Caroline Ferdinandsen

Dear 2008: It's Not You--It's Me

Caroline Ferdinandsen — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 13:30:54 -0800

Dear 2008:

I’ve never broken up with the past before, so I’ll be honest—this will be a little awkward. You’ve been great, but it’s not you, I promise. It’s me.

You’ve been very good to me this year, having taught me about the value of a simple life, the reward of slow and steady practice, the glory of aging a little bit at a time, and the sheer beauty of four separate seasons. I hardly knew you twelve months ago, but I’d heard about your reputation—that you would be better than 2007 and that an optimist would find you charming and good. They were right. You were all of those things.

But I was reading the Bible this morning and God said that there’s a time for everything under the sun. A part of me wishes I could keep you for a while longer. You’re safe and really, really predictable. I like that about the past. But God has new things for me and that means that I have to let you go.

And I should probably tell you that some people hurt me in 2008—and even before that. If I stay with you longer than God intended, then it’s quite possible that I will keep those things closer to my heart than I should. Sometimes I like to remind myself of who hurt me, and how it felt, and how I can possibly repay them. As long as you and I stay together, I’ll keep courting those feelings—maybe even end up getting married. That would be a huge mistake and we both know it. As one man said, forgiveness does not change the past, but it does enlarge the future.

Another thing: you and I made some mistakes last year that I’ve repented for. I understand that God has flung them out of his sight, but if I keep you around, I’ll be tempted to repeat them. You have some of my dark secrets and I need to keep moving toward the light. I hope you understand.

Me and the Past—we go way back. I have a bad history of holding on to different years for too long, but this time I see some new adventures in the distance. The Bible speaks so often of hope and God uses all kinds of wonderful metaphors for our future: it can be winning a footrace, coming home to a faithful father, being rescued by a shepherd, or gaining a crown. I wish I could have stayed with you, but I must follow the path that stretches out in front of me.

All of this is not to say that I should’ve simply skipped you. That could never be true. Some people try to do that—hibernate for a year or more, wasting their life or numbing their life or even pausing their life until something better arrives. I loved you fully, and perhaps that is why I can say goodbye with such confidence and peace.

So this journey we’ve been on is all part of life, right? We were good together for awhile, but it’s only right that we say goodbye to each other. I’ve just met 2009, and I would never make a good mistress—trying to love two of you at once. The decent thing to do is to let you go, but to tell you that I won’t forget you. I hope you understand.

Love,

Caroline

Blessed Are the Geeks, for They Shall Inherit the Earth?

Caroline Ferdinandsen — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 14:46:22 -0800

Perhaps you've read the rash of articles this season trying to decipher whether Barack Obama is a certifiable geek. Apparently, geekism is related to techno-savvy and intelligence whereas nerdism and dorkitude relates more to social awkwardness and a fondness for Star Trek gang signs. This puts our President-elect in an awkward spot, since he seems to straddle these definitions.

But we Americans like our labels to be as accurate as possible, so a variety of journalists have fashioned a new word for Obama and perhaps others in his predicament: nerd-adjacent.

People who are not themselves fully steeped in nerd culture—but through partial traits and the proximity of friends find they are pretty darn close—can be classified as nerd-adjacent.

In case you’re reading this and worried whether you fall into one or more of these categories, here is a simple list of traits. (We could make this into one of those Seventeen magazine-style quizzes, where you give yourself a certain number of points for each trait, but ConversantLife is way classier than that. Plus, you aren’t really that interested in a score—you just want to make sure you’re fairly normal. Also, please note that there will be a spiritual application at the end, so if you’re wondering why I’m not being profound or anything, just give me a second and I might get around to it).

All right, here goes my unscientific classification that comes from working with honors high school students for a very long time.

Geeks often lean toward these traits:

A fascination with all things technological.
A higher-than-average intelligence
An interest in satire, fiction, and online journalism
Finding personal enjoyment in being an expert in something—usually in the fields of science, medicine, or telecommunications
A fairly large bevy of friends (more commonly called a bevy, as opposed to a posse, or homeboys, or a crew)

Nerds, on the other hand, might also add these traits

A self-awareness of his or her nerd qualities
Taking enjoyment in those qualities to the point of flaunting them, or finding his identity in a nerd sub-culture.
Adopting some of the stereotypes of this sub-culture, which, rather than listing them all here, can be found in Weird Al Yankovik’s ubiquitous musical manifesto “White and Nerdy."

Dorks push the barriers even more through these mutations:

Social awkwardness
Lack of awareness about this awkwardness
A profound happiness that defies logic

So, do you feel better now that you know the difference? The fourth category, the one that journalists are calling nerd-adjacent, spares you and me from the pain of social awkwardness or rejection, but gives us all the benefits we might like, such as intelligence, or wit, or technical savvy.

All right, so if you’ve read this far, what does this have to do with faith? Here’s my biggest question for you. Are you a Christian—or merely Christ-adjacent? I have classified myself as a Christian for most of my life, assuming that I have adopted all the traits of this sub-culture. But have I ever been guilty of the hyphen? Have I situated myself comfortably among the followers of Christ in order to reap the benefits but have been reluctant to go all in?

Let’s consider how the Bible defines its terms. If you took the previous test—well, sweet. But this one is a touch more important, so stay with me:

The Lukewarmers hold these traits:

Disliking both the heat of the disciple and the chilly conclusions of the apostate
Preferring the relative comfort of the middle ground

I know you inside and out, and find little to my liking. You're not cold, you're not hot—far better to be either cold or hot! (Revelation 3:15-16, The Message)

The Pious could be said to show:

Fervency with regard to politics, morality, and social behavior
Devotion to the appearance of goodness and character

But the Master said to him, "I know you Pharisees burnish the surface of your cups and plates so they sparkle in the sun, but I also know your insides are maggoty with greed and secret evil. Stupid Pharisees! Didn't the One who made the outside also make the inside? (Luke 11:38, The Message)

The Christ-adjacents demonstrate these characteristics:

A proximity to other believers
Enjoying trailing in the wake of “good things” such as comforting sermons, scripture-a-day flip calendars, and nighttime prayers

Don't look for shortcuts to God. The market is flooded with surefire, easygoing formulas for a successful life that can be practiced in your spare time. Don't fall for that stuff, even though crowds of people do. The way to life—to God!—is vigorous and requires total attention. (Matthew 7:13-14, The Message)

Yes, we like our labels to be unambiguous, so there are a few that speak the truth rather plainly. Don’t add up your score and panic. Instead, use the label that can’t be hyphenated, prostituted, mangled, or distorted. Aspire to be called what Jesus Christ himself used for his closest followers: disciple.

Capitalism and his Girlfriend Original Sin: Let’s Just Say It’s Complicated

Caroline Ferdinandsen — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 13:27:59 -0800

If you follow ConversantLife somewhat regularly, you’ll notice a trend lately toward anti-consumerism (including some of my own posts). It seems the right thing to be—a lover of God and humanity more than a lover of things, a Christ follower who chooses abstracts like love and peace over crass commercial objects. I’ve been feeling the vibe myself. The Christmas season tends to inflame these sentiments even more. Christians, you know, can be very anti-establishment when it suits us.

All the talk of philanthropy and anti-consumerism has gotten me thinking. I’m sure lots of other people have thought about these things longer than I have. I’ll bet I could find a hundred books debating the virtues and vices of capitalism. I am not a student of economics, so pardon any embarrassing gaps in my understanding, but here’s a simple layman’s exploration.

I am struggling with the link between greed and capitalism. What would happen if all the corporate moneygrubbers converted this year and everyone became a philanthropist? Truth is, most of the things that I enjoy in my home were made by companies whose founders, at some point, were hungry for a profit. What man finds meaning and pleasure in manufacturing toilet paper or aluminum siding, for example, just for the joy of it? So, if God wants all of us to share, conserve, reduce, and give away, what would become of America? Someone else’s greed has enabled me the freedom to live humbly or to live extravagantly. Thus is the thorny way of capitalism.

Now this leads me other things that give me a headache. What if every family in America was sincerely convicted to withhold its money from the Big Box retail conglomerates and give it away to noble foreign causes? No doubt, the Targets and Best Buys and Wal-Marts would collapse, leaving many manufacturers to fire their employees. Ah, but there’s the catch, for if man’s heart were pure around the world, then noble capitalists wouldn’t need to pay out to war torn countries in the first place. Nor would I give away my old clothes to the homeless, for under God’s principles, the complex conditions leading to homelessness wouldn’t exist.

And what if all the abortion clinics suddenly adopted God’s view of the sanctity of life? If we would reverse every abortion in American this year, imagine the economic impact all those children (many of them in situations of poverty and dysfunction) would have on our culture? But there we go again, for if we were really doing things God’s way, then many of those desperate children wouldn’t have been desperate in the first place (nor even conceived in an unhallowed place, for that matter) . . . and so goes our endless rewind. Every charitable act is predicated on the sin that required it. If that doesn’t blow your mind, read that sentence again.

And now, my head throbbing tonight, I realize that sin seems to be part of the American Dream, and I’m having trouble with that. I’m a product of this centuries-old year national experiment, finding value and comfort in a world with good roads and clean water and entertainment and a sturdy paycheck and light bulbs that go on and off on command. Profit and innovation and greed and curiosity and convenience and narcissism and sin get so mixed up together that I can’t figure out how to get to the beginning of the string. So when I say a sweet prayer with my kids at night that goes something like “Thank you, God, for blessing us with a warm house and food to eat,” it’s starting to feel positively weird. Should I not pray instead, “Thank you, God, that American self-absorption and corporate greed paved the way to our comfort”?

The more I unravel this ball of yarn, the more confused I become. The what-ifs are keeping me awake, and I keep going back and back and back to the beginning of the problem, trying to figure out God’s purposes. And you know where I end up?

The Garden of Eden.

That’s the only place where all the bohemian dreams and political hopes can hope to thrive, and I’m afraid we already missed that train. I understand a little better why hippies wanted to shut out all the capitalist noise, and why human beings dream up utopian societies. We’re all trying to get back to the Garden of Eden, if you ask me.

Perhaps capitalism is the best we’ve got in a fallen world. You may complain that nothing on the ideological menu looks very good to you, including democracy and its free enterprise system, but the alternatives--such as dictatatorship, poverty, injustice, and civil war--will give you food poisoning. The same system that allows us to squash the little guy and over-consume also allows us to love our fellow man. Sin might be part of the human equation, but with Jesus’ help, I’m doing my darndest to make it not so.

It’s complicated and I’m sure somebody’s got a book title they can recommend. But I’m an essayist, and it’s my job to get in and get out for the sake of time and space. In a phrase, original sin always gets us into trouble and God’s grace always gets us out. Tonight, that’s good enough for me.

Interpreting the Tricky Hot-O-Meter

Caroline Ferdinandsen — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 14:11:51 -0800

Some girl in the fifth grade yesterday called my ten-year-old son hot.

Yup. Hot.

Okay, so I think the word hot means, like, sexy and attractive and all that. So when I, his mother, hear that a little vixen uses that word to describe my baby-faced son, I’m ready to sign up for recess duty. I might need to check this out.

And then I realize that fifth-grade hotness is really something else entirely. It really means, from what the locals tell me, that she called him crush-worthy, a boy with some perceived value, a boy who won’t pull her ponytail. This is, in fact, a very good thing. It’s really not about being hot after all.

As his mother, I am caught in the unenviable position of interpreting an elementary school lexicon, which I can access only from a distance. I hear a word, a phrase, in solitary confinement and I botch the interpretation. Such linguistic investigation is teaching me a lesson, namely that unless I hang out on your playground and speak your language, I’d best not try to interpret it. It will only make me look foolish.

Joseph Conrad confessed that words are the great foes of reality. He means that words often betray what we really mean—the truth under the surface. To become a student of you, I must become a student of your language. This sort of careful study is what marriages and churches and communities and even Bible translations are made of. It’s hard work to learn someone else’s language, and that’s why we lazy people would rather not even try. Plus, it’s easier that way to misunderstand you while I’m on the outside looking in and then declare it’s your fault.

One of the fallouts I’ve observed in our modern, decentralized Christianity is that different faith communities are no longer taking the time to listen to the real meaning behind each group’s private language. If a church calls its prayer time “meditation,” and I am not a member of that church, I had better keep my mouth shut before I tell others there’s a Buddha in their lobby. If another church invites women to its leadership meetings, and I am not a member of that church, perhaps I shouldn’t assume they forgot to study I Timothy 2. If a Christian university uses the word patriotism on its website, and I am not familiar with their core doctrines, perhaps I should withhold judgment about their perceived political affiliations.

Discernment is tricky and requires great spiritual maturity. Compassionate interpretation also requires us to listen and sometimes to live among foreigners. Words are organic and contextual, as my son’s admirer so innocently demonstrated to me yesterday. If you never visit the playground, don’t panic at the first sign of controversy. Instead, listen to the intentions beneath the words and see if the heart of the matter might be obscured by a misleading vernacular. If you do find that the little girl is really a vixen, then by all means, call her mother and protect your innocent son. But if you just don’t understand the secret language of fifth graders, make sure your Hot-O-Meter is in good working order before you interpret the results.

The Case for a Little Spiritual Quarantine

Caroline Ferdinandsen — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 11:29:49 -0800

Why do so many of the non-readers at my high school suddenly want to read Twilight? How come the aprons in the 1800s were all made from calico prints? Why do some Christians believe that Obama is the anti-Christ?

In his best selling book The Tipping Point (2000), Malcolm Gladwell explores the parallels between ideas and viruses. He uses an epidemiological motif to promote his thesis—that human behavior is shaped suddenly and powerfully by viral influences in their communities. If ideas are viruses, then my proximity to both Christian skepticism and Christian trendiness is bringing me dangerously close to getting the flu.

I’m going to admit something very honest: my Christian faith has suffered from my chronic reading, interfacing, and networking this past year. I'm rather shocked by this. I thought I was doing myself some good by jumping into the conversation. I’m not talking about the good and beautiful result of knowing all sorts of people. I’m not talking about exposure to new ideas, or being challenged to examine the credibility of my beliefs. But I’m suffering from some information inflammation—the relentless sound bytes, articles, videos, jokes, books, concepts, marketing, and opinions that my spiritual antibodies must filter every day. I don’t think my soul was designed for this much discernment.

Henry David Thoreau, a pantheist of sorts who became transcendentalism’s greatest disciple, did have some cool things to say about simplicity. After living in the woods for two years, it was Thoreau who determined that "a man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can let alone." It used to be that I was able to read the Bible by itself. Now, I have grown accustomed to seeing what ten other people have to say about the Bible first. I used to trust my circle of mentors to help me discern truth from error, but now I can access the anonymous advice of my Facebook friends, bloggers, radio hosts, political pundits, and celebrities. It’s screwing up my immune system.

The more sources I consult, the more likely that Gladwell’s lightning-fast social epidemics will influence my thinking. I’ve heard from and read about all kinds of faith-labels this year: mystics, postmoderns, charismatics, seekers, emergents, traditionalists, culture warriors, apologists and more. I used to think I was educating myself, but now it’s beginning to feel a little absurd. Why would a healthy person kiss every contagious person in the room? My information might be outpacing my application—I mean, do I have any idea how to apply all the things I’ve learned?

It's not only about allowing so-called liberal infections to compromise our spiritual health. Bob Jones University, who apologized recently for its racist policies of the past, issued this statement on their website: ". . . for far too long, we allowed institutional policies regarding race to be shaped more directly by a [segregationist] ethos than by the principles and precepts of the Scriptures. We conformed to the culture rather than provide a clear Christian counterpoint to it." Aw snap. That gets to the heart of the matter, doesn't it?

I’m positioned awkwardly between two generations, separated by a semi-permeable wall called the Internet. I am old enough to remember the way my grandmother lived. As a simple European immigrant, she never read a daily newspaper or drove a car, nor did she have a college education. She read the Bible, listened to a few radio preachers, and dreamed of being a missionary. She told everyone she knew about the Jesus who changed her life. She was hopelessly out-of-touch and uninformed. While her isolation was sometimes maddening to a young girl who tried to be culturally in-the-know, I also loved the simplicity of her faith. When she found a piece of the Good News, she would camp on for a long time, not looking to find a better insight to replace it too quickly.

You might have been scrolling around the Internet, and you happened to find this little posting. If you did, I’m going to say something counterintuitive for a writer looking for an audience. Try the old-fashioned quarantine approach, when momma locked you in your room with a good book when sister had the measles. Run away from all the voices and hunker down with the Bible for a while. When you’re done, pray for discernment. It’ll be the simplest—and healthiest—thing you’ve done in a long time.

Advent Conspiracy

Caroline Ferdinandsen — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 14:44:08 -0800

It's nice to see what some churches are doing this holiday season. Check out this video:

Flannel Boards and Communion Wafers: Welcome to the Church Accessories Hall of Fame

Caroline Ferdinandsen — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 13:12:46 -0800

Last week the stick joined the cardboard box as honorary members of the Toy Hall of Fame. The message is obvious: even primitive things have value, especially when the imagination gets involved. Who needs a Wii when you have a Tree?

So it got me thinking. Having spent some time in no less than nine states and at least 15 evangelical churches in my lifetime, I’m considering a proposal for a Church Accessories Hall of Fame. I’m not sure where to build it, but I can picture the architecture in my head: a monstrous mega-museum with maybe a hydraulic collection plate spinning on the roof?

Anyway, some of you can go way back, but for now, let’s start with some inductees from the 1970s: varnished oak tables from the foyer, the faux-leather hymn book, saltines on a tray, and maroon choir robes with giant zippers down the front. Long, padded pews, Sister Hannah’s flannel board with Caucasian Bible characters, and the plastic snack trays from the downstairs Fellowship Hall. We would have to include a collection of staff photos and their pyramid arrangement: pastor on top, with his wing men in dark suits in descending order according to their seminary degree and paychecks.

The 1980s wing? Here come the Jetsons. We need padded mauve sky-box chairs, a typed collection of praise songs with a plastic curlicue binding, and in a glass case under a halogen spotlight, let’s put one of those plasticized round communion wafers on a red velvet pillow. A black Sanyo keyboard with pre-set beats would be fantastic and so would the “dual-handled pouch-bag-offering-thingie” that everyone passed hand-over-hand down the aisle with choreographed wonder. I’ll donate my Texas pastor’s clear Plexiglas pulpit along with the 3-D silver dove that I glued to my bumper in college. Oh, and can we arrange to pipe in some Amy Grant elevator music?

The 1990s are a bit trickier. For our communion exhibit, let’s start with a big canister of compressed cracker nuggets (corn kernel meets saltine). Guests can raise and lower screens from a high-tech slit in the ceiling. Hand-made banners with silk tassels, espresso machines “on the plaza,” and a vintage visitor’s tent with requisite welcome bags will surely mark the decade’s outreach efforts. The ubiquitous Power Point slideshow (golden wheat stalks blowing? multi-racial families smiling? clouds billowing?) can round out the 90s collection.

So, does anyone have some more objects we can induct into the Church Accessory Hall of Fame?

Why the Intelligentsia Will Never Let Me Join their Club

Caroline Ferdinandsen — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 18:16:31 -0800

When my house is dark and my children are asleep, sometimes I fantasize about earning a Ph.D.

I dream of thesis projects, dense reading, pretentious poetry recitals, and most of all, that super cool graduation robe and hood—part Opus Dei, part Frodo Baggins— that I could hang in my closet and show friends. My other degrees are just fine, but I stopped short of the Big One, relegated to pitching Triple A ball when I really wanted a shot at the majors.

So on some days, I fantasize.

But this year, I might be closer to accepting my fate as a minor league member of the intelligentsia. While I love the world of reason and higher thinking; while I love the pleasure of great books, old and new, and the electric atmosphere of a university; while I’m addicted to epiphanies that strike when I least expect them, I doubt I will ever identify with a subculture that defines itself almost exclusively by its ability to reason.

What could be wrong with reason, you ask? Isn’t rationalism the bedrock of a society, the very thing that separates us from beasts? Isn’t it God’s gift to mankind? My heart isn’t troubled by Reason, you see, or its siblings named Intelligence and Clarity. In fact, my Christian brothers and sisters would do well to identify more often with those traits that make us wise and discerning and clear-headed.

But a strange and troubling thing can happen in sealed-off think tanks and academic chambers, in communities that only give a listen to smarty-pants. Like the humanists during the Age of Reason, the intelligentsia finds its primary value in its ability to solve its own problems, to create its own deities, to discredit everything outside its own brilliance. I’m a little jealous, I must admit. I listen to the condescending conversations, hear the swelling pride of solving global crises, watch the great thinkers smacking down the small-minded ideas of the yahoos, and it tempts me beyond belief to ask if I could join the academy.

So what holds me back? First, it’s the model of Jesus himself who never identified with the smug and pretentious, who chose to dine with the regulars, who loved the commoner, who in the book of Matthew actually thanked the Father that “You have hidden these things from the wise and prudent and have revealed them to babes.”

It’s also the model of Solomon who understood his limitations despite his philosophical brilliance. In the first chapter of Ecclesiastes he said to himself, Look, I am wiser than any of the kings who ruled in Jerusalem before me. I have greater wisdom and knowledge than any of them. So I set out to learn everything from wisdom to madness and folly. But I learned firsthand that pursuing all this is like chasing the wind. The greater my wisdom, the greater my grief. To increase knowledge only increases sorrow.

It’s also the sad, lonely feeling I get while hearing Richard Dawkins address the universities with his Siren voice in a manner so sure, so condescending, so utterly contemptuous of everything he hasn’t already figured out in his short time here on earth.

It’s the apostle Paul who eloquently acknowledges in I Corinthians 13 that knowledge will vanish, while faith, hope, and love will abide forever.

It’s also the beauty of my friendships—young and old, enlightened and not-yet, sophisticated and simple, rich and poor, thinkers and feelers. It’s spending time with children who make me wide-eyed and whimsical. To be loved by—and to love—all types of people can keep us from believing that we’re all that.

I know scores of Christ followers who honor their Savior in graduate schools all over the country. I doubt the Ph.D. itself is the problem. Those scholars whose lives are most Christ-like are those whose degrees become more like a Doctor of Philanthropy than a Doctor of Philosophy, the ones whose Masters is entirely the Master’s, the ones whose primary focus is never their secondary Thesis. If I ever were to go for the big time, those are the men and women whom I would emulate. They were never part of the elite in the first place.

In the meantime, I’ll stop longing for admission to a club that would disqualify me for having faith in something outside of myself. I just don’t have what it takes, thanks be to God.

Photoshopped Faith and The Lies It Tells

Caroline Ferdinandsen — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 10:22:21 -0700

Now what else is the whole life of mortals but a sort of comedy, in which the various actors, disguised by various costumes and masks, walk on and play each one his part, until the manager waves them off the stage? Moreover, this manager frequently bids the same actor to go back in a different costume, so that he who has but lately played the king in scarlet now acts the flunkey in patched clothes. Thus all things are presented by shadows. -Desiderius Erasmus, The Praise of Folly

Let’s just call it a dormant childhood fantasy. Technology has whisked me back to Octobers in Connecticut, the let’s-pretend-I’m-someone-else phase of childhood. But instead of my mother sewing me into a polyester princess costume for Halloween, Photoshop lets me be whoever I want for a brief, narcissistic moment (yes, that’s my face strutting down the catwalk).

Oh, did I tell you I’m a grown-up?

Websites ranging from Yearbook Yourself to Face In Hole have capitalized on our identity-switcheroo imaginations. It’s rather addictive. One glimpse of yourself as Margaret Thatcher or Jack Sparrow or a Teletubby and you’re hooked.

I’ve had some practice with this sort of thing before, but my own faith identity crisis, not any clever software, powered the transformations. In junior high school, I attended a Pentecostal youth group, and I fitted my head so perfectly onto the “on fire for Christ” look that you’d swear I was the real thing. In high school, I went back and forth between a legitimate believer and a glammed-up version of my spiritual self. When I finally got to college, I had configured a handful of evangelical variations of my true self: one for casual dating, one for relating intellectually to my professors, another for spouse-hunting, and a really good one for quiet times with God.

When your focus is on yourself, Christianity is a just a cool masquerade party. You can create whatever self-serving identity suits the moment. But the fourth chapter of the book of Hebrews says this about our hidden motives: Nothing in all creation is hidden from God. Everything is naked and exposed before his eyes, and he is the one to whom we are accountable.

Now I’m in trouble. The terrifying, beautiful, redemptive thing about the New Testament is that it constantly reminds me that external appearances don’t mean squat.

When I attended high school in Texas in the 1980s, I remember girls (and sometimes their big-haired mothers too) who would go to a store in the mall named Star Shots, a creepy faux-studio with plenty of pancake makeup. A couple of formula-trained photographers would glam up their clients and drape them over leopard skin rugs for an hour while clicking their shutters. For fifty bucks and a couple of hours, you could get a counterfeit version of yourself to hang in your foyer.

Jesus used different metaphors, but you can hear him attacking the Pharisees and lawgivers for the airbrushed 16 x 20 reproductions that they proudly hung in their synagogues. Paul also speaks to the church at Corinth this way: We refuse to wear masks and play games. We don't maneuver and manipulate behind the scenes. And we don't twist God's Word to suit ourselves. Rather, we keep everything we do and say out in the open, the whole truth on display, so that those who want to can see and judge for themselves in the presence of God. (2 Cor. 4:2)

The problem with taking Christianity into the studio is that the final product might bear little resemblance to the true Christ. The truth is supplanted by fiction—the Christ we invented rather than the Christ revealed in the Bible. It is because of this danger that Paul tells us For we do not preach ourselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord. (2 Cor. 4:5)

I’m afraid I’ve been guilty of photoshopped faith. I have felt the shame of airbrushing my own identity instead of letting the spirit of God clothe me. But today, because of God’s grace, I pray that I would be the same, through and through, whether you meet me in the sanctuary or in the street. In Erasmus’s words, I don’t want my life to be “presented by shadows” but under the clear, good light of Jesus Christ.

Learning to Die 101

Caroline Ferdinandsen — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 11:02:55 -0700

My high school students have no idea how to die.

How do I know? In class this week we’re reading an old school emo poem with the puzzling Greek title “Thanatopsis.” A seventeen year-old poet named William Cullen Bryant wrote his “vision of death” in 1813, a time when teenagers were apparently thinking about death more often than their modern peers. With the Puritan legacy in his rear view mirror, he defies the Christian worldview of his ancestors and basically says that when you die, that’s it. Young Bryant suggests that you shouldn’t worry about dying because you will join the gazillion other corpses rotting underground who are part of one big annihilated family—and he feels this should be rather comforting to you.

Quite frankly, it isn’t.

Death is not a topic that glides easily into the minds of teenagers. Most of my students will spend more time learning how to drive, speak French, and apply lip gloss than they ever will learning how to die. Did it ever occur to them that the odds are pretty good they will one day leave this world?

Has it occurred to me lately?

John Piper, on the eve of his prostate surgery wrote, “Don’t waste your cancer. You will waste your cancer if you refuse to think about death.” Should I wait until my body betrays me before I consider my mortality—and God’s eternal invitations?

The world is filled with death, but we’re all too eager to ignore it. Doctors, who use the euphemism “circling the drain,” or veterinarians who regularly “put down” their clients, must adopt coping mechanisms for such things early in their careers. This is not my realm. In fact, the recent passing of my daughters’ dwarf hamster prompted an awkward burial ceremony; we had no idea how to go about it. I found myself working very hard to soften the reality, but I would’ve served her better by beginning the dialogue of life and death that will sneak up on her before long.

I’ve lost aunts, uncles, and grandparents, but my losses have thus far been symbolic. The shockwaves were far, far away, and I supposed, rather than knew, what grief really feels like. I think of death like I might think of tsunamis or marketplace bombings: I acknowledge they are real, but since they take place on foreign soil, my emotions don’t go very deep. When it comes to death, I'm terribly provincial.

At my age, I’m afraid of my naiveté. Compared to many around the world, I am hopelessly immune to the realities of life and death, yet I know that my spiritual maturity will always be stunted without it. One Christian journalist remarked that before his open heart surgery, he used to thank God that he was not like other men—you know, the overweight, careless, lazy types. He acknowledged he should have been praying instead for God’s mercy. So should you and I. The relative time lapse between funerals (the other guy’s and ours) is merely the time between this blog and the next.

So I must use the wide-angle lens when I frame today’s purpose. It will teach me not only how to die, but how to live. Solomon in all his cantankerous pondering wrote in Ecclesiastes chapter 12: Remember him before you near the grave . . . Yes, remember your Creator now while you are young, before the silver cord of life snaps and the golden bowl is broken. Don’t wait until the water jar is smashed at the spring and the pulley is broken at the well.

Whoa. His words get my attention. They drive me to my Savior—the one who can change my eternal condition. I was going to learn how to play the electric guitar this year, but I think I’ll learn how to die first. Anyone care to join me?