Is Your Faith an Adventure or a Quest? The Difference Between the Two

Our culture loves admiring (from a safe distance, mind you) the glory of quests. We love watching them in movies and reading about them in novels, but in actual practice, we much prefer adventures over quests. In fact, our Western culture, despite all the lip-service it pays to them, tends to avoid quests with the same fear that it avoids death.

Why?

While listening to a Timothy Keller sermon (from a podcast called “Real Security and the Call of God,” posted on iTunes 2/10/10) he explained something striking about adventures and quests.

An adventure, at least in the world of literary analysis, is a “there and back again” journey. You leave your home – your comfortable world, whatever/whomever/wherever that is – you go somewhere dangerous and adventurous, and then you return home and continue living your life just as you did before, but with the added benefit of having that adventure alive and shimmering in your memories. Bilbo Baggins went and faced the dragon, survived a great battle, then returned home and lived a happy life just as before but with new treasures added to his comfortable Hobbit hole. “There and back again.”

But with a quest you don’t return home.

You either die in service to the quest or you return home so changed from the quest that you can never return to your old life or live it quite the same way. A part of you has died in service to the quest, even if your body has survived, and you come back unrecognizable to yourself – maybe even to others.

In the Gospels, when Jesus said to “take up your cross and follow Me,” He was making it clear what kind of faith He meant. He was announcing a quest. But we reject Jesus’ call and re-shape Christianity into an adventure. We like the excitement of following Jesus, but we want a “there and back again” experience. We want to return to our earth-centered delights and comforts undisturbed when the Sunday service has ended or when our monthly outreach event comes to a close or when we exit the prayer closet.

Of course, we do return to our hobbit holes of comfort with a little fire in our hearts flickering from the recent spiritual experience, but we only tolerate the little flame as long as it serves to enhance, not threaten, our stable routine of comforts. If that flame begins to grow too large, and if it threatens to consume us and our comforts, we snuff it out. We remind that little flame, “Excuse me, little flame, but, if you recall, it is there and back again. You must always allow me to return home to my world of comforts undisturbed when I am finished with our adventures.” In the grand scheme of things, we may love our faith, our church life and the spiritual happiness it all brings, and we may love the upper case Cross – the one that Jesus died on for us out of His fierce love – but we want nothing to do with the lower case cross, the one that Jesus requires His followers to “take up.” We do not want death or irrevocable transformation.

We want Adventure Christianity. We do not want Quest Christianity.

Frodo went on a quest. His journey to Mt. Doom brought severe wounds to him – so severe that he could not return home. Instead, after the quest was complete, he set sail from the Grey Havens and went far from Middle-Earth into the Undying Lands far over the ocean in the West with the elves. It was his only chance to find healing, both for his body and his spirit. He lost everything because of the quest. Yet Sam begged him to not go with the elves. Sam just wanted to go back home to the comforts and simple happiness of the Shire and eat dinners with his best friend Frodo at the pub again and laugh and enjoy life as they had always done. But Frodo said this to Sam in reply:

“But I have been too deeply hurt, Sam. I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me. It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them.”

It is a broken moment. It hurts to read it. The world is saved, yes, but, somehow, all is still lost.

But then the far-off longing comes, that stab-of-joy desire that C.S. Lewis wrote about in "Surprised By Joy” – some strange desire for a home we’ve never seen wells up – and we hear a voice of hope in the blackness. This voice says something that reminds me of this line from “Return of the King”:

“For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.”

…light and high beauty forever beyond the the reach of the Shadow.

And even for those who are allowed to return home after the quest, they can never be the same again. They lose a part of themselves. Yet, even in such deep, heart-rending transformation, an Unseen Hand pulls treasures from the dark – treasures that we could have never imagined.

Again I turn to "The Lord of the Rings.” After the war ends, the king, named Aragorn, comes to the houses of healing to visit the wounded. There he finds the hobbit named Merry. Merry has been grievously injured both in body and spirit, and he is unconscious, but he will survive. The king says this about Merry’s suffering:

“His grief he will not forget; but it will not darken his heart, it will teach him wisdom.”

Timothy Keller points out in his sermon called “The Two Great Tests” that nothing tests our faith and refines our spiritual wisdom more than two things: great suffering and great success. Both whip around us as white hot fires, and their flames have consumed far too many to number.

But, whatever tests and fires may come, if we can accept that we are on a quest and not an adventure, and if we stay close to our True Companion on this quest, our grief will not darken our hearts.

It will teach us wisdom.

FREE ebook of Kevin’s short story “The Night Elvis Presley Met C.S. Lewis – A (Possibly) True Story” when you sign up for Kevin’s email list.

from Tumblr http://ift.tt/1JlHztS
via IFTTT

The Future Needs a Big Kiss

from Tumblr http://ift.tt/1fFZjaN
via IFTTT

A Song in the Night Seasons (Psalm 77)

from Tumblr http://ift.tt/1Igd4nc
via IFTTT

Jesus' Lesser Known Miracle for Guitarists

from Tumblr http://ift.tt/1UcEAJh
via IFTTT

How WAKE UP DEAD MAN Helped a Troubled Youth (Part 1)

The secrets of our deepest longings – those stabs of joy, bittersweet pangs of homesickness for a home we’ve never had, are locked in ordinary moments. But they are also locked in moments of suffering. Moments of disaster. Moments of mournful longing.

Here’s a story about this very truth – the story of a troubled youth who finds a spark, like electric arrows from Heaven pointing to God, in the least likely place: a rock album called “Pop” by a certain Irish band.

This troubled youth once became a high school drop out for a day when he walked out of class in a panic without saying a word to anyone and walked right off campus (which was not allowed, of course). He then experienced (what he later learned) was a symptom of Post Traumatic Stress Symptom (something that doctors would diagnose in him a few months later). After he ditched his classes and ran away from his high school he wandered aimless and alone. The terrors and sorrows of certain troubles in his life had stalked him day and night, and finally they found him and sank their sharpest fangs in. That day the youth ended up in an ambulance when something akin to a panic attack paralyzed him (and he thought perhaps it was a heart attack).

As he lay in the ambulance, out the back window he could see stacks of white clouds billowing and drifting like air ships. A sting hit his heart, and he thought of his parents, and he grieved about what the ambulance ride would cost them. He wondered what would happen to him. Was he going to die? He seemed to be feeling better even as the ambulance reached the hospital.

They released him the same day. No one understood what was wrong. It wouldn’t be for another few months until a doctor zeroed in on what was happening. (PTSD.) 

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is something usually associated with combat veterans, but it is more common than people realize in other situations that aren’t necessarily on the battlefield.

So it was not a physical battlefield. But it was an unseen one – a spiritual battlefield. 

He was promptly removed from school that year, his junior year, and he spent the year in home study – i.e. where a student completes all of their school work at home. No attending classes. No school trips.  Very little contact with peers. Often alone.

Yet not alone.

“Draw near to God and He will draw near to you." 

In that solitude the love of God came like a warm memory, and, with the lion-like fierceness of Aslan, that Voice of love made a promise to the youth: "I will make these nightmarish stories unravel and turn back until they are untrue, and I will turn back the poison and siphon the night from your lungs so you can breathe again. Just wait patiently. Wait for me.”

And in that dim light of waiting, music came, and it was an Irish tenor singing, “Wake up dead man." 

In Part 2 I will tell you what happened to the troubled youth when the story came to an end. 

from Tumblr http://ift.tt/1UcEAJb
via IFTTT

How WAKE UP DEAD MAN Helped a Troubled Youth (Part 1)

The secrets of our deepest longings – those stabs of joy, bittersweet pangs of homesickness for a home we’ve never had, are locked in ordinary moments. But they are also locked in moments of suffering. Moments of disaster. Moments of mournful longing.

Here’s a story about this very truth – the story of a troubled youth who finds a spark, like electric arrows from Heaven pointing to God, in the least likely place: a rock album called “Pop” by a certain Irish band.

This troubled youth once became a high school drop out for a day when he walked out of class in a panic without saying a word to anyone and walked right off campus (which was not allowed, of course). He then experienced (what he later learned) was a symptom of Post Traumatic Stress Symptom (something that doctors would diagnose in him a few months later). After he ditched his classes and ran away from his high school he wandered aimless and alone. The terrors and sorrows of certain troubles in his life had stalked him day and night, and finally they found him and sank their sharpest fangs in. That day the youth ended up in an ambulance when something akin to a panic attack paralyzed him (and he thought perhaps it was a heart attack).

As he lay in the ambulance, out the back window he could see stacks of white clouds billowing and drifting like air ships. A sting hit his heart, and he thought of his parents, and he grieved about what the ambulance ride would cost them. He wondered what would happen to him. Was he going to die? He seemed to be feeling better even as the ambulance reached the hospital.

They released him the same day. No one understood what was wrong. It wouldn’t be for another few months until a doctor zeroed in on what was happening. (PTSD.) 

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is something usually associated with combat veterans, but it is more common than people realize in other situations that aren’t necessarily on the battlefield.

So it was not a physical battlefield. But it was an unseen one – a spiritual battlefield. 

He was promptly removed from school that year, his junior year, and he spent the year in home study – i.e. where a student completes all of their school work at home. No attending classes. No school trips.  Very little contact with peers. Often alone.

Yet not alone.

“Draw near to God and He will draw near to you." 

In that solitude the love of God came like a warm memory, and, with the lion-like fierceness of Aslan, that Voice of love made a promise to the youth: "I will make these nightmarish stories unravel and turn back until they are untrue, and I will turn back the poison and siphon the night from your lungs so you can breathe again. Just wait patiently. Wait for me.”

And in that dim light of waiting, music came, and it was an Irish tenor singing, “Wake up dead man." 

In Part 2 I will tell you what happened to the troubled youth when the story came to an end. 

from Tumblr http://ift.tt/1i0Xp6j
via IFTTT

Writing a Nonfiction Book Proposal? I’ve Got the Perfect Template for You

…

from Tumblr http://ift.tt/1hdJOYK
via IFTTT