did or will we be thankful for them?
Will we wish we had made better use of our time or will we be grateful for the
mindless entertainment and trivial conversation that took up so many of our
hours? (After this blogpost, we’re going to post two chapters of an excerpt
from my book Thirsting for God that covers this discipline, if you want
to read further in this area).

If
you want to avoid deception and disillusionment, base your life, marriage, and family
on truth and hope. Jesus is the only teacher who knew what life outside of
the space/time continuum that we call “earth” is like. The apostle Paul got a glimpse,
but Jesus could tell us what to expect and therefore what to live for in a way
no one else ever has or could. If we base our life on His agenda, seeking first
the Kingdom of God, we are following the only teacher who truly knew what He
was talking about, the very definition of “truth.”

If
you pursue a deception, you’ll eventually wake up disillusioned. Don’t blame
your marriage or your spouse for the disillusionment; just wake up to the
truth. Spiritual health is cultivated by regularly asking ourselves, every
day, “Is this true?” and “Is this pursuit important?”

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