Mrs. Jellyby is a person who is devoted to Christian philanthropic projects, especially in Africa. He talks constantly about it yet Dickens describes her house as covered with litter, “not only untidy but very dirty.” Her children are unwashed, scantily clothed and in a state of chaos with dirt and disaster, accidents and neglect.

Eugene Peterson, whom I learned about this story from, writes this: “She introduces herself to the three young people who are to be her guests for supper and the night, saying, ‘You find me, my dears, as usual very busy; but that you will excuse. The African project at present employs my whole time. It involves me in correspondance with public bodies and with private individuals anxious for the welfare of their species all over the country… It involves the devotion of all my energies, such as they are; but that is nothing, so that it succeeds; and I am more confident of success every day.” (Practice Resurrection, p.229, Eugene Peterson)

This story comes at us and right to the heart of what we’re about in a lot of church gatherings. What we see, I believe, in Peterson’s writings is not a distaste for mission work, but a distaste for how mission and ministry are done in many examples today: essentially, without much care for those around you, at home and workplace. It becomes quite simple, and even quite life-stifling, to focus our attention on the distant. the grandiose, and neglect the close up, the intimate, the neighbor. Our God projects might get in the way of being with God and living out a with-God lifestyle with others.

Peterson goes on, “…the practice of resurrection, the very heart of the church’s life, is squandered into disembodied causes and projects in far off [places] by men and women who give neither time nor attention nor touch to what is going on in their home and workplace… they are far too busy to engage in the glorious practice of resurrection in caring for their own children and keeping the household clean in the tedium of the ordinary.”

What does this mean? It means that we’re passing on and living into a certain lifestyle, this resurrection life worked within us by the Holy Spirit. This can’t be reduced to God projects. Instead, when we’re on missions or at the grocery store, we have the opportunity to express the love of God in the ways that we love and interact with others – either far (if we were on a mission) or close by (if we’re still at home). The location is insignificant here; what matters is the focus of God in your location – the intimate, the personal, the relate-able, the conversational God that has called us to come and live and to have us call others to do the same. I suppose it’s more of a temperament really.

Peterson brings this Dicken’s clip into his book to talk about how so many ministers in our world today have neglected family and friends for some kind of God project they call “Public Ministry.” Peterson reflects that such a God project misses the point: life with God and a lifestyle that is absolutely rooted in the very-personal around us. To neglect family is to neglect resurrection life and the locus of that life – right at home.

Now, what about missions? Missions are still needed but only truly work (as I force my interpretation on Peterson’s words) in a pattern similar to how you live at home, I mean, still considering the lifestyle of where your mission is at. Essentially, working yourself to a thousand pieces rips the fabric of the resurrection life, and if busyness is what our missions look like (one project after another) instead of living together and telling/hearing stories we plant something else in the field, something that’s not resurrection seed. I’m not sure what it is, but it grows fast and spreads like a virus. It doesn’t make anything worth eating either.

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The problem with this over-filled lifestyle is that we are prevented from experiencing inner freedom with God. “The tragedy is that we are indeed caught in a web of false expectations and contrived needs. Our occupations and preoccupations fill our external and internal lives to the brim. They prevent the Spirit of God from breathing freely in us and renewing our lives.”

Being unfilled, on the other hand, is not the opposite of being filled; these typically occur at the same time. (I’ll explain.) Within the experience of a filled life, like above, we experience a sense of unfulfillment - that something is lacking even though there is so much going on. “While busy with and worried about many things, we seldom feel truly satisfied, at peace, or at home.”

Nouwen points out three experiences of this unfulfillment: boredom, resentment, and depression.

Boredom, he states, isn’t about not having something to do, it’s about not seeing the significance of what we’re doing. It’s a “sentiment of disconnectedness.”

Boredom leads to resentment. We resent those around us or situations around us because we question whether what we’re doing matters. …we begin to feel manipulated, used, and exploited (Nouwen’s words).

Finally, at the end is depression. At the core: “Is my life worth living?”

What’s the cure? Where is hope?

Our hope comes from Jesus, who he is and what he’s about.

At the end of the book, Nouwen suggests that what we are in need of is a dose of solitude and community: solitude to spend time with God, just us and God, listening for his voice that let’s us know our identity as children of God. …in community, to listen together and to even be agents of the voice of God in one another’s lives, all the while having our lives permeated by the Words of Scripture.

As we listen, we are formed and set free. We learn and live into the identity as a Child of God – the Child that no longer has to prove herself worthy of love by what she does or how she looks. Instead, she is set free to experience the Love of God that sets all people free (John 8).

Be free.

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Our pool is just one of those blow up deals, but it can get a couple feet deep. At any rate, he loves it. …Loves water.

Jude was splashing around in his pool the other day, getting really low and jumping up and to the side, like a very, very small sea monster coming up to the surface.

Jude playing like a sea-monster made me think of a favorite Scripture passage about the Leviathan: Psalm 104:6:

There go the ships,

and Leviathan, which you formed to play in it

Jude playing is a good reminder that life is about living and living to the fullest. The sea-monster Leviathan was made to play in the sea; us? …made to play with God. I hear a leisurely approach to life, an attentiveness to times to play and a playfulness when we’re at work.

May God form a growing desire to play within my soul.

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Roles, I believe, can drain the life and expression of life from a person. They reduce the adventure and journey that life is into a mathematical connecting of dots. …a reduction of people into what they can do, produce or what their culture expects them to be.

Prayer, can be similar.

Here are the words from Practicing Resurrection:

As we become increasingly proficient in the language of naming and defining and describing, the personal, relational aspects of language recede as we learn to talk our way competently though a world made up [by human objectives] mostly of things to arrange and work to do. In the process, sadly, we “thingify” persons. More often than not, the words we use and listen to are in the context of the roles that we are given to play: students, customers, employers, workers, competitors, all of whom could just as well be, and often are, nameless…

…as language becomes impersonal, the world becomes depersonalized.

…prayer is personal language or it is nothing.

…When we use impersonal language in this most personal of all relations [prayer], the language doesn’t work. And when we listen to Scripture and in silence to what the personal God has to say to us in our unique personhood, anticipating information or answers and not hearing anything remotely like that, we don’t know what to make of it.

…The language we are really fluent in, the language we are most used to, deals with impersonal data and functionalized roles. The practice of prayer, if it is going to amount to anything more than wish lists and complaints, requires a recovery of personal, relational, revelational language in both our listening and our speaking.

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Peterson brought something to my table: essentially, we struggle with prayer because the language we’re mostly accustomed to in our culture is an impersonal language: a language that describes, analyzes, dissects, and then reports.

Praying, we know, is a posture of relationship, expression in conversation. I wondered, as I read, that our struggle in prayer is that we’re so used to a typically impersonal language and that just doesn’t work in a posture of prayer. Prayer and praying go together (obviously) and both are deeply personal: personal action (praying) and personal words (prayer). Perhaps we’ve felt so strange in prayer because we started prayer off with a recitation of facts, like we’re reading a small town newspaper of our day to God, telling the details. (Sure, God loves the details.) But what about the deeper side of those details – the way you reacted, how you saw a glimpse of God in action, how you felt, what you thought?

I imagine that pairing relational language with praying (which is relational in nature, like talking to your mother over coffee) might just make it seem more natural, more put together in it’s expression.

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Relationship over Mission

(List comes from Church 3.0, Neil Cole)

How does this list affect us?

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Christian Smith and Melinda Denton

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The essence of the book (and I suggest you check out the Amazon link above and read about the book there) is that we’re not helping our youth out much when it comes to raising them in the faith. Now, we seem to be able to encourage some youth to be “nice” and to consider “church” an alright extracurricular event in their over-packed schedules, but are we passing on the faith and the faith lifestyle?

First, what is the lifestyle we’re missing? Mostly, it’s a centrality of Jesus in all of who we are. Instead, we’ve arrived at church as extracurricular and for the purpose of passing on some kind of morality – in essence, we’ve been making “nice” kids (a lot of the time) but haven’t been making disciples of Jesus.

I see a line drawn from our post-World War II churches to where we are today. After the war, we can see a mindset in America, that pursuit of happiness in full stride, and a desire for normalcy, niceness, and any other word we might use to alternatively describe today’s suburbia. We saw a rise in church attendance then. Why? I think there are many reasons, but I think there was a lot of social-norming going on too, with a push for niceness, American morality, etc. Look at Leave it to Beaver, and things like that — those are what became the ideal and the goal for any organization. In a way, it was like some kind of pursuit of utopia. …in a way.

I don’t mean to be too generalized with this. I know there were disciples made then, just as there are now. But my question is what is the primary, general focus and goal of the church, then and today? Niceness or Disciples? Morality or Walking with Jesus?

Without wonder, we approach spiritual formation as a self-help project. We employ techniques. We analyze gifts and potentialities. We set goals. We assess progress. Spiritual formation is reduced to cosmetics. (Eugene Peterson, Living the Resurrection, p.30)