Gratitude can be easily forgotten in a world filled with terror, fear, and heightened concern for safety. It is not difficult to understand a pervasive mood of suspicion and guardedness given the regularly disruptive news of violence and tragedy. A hand-wringing anxiety replaces the open-heartedness that accompanies gratitude.

More than this, it can seem naïve or insensitive to articulate gratefulness in the midst of human suffering. How can I be thankful when so many around the world suffer in unspeakable ways? It feels more appropriate to maintain a somber outlook as a way of finding solidarity with those who are hurting. Being grateful for personal “blessing” seems to add salt to the wound.

Perhaps this is why it is always amazing to encounter those who find gratitude to be healing even in the midst of loss and tragedy. A powerful editorial by New York Times writer, David Brooks, introduced readers to Kennedy Odede, a Kenyan man who grew up in the infamous Kibera slums of Nairobi. Odede and his wife, Jessica, have created schools for girls and a community organization called Shining Hope for Communities. In their co-written memoir called Find Me Unafraid, Jessica and Kennedy recount the horrors of life growing up in this slum with all of its abundant evil. Kennedy was molested and abused by a priest, repeatedly beaten by his father, watched friends and family murdered before his eyes, saw others die from drug abuse, and had to survive through petty theft because of constant hunger and poverty. Yet, Brooks described Kennedy as the most joyful person he knows. How can this be, Brooks wondered, given all that he suffered? In an email to Brooks, Kennedy wrote:

“While I didn’t have food and couldn’t go to school or when I was the victim or witness of violence, I tried to appreciate things like the sunrise—something that everyone in the world shares and can find joy in no matter if you are rich or poor. Seeing the sunrise was always healing for me, it was a new day and it was a beauty to behold.”(1)

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Finding Gratitude →

Have you ever had the feeling that an experience you had, whether good or bad, was like a scene from a novel or a movie—like you were a part of at least a small story? With the ubiquitous presence of Facebook pages and blogging platforms, I suspect this phenomenon grows all the more common an experience (and likely one that increasingly communicates we are the leading characters of these stories). If the answer is yes, it’s probably because our lives, after all, do tell a story—and perhaps the increasing presence of such outlets to tell these stories affirms it. Every human being has a unique story unfolding as they live out their lives. Just think of it: literally billions of different stories going on all at once, intertwining, overlapping, as we love each other, hate each other, struggle together, and laugh together. Every minute new human stories are beginning in birth and old ones are concluding in death.

Listen to what author Brent Curtis has to say about the stories of our lives:

“The deepest convictions of our heart are formed by stories and reside there in the images and emotions of [a] story….Life is not a list of propositions, it is a series of dramatic scenes. As Eugene Peterson said, ‘We live in a narrative, we live in a story. We have a beginning and an end, we have a plot, we have character.’ Story is the language of the heart. Our souls speak not in the naked facts of mathematics or the abstract propositions of systematic theology; they speak the images and emotions of story.”(1)

We love stories because life itself is a story. We each have a story that takes place in a particular context, culture, and time in history. Depending on how we grew up, the dynamics of our families, and a million other factors, our stories are going to come out differently.

But is there any common element that runs through all of our stories, an element that we see in every life?

You may have never thought about it this way, but the Christian message really introduces a story of its own; and if it is indeed true, it’s a story that explains the “plot” of each and every human life story. What is this lot? It’s a love story. It’s the story of God’s love for us individually and collectively, God’s seeking to win our hearts again and again, and our responses to this movement toward us. We see this in the well known text of John 3:16: For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son. I would challenge you to look at your life, look at where you are now and where you’ve been, and see if you do not find evidence of God drawing you closer to who God truly is. See if you can find God calling to you in the circumstances of your life, even in hard or painful times, whispering to you in joy, in mystery, in fear, in pain.

God is the ultimate author, God’s story the account that makes sense of our lives and brings beauty into our own stories. As one human author put it, your life could be the very poetry of God.

Ravi Zacharias is founder and chairman of the board of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries.

(1) Brent Curtis, The Sacred Romance (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1997), 39

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Having a nearly 100 pound German shepherd dog creates both opportunities and challenges. Like most German shepherds, my dog has the intense gaze and keen alertness typical of the breed. He does not have an ‘inside bark’ but rather exerts the full capacity of his lungs whenever a visitor or stranger comes to the door. For the person on the other side, venturing into the house is filled with fear. For all they know, a barking-mad, wild beast of a dog awaits them! I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised at the wide-berth I am given or the anxious looks I receive as I traverse the sidewalks of my neighborhood with my dog. He looks and sounds absolutely ferocious.

Given this description, it might be hard to believe that I have ample opportunities to showcase my dog’s gentle, calm, and loving demeanor despite his apparent ferocity. Kaiser is quick to roll over on his side when he meets another dog. His ears flatten with joy and his tail wags a mile a minute as he greets children and adults alike. For those who give him the opportunity, he proves himself time and time again to be an affectionate, docile canine.

My dog Kaiser is often misunderstood. His size, the reputation of the breed, and past memories of fearful encounters with large dogs will forever preclude a wonderful encounter for some who meet him. While I know this intellectually, I cannot help but take it personally every time I see individuals cross over to the other side of the street. No matter how much convincing I do, or how well-behaved my dog, there will always be those who simply don’t believe me when I tell them how friendly he is and how much he loves to meet other dogs and people. I reluctantly conclude that there will always be some people who misunderstand my dog and his good intentions.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Art of Being Misunderstood →

One of the tragic casualties of our age has been that of the contemplative life—a life that thinks, a life thinks things through, and more particularly, thinks God’s thoughts. A person sitting at his or her desk staring out the window would never be assumed to be working. No! Thinking is not equated with work. Yet, had Newton under his tree, or Archimedes in his bathtub, bought into that prejudice, some natural laws would still be up in the air or buried under an immovable rock. Pascal’s Pensees, or “Thoughts,” a work that has inspired millions, would have never been penned.

What is even more destructive is the assumption that silence is inimical to life. The radio in the car, Muzak in the elevator, and the symphony entertaining callers “on hold” all add up as grave impediments to personal reflection. In effect, the mind is denied the privilege of living with itself even briefly and is crowded with outside impulses to cope with aloneness. Aldous Huxley’s indictment, “Most of one’s life… is one prolonged effort to prevent thinking,” seems frightfully true. Moreover, the price paid for this scenario has been devastating. As T.S. Eliot questioned:

Where is the life we have lost in the living?

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

The cycles of heaven in twenty centuries

bring us farther from God and nearer to dust.

Is there a remedy? May I make some suggestions? Nothing ranks higher for mental discipline than a planned and systematic study of God’s Word, from whence life’s parameters and values are planted and Christ is made known. Paul, who loved his books and parchments, affirmed the priority of Scripture as the means to encountering Christ. And Psalm 119 promises that the God who speaks to us keeps us from being double-minded.

The average person today actually surrenders the intellect to the world, presuming Christianity to be bereft of intelligence. And many a pulpit has succumbed to the lie that anything intellectual cannot be spiritual or exciting.

Thankfully there are exceptions. When living in England, our family attended a church where preaching was taken quite seriously and one-hour sermons to packed auditoriums were the norm. Cambridge, being rife with skepticism, demanded a meticulous defense of each sermon text. When we were leaving Cambridge, our youngest child, who was nine years old, declared the preaching of this church to be one of his fondest memories. Even as a little boy he had learned that when the mind is rightly approached, it filters down to the heart. The matter I share here has far-reaching implications. We do a disservice to our youth by not crediting them with the capacity to think.

God places great value on the thought-life and its capacity to shape all of life. “As one thinks in his heart, so is he,” Solomon wrote. Jesus asserted that sin’s gravity lay at the level of the idea itself, not just the act. Paul admonished the church at Philippi to have the mind of Christ, and to the same people he wrote: “[W]hatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think on these things” (Philippians 4:8). The follower of Christ must demonstrate to the world what it means not just to think, but to think justly. That is, in the words of aging David to his son Solomon, to “acknowledge the God of your father, and serve him with wholehearted devotion and with a willing mind, for the LORD searches every heart and understands every motive behind the thoughts. If you seek him, he will be found by you; but if you forsake him, he will reject you forever” (1 Chronicles 28:9).

With hearts, minds, and bodies, we can follow the God of creation and the Son who stepped into it. After all, it is not that I think, therefore, I am, but rather, the great I Am has asked us to think, and therefore, we must.

Ravi Zacharias is founder and chairman of the board of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries.

http://www.rzim.org/

At an open lecture in a leading software company, I made the comment: “Love is seeking the highest best of the other person; it is not about your own interests.” An employee caught up with me at the end and inquired: “Is that kind of love possible?” I gave her an illustration of a mother who takes care of an ailing child—sacrificing her own comforts and well-being to ensure that the child is comfortable. This young lady thought for a moment and quipped: “Perhaps the mother does it because it is her own child.” She was suggesting that the reason for the mother’s selflessness is actually self-centeredness. A few years ago, a leading magazine in India carried a cover page article titled, “Twenty-five ways to be happy” written by a well-known columnist. Her very first point was similar: “Be selfish.”

Khaled Hosseini, award-winning author of The Kite Runner, presents a darkly selfish story about a man who found a magic cup and discovered that if he wept into the cup, his tears turned into pearls. But even though he had always been poor, he was a happy man and hardly shed a tear. So he found ways to make himself sad so that his tears could make him rich. As the pearls heaped up, so did his greed grow. The story ended with the man sitting on a mountain of pearls, knife in hand, weeping helplessly into the cup with his beloved wife’s slain body in his arms.

On the contrary, it is heartening to read of many leading billionaires in the world who are setting a remarkable model on giving. Warren Buffet and Bill and Melinda Gates unveiled the largest philanthropic drive ever. They started a campaign to get the richest men and women in the world to give away fifty percent of the wealth to charity during their lifetime or after their death. Buffett has pledged to give away an unbelievable ninety-nine percent of his wealth.

With a similar altruism, the heroes and heroines of the terrorist attack at the Taj hotel in Mumbai were its employees. Putting their lives on the line, these men and women braved the attack, and although they knew where the exit points were in the hotel, they stayed back to rescue as many guests as possible. In the process, eleven of them paid with their lives. No wonder Professor Rohit Deshpande at Harvard Business School has made this example a case study on customer-centric leadership.

It appears that one camp seeks to be at the giving side and another prefers to be stay put at the receiving end.

The Bible says, “Greater love has no man (or woman) than that he (or she) lay down their life for their friends.” Jesus died on the cross in a supreme example of love for his friends, even friends who turned away from him, and ‘friends’ who had no awareness of what he was doing. He commanded his disciples to love their enemies and at a climactic moment near death, looked at his tormentors who crucified him and prayed; “Father forgive them.”

While we may all be guilty of self-centeredness, Jesus can make a change in our lives. Opening our hearts, he pours his love into our lives.(1) Jesus gave himself up for you and me and the best response we could exhibit is to give back our lives to him in gratitude, for it is far more blessed to give than to receive.

Neil Vimalkumar Boniface is a member of the speaking and writing team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Chennai, India.

(1) See Romans 5:1-5.

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The world of belief-systems and worldviews is a complicated playground of stories, storytellers, and allegiances. What makes it most complicated is perhaps what is often our inability to perceive these interacting powers in the first place. That which permeates our surroundings, subconsciously molds our understanding, and continuously informs our vision of reality is not always easy to articulate. The dominate culture shapes our world in ways we seldom even realize, and often cannot realize, until something outside of our culture comes along and introduces us, and the scales fall from our eyes.

Further complicating the great arena of narratives is the fact that we often do not even recognize certain systems for the metanarratives that they are, or else we grossly underestimate the story’s power. Whatever versions of the story we utilize to understand human history—atheism, capitalism, pluralism, consumerism—their roots run very deep in the human soul. This is why Bishop Kenneth Carder can refer to the global market economy as a “dominant god,” consumerism, economism, and nationalism as religions.(1) These deeply rooted ideologies are challenged only when a different ideology comes knocking, when a different faith-system comes along and upsets the system in which we have placed our faith and ordered our worlds.

This is perhaps one reason the Bible calls again and again for the action of remembering: Remember the story, tell of the acts of God in history, remember that there is one who has come near. For into this world of belief-systems and worldviews, God repeatedly tells the story of creation and the pursuit of its redemption and re-creation. God himself comes and proclaims in a body a kingdom both among us and entirely other. The narrative we discover introduces us not only to a new world, but a kingdom that jarringly shows us our own world and a savior who shows us what it means to be human.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Another Story →

The capture of one of the most notorious drug loads—leader of the Sinaloa Cartel—El Chapo, Joaquin Guzman made global headlines. Guzman was captured without the firing of a single bullet. This was quite a feat given that he kept an arsenal of weapons around him at all times: semi-automatic rifles, hand-grenades, rocket-launchers, and other weapons of mass-destruction. Yet, he was completely caught off guard when police arrested him in his home in the early dawn of 2014. He escaped not five months later by creating a tunnel from his shower. While the media hailed his capture and re-capture in January 2016 as well as his recent trial and upcoming sentencing as huge successes in the fight against drug trafficking, most citizens in Mexico are less sure. There is little confidence that Guzman’s capture will slow the traffic or violence of the drug trade and its cartels, which for many seems an intractable feature of Mexican life.

The moral depravity of the real-life drug cartels has often been fictionalized in television and film. Whether the popular television show Breaking Bad or the 2007 film No Country for Old Men (adapted from the novel by Cormac McCarthy), the violence intertwined with the illegal drug trade has often been used as a metaphor for exploring the underbelly of evil just below the surface of ‘civilized’ life. Specifically, it is a force that seems to advance without end or solution. The recent news about heroin epidemics and overdoses in typically “middle-American” towns is a chilling example. Given the chaotic elements inherent in addiction and violence, it is understandable how a kind of nihilistic despair can take hold. As the sheriff laments in the film No Country for Old Men:

“I was sheriff of this county when I was twenty-five years old. Hard to believe. My grandfather was a lawman; father too. You can’t help but compare yourself against the old-timers. Can’t help but wonder how they would have operated these times. The crime you see now, it’s hard to even take its measure. It’s not that I’m afraid of it. I always knew you had to be willing to die to even do this job. But, I don’t want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don’t understand. A man would have to put his soul at hazard. He’d have to say, ‘O.K., I’ll be part of this world [emphasis mine].’”(1)

When I read the headlines or encounter some of the ways in which these realities are depicted in film, television, novels, and other artistic media, I wonder with the Sheriff in McCarthy’s novel how to make a difference in the kind of world most would be terrified to enter. Is there any hope for redemption, transformation, and justice that goes beyond simply punishment? As a Christian, I wonder what difference the good news of Jesus can make in a world of drug lords, traffickers, and violence?

In the face of these kinds of questions, I learned about the work of the artist Pedro Reyes. His musical project titled “Disarm,” transformed 6,700 guns that were turned in or seized by the army and police into musical instruments.(2) The guns came from Ciudad Juarez, a city of about 1.3 million people that averaged about 10 killings a day at the height of its drug violence. In 2010, Ciudad Juarez had a murder rate about 230 per 100,000 inhabitants. Reyes remarked of the guns he used that this is “just the tip of the iceberg of all the weapons that are seized every day and that the army has to destroy.” But rather than succumb to the despair, Reyes took the very instruments used for violence and created instruments for music.

Reyes already was known for a 2008 project called “Palas por Pistolas,” or “Pistols to Shovels,” in which he melted down 1,527 weapons to make the same number of shovels to plant the same number of trees. Reyes stresses that his work “is not just a protest, but a proposal.” His proposal is to take objects of destruction and transform them into objects of creation. It is not by accident that Reyes’s creative work hearkens back to the ancient vision of the prophet Isaiah when on the great day of the Lord “they will hammer their swords into plowshares.”(3)

It is not by accident that the gospel of John hearkens back to the chaos of the primordial creation: “In the beginning was the Word…In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and void and darkness was over the surface of the deep; and the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters…All things came into being by Him and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being. In him was life, and the life was the light of all people.”(4) John’s gospel presents Jesus as the one who brings order from chaos, light from darkness, just like God’s action at the original creation. Out of what was formless and void order and meaning come forth. The light that comes does not simply banish the darkness; it is re-worked and re-ordered by the light. Light transforms the darkness. The creation of music from the violence of the drug cartels takes a similar cue. “To me at least,” Reyes says, “the concept is about taking weapons that are destructive in nature and chaotic and trying to make them for something else. So instead of objects of destruction, they become objects of creation.”(5) Art, for Reyes, is about transformation; about shining light into the darkness.

Could God take the chaos and destruction we often see in our world and transform it with our deceptively simple, seemingly small acts of creative engagement? For those who follow Jesus, that kind of engagement with the destructive forces of the world gives witness to the reality of Jesus Christ, the Creator of life, light, goodness, and love. For the light shines in the darkness and the darkness does not overcome it.

Margaret Manning Shull is a member of the speaking and writing team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Bellingham, Washington.

http://www.rzim.org/

In the eyes of an eight-year-old, the most wonderful thing about Lake Michigan was grandpa’s boat. Sailing was a love of his and I was a glad participant. A particularly rare treat was spending the night on the boat, gently being rocked to sleep by the bobbing waves and steady clanking of metal against mast. My grandpa tried to show me the Milky Way, directing my eyes by way of the North Star. He told us the meaning of the boat’s name, a word that sounded funny at the time. “Nomad,” he said, “is the word for a wanderer, a drifting, homeless traveler.” Feeling like the darkened sky could swallow me up in seconds, under the stars, I felt the same.

One of the things I am comforted by in the Christian religion is the insistence that I am a wanderer, a stranger in a foreign and yet familiar land. “Hear my prayer, O LORD,” pleads the psalmist, “and give ear to my cry; do not hold your peace at my tears. For I am your passing guest, an alien, like all my forebears.” In the book of Hebrews, amongst the testimonies of those who have lived and died, we are told that besides having in common a life of faith, these men and women had in common the suspicion that they were people living as aliens, journeying toward the very God who makes home home. “All these died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them. They confessed that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth.”(1)

In his book Reaching Out, author Henri Nouwen defines a stranger as someone who is “estranged from their own past, culture and country, from their neighbors, friends and family, from their deepest self and from God.”(2) There are perhaps few of us who cannot find ourselves within that definition in some way each day. At the sound of breaking news, in the silence of anguished prayer, in the distraction that consumes years, there is a sense of alienation that wells up within us. Longing for promises in the distance, we wait estranged and encouraged by the hope that all is not yet as it will be.

Along the road to Emmaus, Jesus walked with two of his disciples who did not recognize him. On their way, the disciples talked about the events that gripped them with confusion and sorrow: their crucified leader, their lost hope, the ‘idle tale’ of an empty tomb. The one who traveled with them talked about the Scriptures, explaining events and promises down the centuries from Moses to the prophets. When they arrived, they invited him in to have a meal with them, and as he broke the bread, their eyes were opened: This stranger who walked with them was the one they knew. Home was once again in their midst.

On this road, there are always parts of ourselves that wander off with guilt or resentment, or get stuck somewhere on a tangent. But there is a great difference between wandering like a nomadic soul and walking as a stranger heightened by the hope that going home is a lifelong journey walked in thankful awareness of life with the Spirit. Often we are aware how long is the journey and how trying the conversations that must be had along the way. But we may find ourselves encouraged by fellow strangers in our midst. In the form of a tired traveler, Christ came to show us how to be human, how to find ourselves home again. As a stranger in a foreign land, salvation came searching for all who find themselves estranged.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) cf. Psalm 39:12, Hebrews 11:13.

(2) Henri Nouwen, Reaching Out (New York: Doubleday, 1986), 49.

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“Prosperity, pleasure, and success may be rough of grain and common in fibre, but sorrow is the most sensitive of all created things.”

Those are the words of the famed pleasure seeker, Oscar Wilde. In his De Profundis, written in prison, he wrote with profound earnestness about how much sorrow had taught him. He went on to add, “Where there is sorrow there is holy ground. Some day people will realize what that means. They will know nothing of life till they do.”

As I reflect on those words, I take note first of the one who wrote them. A life of pain was the farthest thing from his mind when he made his choices. In that sense, none of us ever really choose sorrow. But I take note of something else in his words. His claim is bold; he is not merely confessing an idea written across his worldview, but one he insists is written across the world: Sorrow is holy ground and those who do not learn to walk there know nothing of what living means. What he means at the very least is that some of life’s most sacred truths are learned in the midst of sorrow. He learned, for example, that raw unadulterated pleasure for pleasure’s sake is never a fulfilling pleasure. Violation of the sacred in the pursuit of happiness is not truly a source of happiness. In fact, it kills happiness because it can run roughshod over many a victim. Pleasure that profanes is pleasure that destroys.

Sorrow on the other hand—while never pursued—comes into one’s life and compels us to see our own finitude and frailty. It demands of us seriousness and tenderness if we are to live life the way it is meant to be lived. One of the most important things sorrow does is to show us what it needs and responds to. Wilde said it himself: “Sorrow is a wound that bleeds when any hand but that of love touches it, and even then must bleed again, though not in pain.”

Of all the descriptions given about Jesus, there is one that unabashedly stands out to confront us. It is a description uttered by the prophet Isaiah, prodding mind and heart at once: “He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief. Like one from whom men hide their faces; he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted” (Isaiah 53:3). Whether holding glimpses of global suffering or personal pain and loss, Isaiah’s is a fitting description to reflect upon.

Maybe you are at a time in your life when hurt is writ large upon your thoughts. Jesus is not unacquainted with your pain. In fact, he draws near particularly with a hand of love. Your wound may still bleed for a while to remind you of your weakness. But he can help carry the pain to carry you in strength. This could indeed be holy ground for you. It most certainly was for him.

Ravi Zacharias is founder and president of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries.

http://www.rzim.org/

The following is excerpted from Ravi Zacharias’s I, Isaac, Take Thee, Rebekah(Nashville: W Publishing, 2004).

I have heard it said that the longest journey in life is from the head to the heart. Another way to say the same thing is that the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. Yet another aphorism of our time is that beginning well is a momentary thing; finishing well is a lifelong thing. All of these point to one reality—our knowledge and our response are not always in keeping with each other. We seem to be inclined to separate what God intended to remain joined together.

Solomon proved this centuries ago. He made a fascinating statement in the Book of Ecclesiastes. He relates all the areas in which he searched for meaning—pleasure, riches, power, fame, and everything else one could imagine. Through all of these forays in a search for fulfillment, he says, “My wisdom stayed with me” (Ecclesiastes 2:9). How is that possible, we ask, when his day-to-day life was a colossal mess? I understand him to mean that in the midst of his duplicity, his theoretical knowledge of right and wrong never left him. He knew how to discern. But he was volitionally weak and unable to resist the tug of attraction into wrong behavior.

I have shared the following story many times over the years. Those from parts of the world where this is foreign shake their heads in disbelief, wondering how this can even be theoretically plausible, let alone practically workable. But read the reasoning first and then I will try to explain.

I give you an example of my older brother, who lives in Toronto, Canada. The story dates back to the late 1960s. At that time he was a systems engineer with IBM. Since that time, he has gone on to do several very impressive things in the world of computer software. In other words, he is mentally all right. He doesn’t have any major problem as far as his IQ is concerned. I say that because you may begin to wonder as I tell his story.

When he was in his mid-twenties, my brother came to my father and said, “You know, Dad, I’ve always maintained even when we were in India that I’m only going to marry the girl you choose for me. I guess I am ready now. Would you please begin a search for a girl for me to marry?”

I really didn’t believe he’d go through with it. We were living in Toronto, thousands of miles and a cultural planet away from the land of our birth. But this was his choice. He wanted my parents to help in “The Search.” My father and mother said, “Fine. Tell us the kind of young woman you’re looking for.” My brother gave his “ideal partner” speech and proceeded to describe the kind of person he would choose to marry.

Under normal circumstances, the parents would travel around and look for somebody that met the criteria, but in this instance my brother said to our father, “Look, you really don’t need to do that. Why don’t you just write to your sister in Bombay and let her do the groundwork? We’ll just correspond back and forth and take it from there.”

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Will To Do →

Each of us, in an instant, can drudge up a snapshot of humanity at its worst. Images of genocide in Germany, Rwanda, Bosnia, or the Sudan come readily to mind. Other impressions are not far off: students planning deadly attacks at school, opportunists preying on the elderly, the greed that paved the Trail of Tears. They are visions that challenge the widespread hope that people are generally good, leaving in its wake the sinking feeling of human indecency. But ironically, such snapshots of humanity also seem to grant permission to distance ourselves from this depravity. Whether with theory or judgment, we place ourselves in different categories. Perhaps even unconsciously, we consider their inferior virtue, their primitive sense of morality, or their distinctively depraved character. And it is rare that we see the stones in our hands as a problem.

As Jesus stood with a girl at his feet in the middle of a group armed with rocks and morality, he crouched down in the sand and with his finger wrote something that caused a fuming crowd to drop their stones and a devastated girl to get up. No one knows what he wrote on the ground that day with the Pharisees and the woman caught in adultery, and yet we often emerge from the story not with curiosity but with satisfaction. This public conviction of the Pharisees strikes most of us with the force of victory. Their air of superiority is palpable, and it is satisfying to picture them owning up to their own shortfall. If we imagine ourselves in the scene at all, it is most likely in a crumpled heap of shame with the woman at Jesus’s feet; it is rarely, if ever, with the Pharisees.

There are those who mock the idea of human depravity, insisting that it wastes our potential for good with unnecessary and demeaning guilt. According to Richard Dawkins, if God would just stop policing the world, then people would be good. But I suspect most of us recognize in ourselves the potential for something other than good, for greed or for cruelty, for vice just as easily as virtue. Even those who disapprove of the word “sin” have surely seen its expressions in their lives and in others. Looking below the surface of our good days or friendly moments, it is hard not to admit that who we really are at the heart of things—on bad days or even average days, when life runs amok or temptations overwhelm us—is complicated to say the very least. Thus, for most of us, it is not a giant mental leap to see ourselves in the adulterous woman.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – In Stone and Sand →

Before coming to the narrative of Christ’s birth, there is a dramatic conversation which takes place between a priest called Zechariah and the angel Gabriel. One day Zechariah was serving in the temple when the angel Gabriel appeared to him.(1) Zechariah was very afraid but Gabriel spoke to him saying, “Do not be afraid. Your prayer has been heard.” Gabriel continued to tell Zechariah that he and his wife would have a son and they were to name him John. Ultimately, John would be the one to prepare people for the Lord Jesus.

Yet instead of rejoicing over the news brought to him from Gabriel, Zechariah objects, “How shall I know this? For I am an old man, and my wife is advanced in years.” Gabriel responds by explaining to Zechariah precisely to whom he is speaking and also cites the authority on which he bears this news:

“I am Gabriel and I stand in the presence of God, and I was sent to speak to you and to bring you this good news. And behold, you will be silent and unable to speak until the day that these things take place, because you did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled in their time.”

One only needs to read the first chapter of Luke’s Gospel to find out that this promise from the Lord was fulfilled. Elizabeth and Zechariah have a baby boy and they name him John. It is only after the naming of John that Zechariah is able to speak again.

There are many aspects of this story that are remarkable. First is the context in which the story takes place: the people of Israel, of whom Zechariah and Elizabeth were a part, have not heard from God for a period of roughly 400 years! When Gabriel appears to Zechariah, it is highly likely that this is the first time Zechariah has heard from God in such a way.

To make theological matters even more complicated for Zechariah, Gabriel’s second statement, after telling him to not be afraid, is “Your prayer has been heard.” There is deep irony in this statement primarily because of the theological background leading up to this conversation. For all of Zechariah’s life, he had never heard God’s voice like this. The very act of God speaking to him would seem preposterous. Therefore, it is understandable why Zechariah questions Gabriel. Zechariah and his people have prayed to God, many for their entire lives, and they have never heard anything. How could Zechariah be sure this was truly a message from the Lord? This encounter undoubtedly marked a watershed moment, not only for Zechariah, but for God’s people and the entire world. God would speak now and humanity would be silent.

God’s silence is often a challenge to belief. One point I glean from the early part of this story is that God’s silence does not necessarily imply that God is inactive. In Israel’s case, God had been silent for years, yet in this angelic encounter, nearly the first words of instruction from the Lord are, “Your prayer has been heard.” For those of us who are immersed in the urgency of the digital world, we would do well to heed the implicit lesson of patience found in this story. God had been silent for a long time, but God was listening. There are times in our lives in which we do not hear God’s voice. Gabriel’s words tell us that although we might not hear God speaking, God is still listening.

After Zechariah objects to the seemingly audacious promise given from the Lord, Gabriel points out that it is not on his own authority that he speaks, but God’s. Implicit in Gabriel’s statement is the reality that God is bringing help to Israel, not because of what Zechariah or Elizabeth have done, but rather because of who God is. Historically speaking, God was the one who helped, rescued, and saved Israel countless times. The people of Israel knew this history well and they also knew why God had reached down and helped them. This much was clear in the mind of Israel: God’s salvation came only because of God’s character. God’s saving power came, not because of humanity’s effort, but because of God’s nature to save.

Gabriel then tells Zechariah that he will be silent. This is what strikes me most about the story: Gabriel appears to Zechariah in a time during which the people of Israel had not heard from God in years. The Lord speaks to Zechariah and tells him that God will act and fulfill his promise, but while God does so, Zechariah will be silent.

Generally I have viewed the silence of Zechariah as a punishment for not believing in God, and that may well be true. But I also see this act of silence pointing to something far deeper than one man receiving a punishment from God for not believing, and here’s why: The people of Israel knew that God had helped them; they knew why God had helped them and they also had learned how God had worked in history. Over time they had realized that God’s grace and salvation would be worked out through quietness and trust. Israel’s strength lay not in activity and being busy, but in silence. This was how God worked.

Zechariah’s silence is a symbol of God’s salvation. John’s life was spent concentrated on preparing people for Christ, the means by which people could be saved. But before John came, the Lord visited his father through Gabriel, telling Zechariah that He had heard his prayer, and was going to rescue his people not in a flurry of human activity, but in a way in which people could only watch him work and hear him speak. Perhaps one of the vital lessons we can learn from the Incarnation is to prioritize silence before God. At the very least, being quiet will remind us of a greater time, one of the greatest in history, when God spoke and humankind was there only to watch and listen.

Nathan Betts is a member of the speaking team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Seattle, Washington.

(1) See Luke 1.

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In his book The Idiot, Fyodor Dostoevsky sets forth the bold assertion that “beauty will save the world.” The sheer number of ways in which this quote has been applied attests to the risk inherent in the idea, and perhaps inherent in beauty itself. Certainly the church during the Reformation recognized the risks involved in imaging God, using beauty to communicate an incommunicable mystery, the impersonal to describe a Person. For good reason, many are cautious when we hear a statement such as the one in this novel.

But Dostoevsky did not pronounce the idea with the naïveté with which it is often quoted. He did not have in mind the kind of beauty we worship in the fashion or beauty industries nor did he have in mind an impersonal object or a purely abstract notion, a distinct but distant ideal. On the contrary, Dostoevsky entertains the idea in a person, in Myshkin, who lives the quality of beauty as if an inescapable quality of his inmost being. For Myshkin’s inclination is to help rather than to harm, to give mercy rather than malice, forgiving again and again, though surrounded by people who do not. In fact, it is this group who tirelessly labels Myshkin the “idiot” because he refuses to participate in the disparaging and destructive ugliness of their own ways but instead takes what is cruel and repulsive in them and their culture and dispels it. They hate him for it; they believe him a fool. But it is a kind and beautiful foolishness.

I sometimes wonder if we have so stripped away the possibility of actual beauty in our encounters with the divine that we not only miss something real of God and others to behold in the world, but we miss opportunities to show the world the beauty of God—in hands and faces, in people who bestow crowns of beauty instead of ashes, in communities that repair ruined cities instead of causing further devastation.(1) Theologian William Dyrness laments the modern mentality that has somehow lost the sense of the “wholeness that beauty reflects.”(2) We are so mindful of beauty’s limitations; but isn’t it we who are the limited as the depicters of God’s beauty? “[When I look at] the moon and the stars that you have established,” sang David, “what are human beings that you are mindful of them?” (Psalm 8:3). Describing the very wholeness that beauty reflects, Dyrness continues, “Based on God’s continuing presence in the Spirit of Christ, God is somehow present in all beauty.”(3)

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Every society has insiders and outsiders. Groups of people or individuals are defined by a particular characteristic, belief, ethnicity, or behavior marking them as winners and losers. If one was a Jew in Nazi Germany, for example, she was an “outsider” and branded as such by a yellow Star of David sewn into her garments. If one was a Tutsi in Rwanda in the 1990s, he would be forced to use an ID card which specified his ethnic group. In addition, his skin color was a general physical trait that was typically used to designate him an ethnic “outsider.”

But just who is inside and who is outside in particular cultures is often a matter of perspective. Many Anabaptist communities, for example, intentionally live as “outsiders” eschewing many of the modern trappings of secular culture. Being outsiders is their purposeful identity. In the button-down-shirt-world of suits and ties, tattoos and multiple piercings define one as an outsider, using body art as a means of “dressing” apart from the rest of society. It seems that the boundaries around who is in and who is out shift and change constantly.

Jesus, as presented in the gospel accounts of his life, often blurred the lines between who was inside and who was outside. Indeed, he often suggested in his teaching ministry that those deemed on the outside of the society were actually on the inside. In his “outside-in” perspective, the first would be last, and the last first. Rejecting the rules that kept the poor, the broken, the sick, the disabled, or the ethnically different person firmly on the outside, Jesus instead opened-wide his arms and extended the reach of his hospitality far beyond what would have been deemed acceptable in his day.

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While many industries confess to struggling during times of economic downturn, the identity management industry, a trade emerging from the realities of the Internet Age, is one that seems to gain business steadily regardless. As one company notes in its mission statement, they began with the realization that “the line dividing people’s ‘online’ lives from their ‘offline’ personal and professional lives was eroding, and quickly.”(1) While the notion of anonymity or the felt-safety of a social network lures users into online disinhibition, reputations are forged in a very public domain. And, as many have discovered, this can come back to haunt them—long after posted pictures are distant memories. In a survey taken in 2006, one in ten hiring managers admitted rejecting candidates because of things they discovered about them on the Internet. With the increasing popularity of social networks, personal video sites, and blogs, today that ratio is now nine in ten. Hence the need for identity managers—who scour the Internet with an individual’s reputation in mind and scrub websites of image-damaging material—grows almost as quickly as a high-schooler’s social media presence.

With the boom of the reputation business in mind, I wonder how identity managers might have attempted to deal with the social repute of Jesus. Among officials, politicians, and soldiers, his reputation as a political nightmare and agitator of the people preceded him. Among the religious leaders, his reputation was securely forged by the scandal and outrage of his messianic claims. Beyond these reputations, the most common accusations of his personal depravity had to do with the company he kept, the Sabbath he broke, the food and drink he enjoyed. In two different gospels, Jesus remarks on his reputation as a glutton. “[T]he Son of Man has come eating and drinking, and you say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax-collectors and sinners!’”(2) In fact, if you were to remove the accounts of his meals or conversations with members of society’s worst, or his parables that incorporated these untouchables, there would be very little left of Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John. According to etiquette books and accepted social norms, both from the first century and the twenty-first, the reputation of Jesus leaves much to be desired.

Ironically, the reputation of those Jesus left behind often does not resemble his reputation at all. Writing in 1949 with both humor and lament, Dorothy Sayers describes the differences: “For nineteen and a half centuries, the Christian churches have labored, not without success, to remove this unfortunate impression made by their Lord and Master. They have hustled the Magdalens from the communion table, founded total abstinence societies in the name of him who made the water wine, and added improvements of their own, such as various bans and anathemas upon dancing and theatergoing….[F]eeling that the original commandment ‘thou shalt not work’ was rather half-hearted, [they] have added to it a new commandment, ‘thou shalt not play.”(3) Her observations have a ring of both comedy and tragedy. The impression Christians often give the world is that Christianity comes with an oddly restricted understanding of words such as “virtue,” “morality,” “faithfulness,” and “goodness.” Curiously, this reputation is far more similar to the law-abiding religion of which Jesus had nothing nice to say. “Woe to you, hypocrites! For you lock people out of the kingdom of heaven.”(4)

When the apostle Paul described the kind of life that will flourish in the one who follows Jesus, he was not giving the church a checklist or a rigid code like the religious law from which he himself was freed. He was describing the kinds of reputations that emerge precisely when following this friend of tax-collectors and sinners, the drunkard, the Sabbath-breaker, the vicariously human Son of God: “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”(5) This is no mere niceness, an unfeeling, unthinking social obligation to keep the status quo. Jesus loved the broken, discarded people around him to a social fault. He was patient and kind, joyful and peaceful in ways that made the world completely uncomfortable. He was also faithfully radical and generously intense and unsettling in ways that made the religious leaders and others in power completely uncomfortable. His disruptive qualities of goodness and faithfulness were not badges that made it seem permissible to exclude others for their lack of virtue. The depth of his love for the Father did not lead him to condemn the world around him or to isolate himself in disgust of its immorality; rather, it moved him to walk in self-control to his death for the sake of all.

There are no doubt pockets of the world where the reputation of the church lines up with that of its founder and their presence offers the world a disruptive, countercultural gift. The prophets and identity managers of the church today pray for more of this. Until then, in a world deciphering questions of reputation like “What does it mean to be socially reputable?” or “What is the best way to distinguish oneself?” or “Do I like my googled self?” perhaps we might ask instead, “Who was this human Christ and how might we follow?”

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) From the website ReputationDefender.com/company accessed Jan 15, 2009.

(2) Luke 7:34, Matthew 11:19.

(3) Dorothy Sayers, “Christian morality” in The Whimsical Christian (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 151-152.

(4) Matthew 23:23.

(5) “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” (Galatians 5:22-23).

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You may recall me telling the story of being in a country some years ago where I was introduced to a man who had a daily habit of taking his little boy up a hill. The man would point over the border and tell his son, “Your duty in life is to kill as many of them on the other side as you can.”

Even today it is hard for me to comprehend this. Tragically, this man could never shut the gate on the past. And so he dragged the heavy carcass of historical prejudice and draped that corpse over the shoulders of the next generation as a reminder to continue the carnage.

Sadly, we discover the seeds of hate and separation in the opening pages of Scripture and within the very first family. Incredibly, the first murder in the Bible did not occur because of two irreconcilable political theories. The murder of a man by his own brother was an act unmistakably borne out of their differing responses to God! Trapped by the temporal, Cain was deluded by the belief that he could vanquish spiritual reality with brute force. God saw the inevitable result of the jealousy and hatred deep within Cain’s heart, and in a challenge that would determine his destiny, warned him to deal with it. “If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at the door; it desires to have you, but you must master it” (Genesis 4:7).

Tragically, Cain ignored God’s words, and taking matters into his own hands, he killed his brother Abel.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Think Again: No Longer Bound →

The book and television series Game of Thrones has brought the mythical medieval world of kings and kingdoms back into the contemporary imagination. The world it depicts is a brutal world of despots and power-hungry individuals who will make any alliance to secure their way to the throne. While there are some characters who place the good of the realm over family or individual ambition, most of the characters are a despicable lot maniacally driven towards power.

For those who hail from kingless countries, the language and images of kings and lords may seem at best outdated and the stuff of Arthurian legend, or at worst oppressive. Dominant images of kings and kingdoms as overlords, like those portrayed in Game of Thrones, conjure up images of tyrants living in ancient feudal societies who will stop at nothing and not think twice about stepping over anyone who gets in their way. As a result, for some the word “king” can hold fairly negative images and feelings.

Regardless, for Christians the language of king, kingdom, rule, and authority is inescapable. Christian’s celebrate the rule of Christ over all creation. The apostle Paul’s words to the Philippian church describe Jesus in the language of kings: “God highly exalted him, and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those who are in heaven, and on earth and under the earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”(1)

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Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? When the morning stars sang in chorus, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?

These are just two of the long list of questions asked of the ancient character Job. God’s interrogation bursts forth like thunder, breaking God’s long, unnerving silence with a clap that seems to drown out Job’s outpour of grief. I can read them as a harsh sting, as a silencing gavel to Job’s anguish and objections, akin to the response of an exasperated parent putting an end to the child’s inquisitive clamoring with the trump card of a louder, final sovereignty: Because I’m the parent, that’s why. It is God as Creator imagined something more like God as tyrant.

Our imagining of God is often a complicated collection of stories, images, memories, and emotions, some of which may well be more accurate—or heightened in our minds for whatever reason—than others. I long read God’s response to Job’s pain and questions with the sting of an angry or weary parent. It was the imagination of another that helped me ask: What if these words aren’t said angrily, but with gentle lament for the created world in the life of even one wilting soul? What if these words respond to both the vast pain of creation where it groans in need and the vast beauty of creation where it remains a wonder of good? Such questions thunder quite a bit differently.

A theology professor of mine who grew up farming speaks readily about the creation of the world through the landscape of gardening.(1) I remember the first time I heard him simply read from the creation story. As he read aloud and commented on the story, it was as if I was hearing it again for the first time. Parts of it, I am certain, I had never heard before. Genesis chapter 2, the account of creation that Christians and Jews hold as sacred text, says that God planted a garden in Eden to the east. God, the gardener.

I can’t say that I have ever heard a sermon about creation as gardening, the creator of the world as Gardener. I had never considered what such an identity of God might mean to me or to the world around me. Yet here is one of the first passages in the Bible where we are introduced to who God is—and God is not a warrior or a judge or even a sovereign, but first, a gardener, a nurturer of all life, protector and planter, a designer, keeper, and pruner concerned with life’s flourishing. My own experiences with gardening bring to mind an entirely different set of emotions and dispositions than I typically consider God as having: delight in dirty hands, my own investment into the life I’ve planted, the thrill of fruit, the gentle attention to life, the compilation and cooperation with so many different factors—wind and rain, sun and predators—and the pleasure of simply being near it all. I find that when I am most weary of the despair and injustice of the world, my garden gives me an inexplicable hope.

“Gardens are a form of autobiography,” someone said. God as gardener, the intimate vision at creation’s beginning, can be traced throughout the Old Testament, in the psalms, and in the prophets. Jesus, too, concurs: I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener. Such a reading of the world’s creation and the thought of a gardener tending to me, stirs a response akin to that of the man after God’s own heart:

When I survey this vast world, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars and all that you have established, what are mortals that you are mindful of us, human beings in whatever state of despair or joy or smallness that you care for us with the loving eye of a gardener?

Magnificent and intimate, powerful and gentle, God as gardener, whose deepest concern is life’s flourishing, makes no clearer a case than in Easter’s undoing of death and the vicarious humanity of the resurrected Son. How unmistakably fitting that the place of the tomb and resurrection is also described as a garden, and Jesus himself is mistaken as the gardener on that creative morning. This Maker of all creation, the Gardener who carefully tends to the world and the signs of its groaning, is surely at work even now making all things new.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) For further reading see Norman Wirzba, From Nature to Creation: A Christian Vision for Understanding and Loving Our World (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2015).

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Among atheist advocates, it has become fashionable to dismiss theism with the mantra that unbelievers, like theists, are atheist with regard to a host of entities considered to be divine at sundry times throughout history. Atheists, we are told, merely acknowledge one less God than theists. If believers understood why they reject Zeus, the argument goes, they would understand why atheists reject their God.

Unfortunately, dismissing theism on such grounds betrays a paltry acquaintance with the very idea of God, let alone the God revealed in the Bible. It is true that many concepts of God present us with entities that are nothing more than glorified human beings. But anyone who is familiar with the relevant religious and philosophical literature on the subject does not need to be told that such untutored notions of God are just pointless red herrings. Popular level atheism may be fodder for invigorating debates on the Internet, but it has little, if anything at all, to do with God.

Take, for instance, the idea of God defended by such a prominent ancient philosopher as Aristotle. Whereas Zeus and his associates held sway at the popular level, David Conway notes that Aristotle defended a God who was unchanging, immaterial, all-powerful, omniscient and indivisible; a God who possessed “perfect goodness and necessary existence.”(1) That is a striking parallel to the God worshipped in the major monotheistic religions of the world. Even among the so-called animistic religions, it is a mistake to think that the concept of God is limited to spirits in natural objects and events, even in cases where the latter are venerated. As Timothy Tennent notes, adherents of these religions acknowledge a being who is the ground of all being.(2)

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“It would surely be much more rational if conversation rather than dancing were the order of the day,” notes Miss Bingley in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

“Much more rational, I dare say,” replies her brother, “but not be near so much like a ball.”(1)

Mr. Bingly’s quip came to mind as I walked to the altar to receive the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. “Come to the table,” we hear each Sunday at Christ’s invitation. “Everything is ready.” Eating was no doubt for Jesus a theological declaration; declaration that could perhaps have been more rationally given. But this would certainly be much less like a feast.

The insistence of Jesus at the inclusion of the unwanted of society was a hallmark of his ministry. This, along with his enjoyment of eating with others, brought upon him labels of unsavory repute. In two different gospels Jesus remarks on his reputation at the table: “[T]he Son of Man has come eating and drinking, and you say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax-collectors and sinners!’”(2) The theologian Joachim Jeremias describes the massive social and spiritual implications that an invitation to a meal held in the minds of this culture—namely, a declaration of worth, the offer of acceptance, and the assurance of divine forgiveness. “Hence the passionate objections of the Pharisees who held that the pious could have table fellowship only with the righteous,” notes Jeremias. “They understood the intention of Jesus as being to accord the outcasts’ worth before God by eating with them, and they objected to his placing of the sinner on the same level as the righteous.”(3)

Jesus mixed food with scandal—allowing sinful women near him at the table, breaking bread with crooked tax collectors, telling stories about dredging the hedges and the streets for the lowly to join the heavenly banquet. Food in his culture was a foreshadowing of heaven, where the righteous join God at the great feast. So it is scandalous that at his table, it is the outcast who seems to be most decidedly welcomed. Or, if we are to take the meal at Emmaus as evidence one step further, Christ is the outcast welcoming the least and the lost. “The encounter with the risen Jesus [in the breaking of the bread] began as an encounter with a stranger,” writes Rowan Williams.(4)

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