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by
Tyler Staton
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February 16 - March 10, 2023
When our unspoken assumptions are proven false, it’s like someone pulls a block from the bottom of a Jenga tower. The shaky foundation we’ve been building on gets exposed for what it is, and the whole house falls.
“Pleasure is, and must remain, a side-effect or by-product, and is destroyed and spoiled to the degree to which it is made a goal in itself.”
Belief involves a mixture of information and hope, but knowledge is just the recall of cold, hard facts—the answer to a math equation or the stats from a baseball game.
In the ancient Hebrew understanding, it was the other way around. Beliefs are based on theory; knowledge is personal. The Hebrew term yada translates into English as “to know.” However, it’s a relational, experiential kind of knowledge,
Not everyone has touched a hot stove, but everyone believes it will hurt if you touch one. That’s belief. Knowledge isn’t theoretical; it’s personal. Someone out there has put the palm of their hand on the glowing red coils of a hot stove. That’s when belief got personal. That’s knowledge.
Beliefs tend to live in the background of our lives. Knowing kicks the door down and confronts us.
Boredom is a sentiment of disconnectedness . . .To be bored, therefore, does not mean that we have nothing to do, but that we question the value of the things we are so busy doing. The great paradox of our time is that many of us are busy and bored at the same time . . . In short, while our lives are full, we feel unfulfilled.
“The biblical story of faith I was spoon-fed as a kid and have done my best to somehow hold on to as an adult is not enough for the complexity of the world I actually live in.
Spiritual breakthrough often starts with saying what you think and feel but are convinced you aren’t “allowed” to say.
Distraction is fast food. It doesn’t nourish us, but it does work for deferring hunger.
So here we are—stuck between two unsatisfying stories. The story of the world leaves us wanting. It always has and always will, no matter how long we distract ourselves from that confrontation. The story of Jesus is a compelling wonder, but if looking for life in an empty tomb is not enough for you, you should know you’re not alone. You’re in good company—even biblical company.
Thomas is modern Western culture personified. A whole hemisphere is stuck between two unsatisfying stories. The citizens of the industrialized Western world enjoy more personal freedom, leisure time, career options, and entertaining distractions than anyone at any other time in human history, and yet the increase in personal autonomy and freedom hasn’t led to increased happiness and fulfillment. Diagnosed and medicated mental illness has grown almost exactly parallel to these factors. The world’s freest, wealthiest, most autonomous people are also the world’s most anxious and depressed people.
But he came as a person because the offer isn’t information; it’s life.
Culture, in all of its variety and expression, with all of its flavors and sounds and movement, was born out of the once untapped potential of this planet. For a ball of dust floating around a star, that’s pretty good. Then there’s society—the organization of people and customs into shared life. The resources buried under our feet have been gathered together to form towns and cities where people can communicate and cooperate and learn from one another. Human relationship is made possible and sustained by this planet. Amazing.
This world is an amazing place. There’s such unfathomable potential in the dirt we stand on and the air we breathe. And a single life, an ordinary, uneventful life that won’t be studied in a history book or memorialized in a hall of fame or documented in a police report—the most ordinary life is an extraordinary thing.
the ordinary days we get to live hold an endless depth. The more of these days you get, the more you realize what a gift this whole thing really is, and a movie about ordinary life becomes an extraordinary thing when you’ve got enough of your own ordinary life behind it to give it the proper weight.
It’s important to recognize that the concept the Bible calls “sin” is woven into the fabric of the world. To recognize this concept within yourself, though, is the critical part. Personal failure is a lot less about morals and a lot more about what occupies the center of your heart, because whoever or whatever holds that position is taking you somewhere.
A match struck at noon on a sunny day gets almost no one’s attention; it just blends in. Strike that same match at midnight, though, and it turns the necks of everyone within eyeshot.
A believer in a group of believers is nothing special. Put a believer in a den of wolves; an area where they don’t seem to belong, and they’ll stick out like a sore thumb.
Triumph isn’t decades of darkness that finally give way to a single, fleeting moment of light. Triumph is when that moment is the rule, not the exception.
Choosing the self for the center can and does look like racism, oppression, and violence, but it also looks like day after day in a world where all those things are present but being so caught up in “my thing” that I do nothing consequential about it.
Sin is meeting the deep needs of my life by my own resources.7 Good intentions powered by human resources bring more pain than healing. That’s the strand of sin that has infected most of us. The mission is so right, but the method is so destructive.
That’s the rub of the human condition—rebellion against God doesn’t equal autonomous freedom; it equals a substitute god. Something else, something outside of myself, has to define me to myself.
In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship . . . is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive
“You will be tempted to provide for yourself, to protect yourself, and to exalt yourself. And at the core of these three is a common impulse—to cast off the fatherhood of God.”
Sin has never been about moral guidelines, because the issue is not that you’re too thirsty; the issue is that you’re drinking from the wrong well.
“There is only one temptation. All particular temptations are expressions of this one original or ‘primordial’ temptation. This is the temptation to believe that the fulfillment of the desires of the human heart depends entirely on us.”
Every origin story, philosophy, and religion must confront this indisputable fact: something has gone wrong with the human race. The denial of darkness doesn’t take the darkness away; it just keeps you stumbling around in the same darkness with your eyes closed.
Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.
“What will come of what I am doing today or shall do tomorrow? What will come of my whole life?”
So here you are, inserted as a character into a story you didn’t author, a story that was being written long before you became aware of it and will go on being written long after you leave it. Here you are, experiencing the unfathomable potential of this life while also occasionally being reminded of the nagging, inescapable reality of recurring darkness. Or maybe it’s the other way around. For you, it’s the darkness of this world that is most obvious, and you occasionally get a splash of the very good potential, like a single ray of sunshine that breaks, for just a moment, through dark clouds
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Jesus once posed this question: “Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to your life?”1 In other words, whose rage against the consuming darkness has ever been successful in the slightest? The quest is a noble one, but if this quest doesn’t end in surrender, it will end in defeat. The darkness is undefeated.
The industrialized Western world is an adult amusement park filled with rides and distractions and treats for our consumption. It’s a museum of distraction, and so that’s how most of us pass our Tuesday afternoons between unfathomable potential and recurring darkness: We change the subject.
Changing the subject can get you through most Tuesdays. Distraction is the way the masses get through life. The chosen forms of distraction differ, based on culture and class, but the vast majority of us prefer to throw out the final vocabulary and laugh at another sarcastic joke, to put this book down and pull up our Netflix queue, to keep changing the subject.
“Stop worrying and enjoy your life” may fit satisfyingly into a life that’s on an assumed upward trajectory, but it stops fitting very quickly when pain interrupts our plans, crashing into a future we thought was promised.
When darkness is more apparent than potential, changing the subject isn’t enough.
God. We all must relate to God or our conception of God or our refusal to believe in a “god,” but however you slice it, we all relate to some idea of the ultimate that is most commonly summed up in the word God.
Self. We are all cognizant of ourselves and therefore have a relationship with ourselves. We are self-aware and possess self-esteem. In fact, the person you think about most is almost certainly . . . yourself.
Others. We relate to other people. There’s no escaping the ripple effects of other people’s decisions—good and bad—that intersect with your life. Life is relationship to other peopl...
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The World. We relate to the actual world we live in. We gather food from the earth, and the habits and decisions of our lives have large-scale con...
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There was a time of only relational bliss. There was a place when people were seen all the way through and loved all the way through. There was a world where exposure wasn’t feared; it just was. There was a relationship between God and people that didn’t center on cause and effect or moral transaction or even parental give-and-take. It was delight. God and people enjoying one another’s company with no strings attached, no unspoken demands, no passive-aggressive expectations. And it spilled over into a perfect view of the self, unconditional love for other people, and the sort of simple,
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The darkness that covered the world when man chose himself for the center drove a chasm between every one of those four relationships—God, self, others, and the world. God. Just like that, God seemed distant, unknowable, untrustable. Self. Insecurity, shame, and self-consciousness plunged into the human heart for the first time. The emotions we spend our whole lives trying to escape were introduced into the story. Others. In a moment, people went from “effortless love” to “effortless competition,” fracturing into distinct groups, resorting even to violence because that’s what self-provision,
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There was a time when God could be trusted, when the Creator was Father, Mother, Protector, Comforter, and Friend. But to our ears, that sounds like a fairy tale. A long, long time ago, that image of God got traded in for the God you’re more familiar with—distant, unknowable, untrustable. A God whose company many welcome in their best moments, but equally a God we instinctively keep a distance from in our worst.
“What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.”
If your image of God is that he is a stern, harsh rule maker, then you will live like you’re always being graded, constantly being watched and evaluated. You’ll believe the truest thing about you is the final mark you receive as the sum total of your days. If your image of God is a permissive, laid-back dad with a headful of curls, making you an omelet in a tie-dye T-shirt, then you will live like your actions in this world are not of ultimate value, that at the end of the day, what you do does not matter in any significant way. When it comes to mistakes, this can be relieving, but what about
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Jesus’ prayers showed us who he really believed God to be—Abba. Your prayers do the same. It doesn’t matter if your prayers come out in communal liturgy, read aloud together in a sacred building or in the back of your head, never audible, and only after you’ve exhausted every other option. If you want to know what you really think of God, just pay attention to your prayers.
“Who one believes God to be is most accurately revealed not in any credo but in the way one speaks to God when no one else is listening.”
The surprising claim on the Bible’s opening page is that in the beginning, before you did a single thing—before you succeeded or failed, before you became something or nothing, before you proved them wrong or right, before you stood up on your own two shaky feet or crumbled in shame—in the beginning, there was God, nothing but the Spirit of God hovering over the surface of the deep, with you on his mind.
Eugene Peterson sums up the Genesis claim as “my identity does not begin when I begin to understand myself. There is something previous to what I think about myself, and it is what God thinks of me. That means that everything I think and feel is by nature a response, and the one to whom I respond is God. I never speak the first word. I never make the first move.”
Jesus is doing his best to make sure we know we are not dealing with an authoritative overseer or a micromanaging boss or even a well-intentioned and hurt father of a disappointing, wayward child; we are dealing with a prodigal God.
The open secret of ancient Israel and of the modern West is that “making it” and getting whatever comes along with your version of success don’t actually cure insecurity, erase shame, or still the constant churn of restlessness that drove you along the journey toward success. The subtext of Jesus’ masterful “Prodigal God” parable is that both sons are trying to “make it.” One thinks success is staying home, the other adventure, and both fail.
