Destined

Dear Eugene,

Once a friend said to me, "Ever since the pastor in my previous church told me about the doctrine of 'predestination,' I found myself not telling the gospel to people as much as before, sometimes not at all.  I think, Well, if God has done his choosing already, maybe things are just gonna be what and how they are gonna be..."

I stared him in the eyes and said, "Let's say this together: Get thee behind me, satanic doctrine!  Whatever takes us away from doing God's will is not from Him.  I am not saying the doctrine is from the Satan, far from it; it is how the Satan has twisted it out of shape to work against God--and we allowed it!

Talk about choosing: we have to make a choice to let the Satan do that to the doctrine and do its evil will to us.  We haven't been faithful in learning the historical context/burden of the doctrine's formulation, which is convoluted and still continual.  We want to use it as if we are the one to discover it ourselves only yesterday, acknowledging not the much blood sweat and tears our forefathers had shed to fight a way out of some very specific historical circumstances.

For now all we need to know about this doctrine is: Since God is the one who does the choosing, we do not prejudge ourselves or others, not Saul the preeminent Christian-killer, not Zacchaeus the filthy little traitor (who probably backpedaled after Christ left town).  God does his choosing; we do his will.  His will is that we go into all the world and preach the Good News to everyone.  We are not in the position to give up on anyone.  We are free to follow, not free to decide whom God will choose."

Well, Eugene, that's a big prologue to what I really want write about today :)  I tried to trim it, but I guess when it comes to touchy topic, I don't want to create further confusion.

My reflection today is: Why do we have this great tendency, often succumb to this huge temptation, to use ideas, propositions, doctrines to explain away people and things?

To say the least, cos life is just easier that way.  People are just hard to deal with; you give them an inch they'll chew you up whole.  You touch someone you are bound to get burned, even when the touching wasn't meant to be intimate to begin with.  What goes up must come down; what comes together will sooner or later break apart.  People agree, then agree to disagree, but seldom without dismissing the other person wholesale.

And sometimes when we touch

The honesty's too much

And I have to close my eyes and hide

This Dan Hill song is like a portable novella, line after line filled with aching pulses and astute insights, endlessly fascinating.  Yes, how we long to be more authentic, more honest, more genuine in relating to others; and how impossible it is!

So we choose the easy way out.  We talk to each others in pithy statements, words and phrases that had long lost their precise original meaning, ride in shared or counter prejudices to stay sane in the crazy traffic of human interaction/conflict.  Just tell me what this verse, this doctrine means, Mr. Pastor!  Don't give me two questions when I asked you only one.  Don't give me a sermon; I want a soundbite, an idea that I can use--now! I want to check out of this conversation in no time; I need to pick up my son from soccer!

N. T. Wright said it well:

“Slogans and clichés are often shorthand ways of making more complex statements. In Christian theology, such phrases regularly act as ‘portable stories’—that is, ways of packing up longer narratives about God, Jesus, the church and the world, folding them away into convenient suitcases, and then carrying them about with us.

Shorthands, in other words, are useful in the same way that suitcases are. They enable us to pick up lots of complicated things and carry them around all together.

But we should never forget that the point of doing so, like the point of carrying belongings in a suitcase, is that what has been packed away can then be unpacked and put to use in the new location.

Too much debate [has taken] the form of people hitting one another with locked suitcases. It is time to unpack our shorthand doctrines, to lay them out and inspect them. Long years in a suitcase may have made some of the contents go moldy. They will benefit from fresh air, and perhaps a hot iron.”

Unpacking takes time and energy though; it consumes our life.  It is not a mechanical process, cannot be done by machines or churned out of a production line.  It is done prayerfully and attentively among unique human beings, each one uniquely sinful, uniquely beautiful, uniquely redeemable in God's eyes.  No abstraction, no shortcuts, no "predestinating" on our part to prejudge where the conversation will take us.  We go where God asks us to go, under His authority exercised through scripture.

At times I'd like to break you

And drive you to your knees

At times I'd like to break through

And hold you endlessly

"We are all human," my manager said yesterday when we were talking about serving our clients wholeheartedly.  Part of being human, I suppose, means we can see our own limits, but we always have this yearning to break through them.  Someone, something is calling us to come out and play.

Is there a limit to how much I can give?  I asked God.

I will decide on that--maybe I already have, He answered.  I make the decision; you do my will.

Determined and destined, Alex