Hands Too Full

Lately, I find myself increasingly conscious of my hands. Specifically, I’m paying attention to the amount of stuff I’m carrying and considering how I can free up my hands so that I can use them for, you know, hand-type things. You’d think that a techie like myself would have digitized everything by now, rendering the need to carry things obsolete. And yet, I find myself most every morning struggling to get out of my car, struggling to open doors, struggling just navigate the office because I’m always lugging something around with me.

It might be my trusty water cup, something I never leave home without. Or my coffee mug that grants me discounted refills at the cafe. It might be a book I’m reading or some obscure piece of technology I ordered for work. It might be groceries or a takeout order I grabbed because I was too lazy to buy groceries. Sometimes, it’s a toy that my nephew asked me to hold for him. More often than it should be, it’s my phone. It could be any number of things, but the point is that my hands always seem to be full, and it has inconvenienced me to the point that I spend time actively thinking about ways to free up my hands. (It’s also inconvenienced me to the point that I’m writing this blog post about it.)

It’s unnatural to constantly carry all of these things with me all the time. I look painfully awkward trying to walk around with my arms full of junk, and I’m prone to drop things when I’ve overloaded myself. I often run into friendly church folk who offer to shake my hand, not as a formality but as a sincere form of extending grace, and the look of confusion and disappointment on their faces when they realize that I’m too bogged down to return the gesture is haunting. It’s difficult to converse, to play, or even to just feel comfortable when my hands are full. It might sound trivial, but this is a serious problem for me.

It’s also made me consider other ways I’m keeping myself from fully living my life by carrying too much. After all, the things we choose to take with us as we go about our days speak to who we are under the surface. (I believe there’s a book about that.) So my tendency to carry too much physically may be indicative of a deeper issue.

Each of us—even those lucky few who have somehow figured out a way to keep their hands free—carry things with us. We carry the tasks and concerns that occupy our minds. We carry scars and emotional baggage from past experiences. We carry preconceived notions about others and the way the world should work. These are natural, and each has its place, but when we take the time to reflect on all of the things that we carry around with us every day, we begin to truly feel the weight of it all.

What experiences are we missing on out when we’re too busy worrying about some potential future disaster to be present in the moment? How many deep, meaningful connections with others do we deprive ourselves of when we’re too cyncical to entrust even the tiniest parts of ourselves to other people? Imagine how much we could learn, how much we could enjoy the world around us, how much lighter we would feel if we just weren’t bogged down by everything we’re carrying.

This is probably the part where I should have some practical advice on how to free ourselves up mentally and emotionally; I don’t. The truth is that I’m terrible at letting things go. Because as burdensome as these things are, they’re still mine. My pain. My preoccupation. My anger. My bias. My doubt. I’ve carried them around for so long that they feel like a part of who I am, and imaging life without them is scary, even though I know life without them would be better.

Sometimes, letting go looks like acceptance. It means seeing things as they are and letting them be. Other times, it means distance. Maybe you don’t need that particular stressor in your life. And in other cases, it may mean something else. For each of us, the process of moving past things that weigh us down is different, but it starts with recognizing the fact that we’re carrying entirely too much and naming the things that we need to get rid of.

And that’s where I find myself now. I’m aware that I carry too much, and I’m starting to pinpoint the burdens that I’m bearing unnecessarily. I hope that with time, I’ll find a way of letting these things go so that they won’t weigh me down anymore. Every day, I’m seeking to feel a little lighter and live a little more fully. And who knows? Maybe along the way I’ll figure out how to free up my hands, too.

New Study Confirms Something I Already Believed

The internet has offered me a new source of endless entertainment. It’s quite simple, really. As I’m scrolling through my Facebook feed, if I see a story or a quote that I find questionable, I’ll simply plug a few of the keywords along with the term “Snopes” into my search bar and see what I find. Nine times out of ten, the first result is an article from the fact-checking website that debunks the claims of the story I’m checking and offers compelling evidence against it.

Once I’ve confirmed my suspicions (and usually checked a couple of other sources just to be sure), I go back to the original post in question. As respectfully as I can, I write a comment indicating that the content is fake and linking to the Snopes article. Sometimes, I even explain a little bit about the history of how the hoax spread around. And I usually end my comment with a simple request: “Please check your sources.”

A funny thing happens after I leave these sorts of comments. I come back later and find that the post is still there. Sometimes, the original poster will have liked my comment or even replied to it, but the misleading post remains. On the person’s profile. In public. After they’ve already been told that what they’re sharing is untrue.

This absolutely baffles me. I can sympathize with those who fall into the trap of sharing something that’s untrue. I’ve been guilty of not properly checking my sources once or twice myself. But once I found out that I had posted something that wasn’t accurate, I quickly corrected it by either updating the post with an apology or by taking it down altogether. I would never want something untrue or downright fake associated with my profile, my public image. And I certainly wouldn’t want to lead those who read my posts astray. Yet, I see people leave this sort of content on their pages all the time. I just don’t get it.

I think it’s important to note that I’m not saying people should stop sharing things that I disagree with. I’m aware that my opinions aren’t infallible, and I’m happy to have civil, constructive, intelligent conversation. But what I’m not willing to do is take seriously content that has been proven to be fake.

It’s one thing to accidentally share misinformation. It happens to the best of us. But once it’s been definitively proven that the content you shared is false, it is no longer an accident. It becomes intentional, purposeful, and downright dangerous. Leaving content like this on your profile is damaging in several ways.

On the most basic level, it spreads misinformation. We all know that information is a powerful thing. It influences people’s beliefs and decisions. It affects elections and world events. And it can either reinforce or call into question ideas held by those who are exposed to it. That’s why we need good, true information. If we want to make informed decisions, improve the world, and just be all-around intelligent people, it starts with the information that we’re taking in and sharing. If that information is false, then everything we build on that foundation will be flawed.

We humans are prone to confirmation bias, the tendency to prioritize information that reinforces our already-held beliefs. If I see something on Facebook that I agree with, I’m more likely to spend time on it and even to share it. This is perfectly natural. But if I allow that confirmation bias to lead me down the path of sharing information that I know to be fake, then I’m not making a positive contribution to the conversation. I’m just making things worse for everyone.

Sharing fake news also hurts your credibility. Sure, some people who agree with you might not care whether your data is true or not, but those who care about intellectual integrity are going to come to the conclusion that you aren’t a reliable source on information. From then on, nothing you share is going to hold any weight with other people because you have a track record of sharing things that aren’t true. And if that’s the case, what’s the point in sharing things in the first place?

No one wants to be the fake news person. People don’t like the fake news person. Don’t be the fake news person.

But most importantly, purposefully sharing false information is a lie. There is no justification for intentionally spreading fake news. No belief, no opinion, no ideological claim is worth more than your integrity. When you knowingly share something that’s fake, you are lying to your friends and family, the people you’re supposed to be the most honest with. I know we all have our beliefs that we want to defend, but is it really worth lying to the people who mean the most to us?

At the end of the day, good ideas are backed up by true, high-quality data. If you believe that what you have to say has value (as we all do), then don’t settle for something that’s fake and hope that no one will notice. Give your ideas, your friends and family, and ultimately yourself the respect they’re due and quit it with the fake news. We can do better. We deserve better. So let’s do better.

Glee and God's Relatability

In my young adult Sunday School class at church, we’re doing a series on portrayals of God in culture and how they compare to the God of the Christian faith. This blog post is an adaptation of some of the discussion points from the second lesson.

Let me begin by addressing the elephant in the room: This is not the original version of the song “One of Us.” This is the Glee version of the song “One of Us.” I am not ashamed of my love for Glee or for their rendition of this song. I came across it during a recent re-watch of the show and found it to be the perfect topic for a discussion like this one. Although the show from which it comes is dramatic and silly, if we take the song seriously, it reveals some profound truths about the way many people view God, and I think that’s worth discussing.

I used to think I was being a bit rebellious when I listened to this song, like I might get in trouble for it if my pastor found out. Because the lyrics contain some questions about God that you wouldn’t expect to hear someone ask in church, at least not in such blunt terms. But I don’t consider this song offensive; rather, I’d call it misinformed.

“One of Us” reveals some beliefs and questions about God that are common in our culture. These issues usually lie under the surface, but it’s important to bring them into the light because they are real, and the church has adequate responses to them. What follows is a short list of the theological issues I see raised in the song and how the Christian faith addresses each one.

This song portrays God as mysterious and unknowable. The opening line asks the question, “If God had a name, what would it be?” This implies that God doesn’t have characteristics of basic relatability, or at least that he hasn’t revealed them to people. This sort of belief is all too common in our culture today. While it’s true that God is transcendent and beyond human comprehension (see last week’s blog post, there’s much, much more to the story.

One of the most amazing truths of the Christian faith is that the God of the universe desires to know us. He’s chosen of his own accord to enter history and interact with his creation in a deep, personal way. He even allows himself to be affected emotionally by human actions. He didn’t have to do that, but he chose to.

In response to the song’s question about God’s name, the answer is clear: God has a name, and he’s chosen to reveal it to us (Exodus 3:14). This revelation of the divine name has huge implications for our ability to know God and to relate to him on a personal level. Every relationship has two elements: knowing someone and being known by them. God knows us fully, whether we like it or not, but our ability to know him is dependent on his revelation of himself, and he’s chosen to take that step, to open himself up to us. Some might even call that vulnerability.

The song also views God as distant and unreachable. According to the lyrics, God has no face and lives “up in heaven all alone” with “nobody calling on the phone.” Like the narrator of this song, many people believe in God but don’t think that they have any access to him. Some adhere to the “cosmic watchmaker” theory, the idea that God set the universe in motion and then withdrew from it, allowing things to play out according to the natural laws he put in place. This apathetic deism is tragically all too common in our culture.

But it does not line up with the way God is portrayed in the Bible or the way God has interacted with his people over the centuries. Christians worship a God who is not only involved in the affairs of the world, but is so involved that he is always available to his followers. God is omnipresent, which means that his presence is with us in all places and at all times. All we have to do in order to communicate with him is reach out in prayer. Does that sound like a distant God to you?

God is involved in the mundane, everyday events of our lives. Every minute, he is present with us and available to us. We each experience phases of life when God feels distant, but even in those moments, he is there. He is available to us because he wants us to reach out to him, to know him, to live this life with him. All we have to do is open ourselves up to his presence.

The thesis of this song is the question, ”What if God was one of us?” The song imagines God as a stranger simply trying to get home. This question reveals a deep desire that we have to worship a God who is relatable. We want a God who can sympathize with us, who knows what it’s like to go through what we go through. We want a God we can relate to, a God who is like us in some way.

In response to that desire, the Christian faith has some good news: God did, in fact, become one of us. We don’t have to wonder what it might be like if God were one of us, because it’s already happened. In the person of Jesus Christ, the God of the universe became a man and lived life with us. He experienced what it’s like to grow up, to work, to struggle, to have his heart broken, even to suffer and die.

And that fact offers us encouragement. There is nothing we can experience that God hasn’t already been through. It’s not enough that we can know God and reach him. He took it even further. He came to the earth and lived a human life so that he could connect even more deeply with us. There’s nothing unknowable, distant, or unrelatable about Jesus. He’s a person just like us, and he also happens to be God.

So you want to know what it would be like if God were one of us? Look no further than Jesus Christ. He is God, but he’s also one of us. And that makes all the difference.

Legislation Isn't Always the Answer

I realized at an early age that the world is a broken place. And it wasn’t the result of some traumatic event or major loss. All I had to do was look around, to pay attention to what was taking place around me, and it was easy to recognize just how messed up things are. Or more specifically, how messed up we’ve made things. The bad things that happen are generally the result of selfish decisions made by individuals and groups that have tragic consequences for themselves and for others. And as a kid observing these awful events taking place around me, I had a strong urge to stop them somehow. I wanted to make the world better. Often, I found myself seeing something happen in the world and thinking, “There should be a law against that.”

Take racism, for example. There was a time in my life when I literally thought that expressing racism should be a crime. “Sure,” I thought, “we can’t stop people from holding prejudiced beliefs, but we can stop them from voicing them.” In my mind, throwing someone in jail for saying something racially insensitive or treating another person differently due to the color of their skin would eventually suppress racism to the point that it would disappear. It sounds ludicrous now, but I actually used to think that we could legislate racism out of existence. Now, I know a little better.

As I’ve grown up, my recognition of the world’s brokenness has only grown more vast and nuanced. I’ve seen people mistreat one another in ways that break my heart and haunt my mind. And the more I see of these behaviors, the more I realize that the issue doesn’t lie in the things that we do; it lies at the very root of who we are. Things like discrimination, violence, corruption, and the like aren’t ultimately external or legal issues. They’re heart issues. And no law or punishment can heal a diseased human heart.

The truth is that we can’t legislate morality. As Jasmin Patterson points out in her article at Relevant, forcing people to adhere to a moral standard through the legal system can’t actually change their hearts. In fact, it probably only makes them less inclined to change their underlying beliefs. Whether it’s in the classroom, at home, or in the political arena, making anything mandatory automatically makes it undesirable for many people. And if we actually want to make the world a better place, we can’t just deal with the symptoms. We have to find a cure for the disease.

I’m not saying that laws are bad or unnecessary. Of course, we need a legal system that protects peoples’ basic rights and deals with those who infringe on the rights of others. And there are some issues that should be dealt with through the legal system. For example, I think that the regulation of businesses (such as rules against monopolies and measures protecting net neutrality) are best left up to legislation. But those legal measures are really just bandages that temporarily and inadequately treat the real problem. They can’t change the human heart.

So if making laws isn’t the way to solve the world’s problems, what is? There are some who say that a free and open market would naturally take care of most of these issues for us. On their podcast Who Would Build the Roads, hosts Josh Taylor and Kevin McCreary represent this view well and argue that social ostracization is a powerful enough force to keep people in line. If someone commits an act that goes against the public consensus of what’s acceptable behavior, the community can simply shun that person (especially by excluding them from participation in the exchange of goods) until they commit to following the rules.

This makes sense to a certain degree. People need to be a part of a community, and they have to engage in the market in order to provide for themselves and their families, so threatening to ostracize wrongdoers might be enough to convince most people to act properly. But does that really solve the problem? To me, it seems to have the same issue as the legal approach: It only deals with the symptoms, not the underlying disease. If one is only concerned with other peoples’ external behavior, then this method would probably work just fine, possibly even better than the legal system. But if what we really want to do is heal the world’s brokenness, we have to tackle the source of the issue, the human heart, and find a way transform it.

I’m convinced that the only solution to the issue of our brokenness is the love and grace of God. We humans are simply too messed up to fix ourselves. No matter what system we come up with, whether it be a government or a market or anything else, it will ultimately fall short of setting the world right because it will not be able to solve the issue of our own selfishness. The only thing that can overcome that selfishness is redemption, and redemption is a miracle that we cannot bring about ourselves.

But that doesn’t mean that we have no role to play. Those of us who claim to follow Christ can have an immense impact on the world by simply living out the Christian life authentically. By choosing to walk with joy instead of cynicism, to forgive those who do us wrong, to love others as ourselves, and to live in the radical way that Jesus calls us to, we are putting God’s love and mercy on display for all to see, and we are drawing others towards him through the way that we conduct ourselves. Authentic Christian living is compelling, and it has the ability to inspire others to live the same way. Only by living with God’s love and mercy as realities in our lives and sharing those realities with others can we truly have a lasting impact on the world around us.

The world is broken, and recognizing that brokenness can be disheartening. We’ve tried every way we know of to fix it and found that every method of human invention simply falls short. But there is a solution to the corruption of the human heart, and it lies at the heart of God. Some of us have personally experienced the redemption that God’s love and mercy offer us; others have not. But it’s available to all, and it’s the responsibility of those of us who’ve experienced God’s grace to live into it, to share it with others, and in this way to begin to transform the world into a more loving, less broken place.

The Best Kind of Tired

I spent the last week in Louisville, Kentucky, working with children at the Free Will Baptist National Convention, my denomination's annual gathering. It was a great conference filled with worship services, choir practices, Bible competitions, and tons of quality time with great friends. But the overwhelming feeling I get as I reflect on my experience is simply exhaustion. After a week of hard work and the brutal schedule that conferences impose, I’m tired.

And I don’t think that’s a bad thing. In fact, I find it entirely appropriate. If I weren’t tired after a week like last week, it would probably be an indication that something had gone terribly wrong. Because even though I don’t like feeling tired and do my best to avoid it, there are times when tired is the best thing I possibly could be.

We often think of exhaustion as an indication that a person isn’t taking take of themselves, and I’ll admit that I’ve put myself in that position before. But that isn’t always the case. I don’t think it’s true for my current situation. Did I get as much rest over the past week as I should have? Probably not. But that’s not the real reason I’m so tired. If it were, I wouldn’t be writing a blog post about it; I’d be napping. Instead, my feeling of exhaustion came from a much more positive place.

The truth is that I’m feeling tired because I put all of my available energy into the tasks at hand over the past week. Whether it was running audio and video for a service, helping teach a song for the children’s choir, or simply spending time with other people at the conference, I didn’t hold anything back. I was totally engaged and willing to give it my all in order to make the week as successful and enjoyable as possible. And of course, that left me feeling drained by the end of the week.

This experience of being dedicated completely to something is not one I’m used to. Most of the time, my mind is being pulled in a dozen different directions, and I’m rarely able to focus on any one task at a time. As I type this blog post, I’m exporting a video, uploading a file to a server, and trying to stay on top of my Twitter feed. And this is just a typical day for me. So when I get to a place where I’m able to focus all of my time, energy, and attention on what’s right in front of me, I find it refreshing.

And after the fact, there’s a sense of catharsis and accomplishment that simply can’t be beat. Like the feeling of soreness in my muscles after a particularly strenuous workout, I savor the inevitable exhaustion that comes from giving my all to something. It’s a sign to myself and to others that I really did do my best, and it gives me an opportunity to slow down, reflect on what I’ve experienced, and truly appreciate how wonderful it was. I’ve been blessed to do just that over the past few days, which is what inspired me to write this blog post.

These sorts of experiences can’t be manufactured or planned. Believe me, I’ve tried. But when they come, they are truly magical. I’m so grateful that I was able to go to the conference this year and give my all to make it the best it could be. I only hope that the next time I’m feeling this tired, it’s because I gave my all to something, because this is the best kind of tired that there is.