Trinity and Humanity

“So you can encourage certain student behaviors by putting in place positive consequences,” the speaker at an education conference said. “If you want to encourage students to be on time for class, schedule a quiz at the very beginning of class that is worth some points. This will encourage the behavior you want.” The speaker was a behavioral analyst, and her tips for encouraging certain student behaviors in the classroom (and discouraging other behaviors) were insightful. Her talk made me think about how we often try to control others’ behavior and choices.

This is particularly true for parents, and it’s difficult to let go of the reins as your children mature into teenagers and young adults. I would also say that it is difficult for many churches to permit the free moral agency that God has allowed humanity. When I compare a church’s response to my own response as a parent, I see a similarity in the area of misunderstanding our responsibility.

When our children are small, it is our job as parents to protect them and guide them, but as they grow up, it’s understood that parents must let their children make choices and learn to live with the consequences.The church also sometimes views its members as needing protection and firm guidance; however, the difference is that members of a church are typically adults who need to have the agency to make choices and take responsibility for those choices. When a church is operating appropriately (i.e., supporting and encouraging members), the membership will most likely have a wide representation of moral views on contemporary issues. In this atmosphere of love and support, diversity with unity is encouraged and love for all is emphasized.

Jesus addresses this issue beginning with the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5-7. Though this is worthy of a much longer blog, I find it helpful to think of the first two chapters (Matthew 5 and 6) of  the Sermon on the Mount as a way of being present and properly judging my own thoughts. In other words, these scriptures help me realize when I’m off-track in my own thoughts and need to re-think my priorities.

Chapter 7 in Matthew begins Jesus’s discussion of our tendency to judge (and consequently, try to control) others. This is where we as parents and as the church tend to go astray because we fail to permit others the freedom to make lousy choices. We assume that our viewpoint is the right one, maybe the only one, not understanding that we are not omniscient. Instead, we are caught up in our own culture, class, upbringing, experiences, and a whole host of other influences.

Jesus says, “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?” (Matt. 7:3, NIV). The “plank” is our tendency to believe we have a responsibility to change others by attempting to control them. Once the plank is removed from our own eye, we understand that our primary responsibility is to control ourselves and our own thoughts, not others. Without a plank in our own eye, we “will see clearly to remove the speck from [our] brother’s eye” (Matt 7:5) by being able to see it’s not our job, but God’s. In fact, when we do strive to manipulate others, even by offering gifts or positive outcomes that they want, they can feel resentful and distance themselves from us. Matthew 7:6 says they will “turn and tear you to pieces,” rejecting even a desirable gift because of the motivation to control.

Behavior analysts like the speaker at my conference can provide insight into the way humans respond to consequences of the choices they make. While promoting positive classroom behavior is helpful, it’s important to recognize that we have a plank in our eye that we cannot see, and so does everyone else. Our responsibility is not to change or manipulate others but to surrender them to God, allowing the Father, Son, and Spirit to work wholeness and healing into all of our lives.

~by Nan Kuhlman

photo courtesy of texturex.com

It’s really summertime because I am walking again every morning. My route through our subdivision allows me to admire the bounties of summer – blue skies with puffy clouds, lush green grass on beautifully manicured lawns (not ours), lovely landscaping – and it takes me down streets that I don’t normally drive through. Since I began this practice on a regular basis about three weeks or so ago, I have walked by one home that has a pickup truck parked on the edge of the lawn near the street. Its bed is filled with junk: an old toilet, microwave, gas grill, baseball bat, to name a few items. The truck has been in the same spot for these three weeks, bed filled with junk, and there’s no sign that it will be going anywhere soon.

Three weeks is a long time to look at a truckload of junk and wonder what it means, and in my wondering I thought about the junk at my own house. It’s concealed better, that’s for sure, and I’m fairly certain none of my neighbors knows about it, though they may suspect I need to do some serious cleaning out whenever our garage door is open. Considering junk like my neighbor’s, left out in the open for rain and sun to work on (to no avail), or junk like my own, neatly stowed and stacked (yet still being junk), makes me notice how often we hang on to stuff that we know we don’t want, that doesn’t help us or serve us or enhance our lives in any way.

I also surmise that behind the beautifully manicured and landscaped homes there is junk that should be hauled away. My garage and the pickup truck parked on the other street are not the only ones who hang on to unhelpful, no longer useful things. While these things could be material goods, they could also be attitudes – judgment, discrimination – anything that seeks to make another human being separate or “other.” Despite the laundry list of differences one could come up with, our common humanity and our special, individual status as a beloved child of God unites us. Even as a church, the very body of Christ, judgments about who is right and who is wrong override our common heritage as beloved children of God. We all may be Adam’s descendants to begin with, but ultimately we are brothers and sisters with Jesus. The junk of needing to be better than someone, anyone, sits in our secret places (or sometimes not so secret places), and it takes up the space where we might know the full freedom we’re entitled to as God’s kids, in intimate fellowship with the Father, the Son (our bro), and the Holy Spirit.

What junk are you hanging on to? What’s keeping you from the freedom you have as God’s child, Jesus’s sib, the container of the Spirit?

~by Nan Kuhlman

P.S. Somebody is missing their teeth in our neighborhood, too. Everyone has his/her own set of troubles. 🙂

 I have a mental list of authors I would love to have lunch with just to talk shop. Maybe you have a list of inspirational people (perhaps not authors) that you would like to have a conversation with just to hear firsthand their stories and the insights they gleaned from their experiences. My list includes nonfiction authors Joan Didion (The Year of Magical Thinking), Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love and Big Magic), Anne Lamott (Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace), and Cheryl Strayed (Wild and Tiny Beautiful Things). I’m a fan of nonfiction writing, and as I read about others’ experiences, I learn from them, and sometimes I see myself in them. Even if their experience is completely different from anything I’ve known, I usually still connect with the emotion that drove their decisions.

Strayed is one author that while I’ve not experienced life as she knew it (losing her mother in her early 20s, becoming a heroin user for a period of time, having an abortion), I still can relate to the emotions that spurred her to make these choices. As a result of her experiences, Strayed offers down-to-earth insights in her nonfiction, and many fans have written her to share their favorite quotes that spoke to their hearts right at the time they needed it. Strayed compiled these “best quotes” into a new book called Brave Enough, and I recently gave this book to our daughter for her high school graduation.

Before I presented it to our daughter, I read about 75 of the 135 pages (I couldn’t help myself!), and I came across this quote from Cheryl Strayed that spoke truth to me: “You must be inclusive in order to feel yourself among the included” (49). It made me think about struggles that organized religion has faced, particularly when wrapped up in legalism. As part of a legalistic group for a number of years, I can attest to the fact that when I was quick to judge others and exclude them based on the lack of religious performance in some area, I often felt I was on the ever-turning hamster wheel of trying to earn my place in the kingdom of God, not to mention making myself worthy of God’s love. As long as I compared others (and myself) to a rigid set of rules in order to discern who was in and who was out of God’s favor, I rarely felt included, accepted, let alone liked by God.

Strayed’s wise quote helps us see that as long as we judge and exclude others, we will never feel included ourselves, and perhaps more importantly, we will never grow to realize that it wasn’t about keeping all the rules perfectly in the first place. By loving others and extending grace, we finally realize that the inclusive sense of belonging we’ve been looking for has always been available, offered freely by the Triune God.

~by Nan Kuhlman

photo courtesy of  widewallpapercollections.blogspot.com

There are many reasons people intentionally become parents – the desire to create a family, to participate in raising a child, or just to experience pregnancy and birth, as well as all the other stages. I can’t remember why I wanted to become a parent, but I’m sure it was probably a combination of all those reasons and more. As our children are now grown (the youngest is 18), I look back at all those struggles of parenting, and I realize that parenting allows us to see into God’s heart and understand a little about how the Father, Son, and Spirit feel as they parent us.

When I remember those long nights, staying up with a sick child and sometimes not well myself, I see the faithfulness of God in action. Though I was far from being omniscient, especially on little sleep, I reassured my little one that he or she would get better. I was present and attentive, and though not omnipresent, my child knew I wasn’t going to leave. This same reassurance from God sometimes comes from inside us, a certain knowing that all is well despite outward circumstances, and sometimes it comes from outside us: an offhand comment from a stranger, a song on the radio, a call from a friend, a helpful article.

When I think of difficulties and bad choices my children have made, I first think of my own parents and the suffering I put them through, and then I realize how God feels when he/she watches us make choices that will only bring more difficulty. I want to save my children from this hardship, just as I’m sure God wants to save us from our foolishness, but the best learning tool is the ability to choose. Free moral agency, they call it, and it is the basis of our world. Without it, we might not have the tragedy that sometimes happens, but we also would not have profound instances of beauty, compassion, and grace. It must be worth it in God’s eyes, so I do my best to let them make their choices, good or bad. I can’t say I’m proficient yet in not offering unwanted advice, but I am working on it.

One of my favorite Bible images comes from Matthew 23:37, where Jesus says, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing” (NIV). Jesus wants to save them, protect them, even though they continue to make bad choices. He totally gets the mother in me, yet he moves me toward being the mother I want to be, the one who knows how to let “free moral agency” do its thing.

Parenting is our opportunity to glimpse God’s heart, to feel the pain that comes when we watch loved ones suffer or make choices that we don’t agree with and know this is the same pain that God feels as he/she watches us exercise our free moral agency in less than perfect ways. As we support and parent our children through all life’s stages, we can know the Father, Son, and Spirit support and parent us perfectly, forever faithful, present, and patient.

~by Nan Kuhlman