One specific juxtaposition in Scripture has captivated my attention for years. Hundreds of times in the Bible, readers see the command, “Don’t be afraid,” or “Fear not.” At the same time in Habakkuk, Romans, Galatians, and Hebrews, readers are told, “The just shall live by faith.” These imperatives might not seem incongruent to you. But as an adrenaline junkie, I bump into these opposing declarations a lot.
Out in the dark on Sunday mornings, my heart’s been buoyed. The people showing up before the sun aren’t disgruntled. They haven’t given up. Even if they’ve chafed under a mask indoors, they’ve counted that small inconvenience as a tiny sacrifice for their mission. Having seen Jesus move in their midst, they remained driven to keep chasing kingdom advances. These folks weren’t trudging with slumped shoulders through a weekend morning on which they’d rather be sleeping in. No: they had smiles on their faces, pep in their step, and joy in their greetings. They radiated an energy that I absorbed and tried to take to my now-smaller asphalt team an hour later.
In college, I was taught that writers are readers. I scoffed at this axiom, as I wasn’t a reader. But those words proved true this year—a year in which my book Scared to Life was edited and published. In 2021, I read and listened to more books than in any previous year of my life—despite rebuilding my business from its COVID revenue plunge, publishing a book, and trying to get a podcast off the ground. Here are those books in the order I would recommend them.
If that’s a mile too far, I’d ask whether you’re a fan of Jesus or a follower. If these temporary restrictions are unbearable, I’d ask whether your greater identity is anchored in the Bill of Rights or the Gospel. If church for you is just sitting in rows on a Sunday or chatting with friends in its foyer, I’d invite you to imagine that church can be more. Much more. And it’s only two miles from where you’re standing right now.
There is a valid lament for losing some of the luxuries of Sunday services, the contagious energy of large gatherings, and the comfort of tangible friendships. We can talk about what we miss, what we long to experience again. When we turn that discomfort into vitriol, we show the world we worship comfort. When we turn public disobedience into a virtue, we put a bushel over our light. When we use our time, energy, and platform to push our wills, we tell our audience who really sits on the throne of our hearts. When a pew position defines our Christianity more than our life the six other days of the week, we don’t have anything worthwhile to offer everyone else that can find their fulfillment in a seat at a stadium or theater, bar or airplane.
We all want to be seen on our level. We all want the big people in our world to smile at us, to lower their faces to ours, to affirm our efforts. We want those further along in life to talk with us as equals. We want those who seem all done—all grown up—to treat us like we are, too. This undercurrent keeps social media afloat. These desires lead to car payments and mortgages beyond prudence. These insecurities can push us to constructive self-improvement or inauthentic personas, hard work or cheating, striving or faking.
But I’m burying the lead. Let’s not gloss over an important part of this rule: it was transcribed in the Bible. Not a fan fiction version of the Bible. The real-deal holy book. I’ve attended more than 5,000 church, chapel, and Bible class sessions and have never heard this addressed once by the person at the front of the room. Religion seems to focus on the more Flannelgraphable passages of the Bible.
I don’t know if it’s a blessing or a curse, but I’ve been given faces for the anonymous stories of sexual assault, abuse, and harassment I’ve read online. One by one over the past few years, I’ve learned that people I love, wives of my friends, and women who worship at my church share those stories.
Growing in our faith is a symbiotic process, an experiential education. We all mature when we lean authentically on each other and lean together into both the truth and the mystery of Scripture. When we do all of that, we create a community that people from all walks of life will crave and something no app could ever duplicate.
One thing we can all be a part of, though, is the remedy for whatever we feel ails our local church or even the global Church. Few of us will impact multiple churches. None of us will change the American church as we know it. We can, however, follow Mother Teresa’s call to “help one person at a time, and always start with the person nearest you.”
Recently, my circle of friends has been growing deeper with each other. My Tuesday night study group, specifically, has been embarking into the kind of conversations you’d expect at a therapist’s office. My encounter with Peter Wohlleben’s book happened as we have been in the process of distilling our DNA to make our culture replicable. Several of my takeaways from the book explain why our circle has functioned with such health—and why it continues to grow.
I just ugly cried in a public park downtown.
Don’t worry: they were happy tears. I was overcome with both gratitude and hope.
With more and more faith-based movies making money on the big screen, maybe we’re not too far from Christian themes coming to the small screen. Reality TV is just the venue for that cable revival. Church people have some prime licensing tie-ins that could get us to a critical mass that network executives won’t be able to ignore.
There’s not a single verse in the Bible that says church has to be boring, that it has to be attended in investment banker attire, that worship can be expressed only in liturgical ways. When Jesus healed people or raised their loved ones from the dead, how do you think those beneficiaries responded? If lives are being utterly changed in a church, why would we expect a different response?
It’s not numbness. I’ve just moved on—like I do on the highway after I pray for the family involved in the wreck I just passed. It was such work to “hold this trip loosely with open hands” that I barely felt it eventually leave my hands.
This isn’t an exhaustive list, any more than it’s an easy one. These suggestions can get you in the right headspace, though, which will help all of you build your own list.
I chose to move to Lynchburg and have fallen in love with it enough to call it home. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that my wife and I are factors in my sister and some of our closest friends emigrating to what we lovingly call “LynchVegas.” Here are the selling points with which I would counter the Lynchburg skeptics.
It was an emotional moment for me, yet I didn’t know how to feel. I was moved by the gesture, but I felt awkward for being the sole recipient. Love, respect, and appreciation wafted with the smell of bread, protein, and dairy; but I didn’t feel like what I love to do needed to be rewarded. In a welcome moment on the horizontal level, I felt something vertical in motion.
It’s just interesting to me where I and other people draw our differing lines and how those lines seem to sprout into moral boundaries.