The streets were cluttered with trash instead of decorated with flowers. The houses had tarps for roofs, and often no roofs at all. The river water served for bathing, elimination, and drinking water. Bloated stomachs were not full; they were ravaged by parasites. Giant sloths hung lazily from the lush trees seemingly unaware, unaffected, and unbothered by the poverty and disease around them, and pet monkeys and parrots had ample food thrown their way. Yet countless numbers of children searched for food or other treasures among the dirt and filth of garbage piles. Still, laughter, singing, and smiles abounded, and the diverse landscape exuded an exotic vibrancy.

These composite impressions come from a visit to Brazil, a vast country that is both geographically and culturally rich, and which has some of the most impoverished areas in the world. This visit to Brazil several years ago was a vivid example of the experience of personal disruption. Growing up in suburban Illinois, with uniformly similar looking roofed houses, and with more than enough resources to take care of my needs and wants did not prepare me for this encounter with a land of unspeakable beauty and desolation. My disruptive encounter prompted many questions: Why did I have so much when others had so little? What could I do to make any real difference in their situation, and if I could make a difference, what would that look like? More importantly, was this encounter for me to make a difference, or for a difference to be made in me?

Disruption, as Webster’s New Riverside Dictionary defines it, can either be seen as an event that creates confusion and/or disorder, or can be seen as something that interrupts.(1) Of course, disruption creates both. When our beliefs are contradicted by our experience or challenged by competing and compelling alternatives, we feel disruption. When we encounter something radically different than anything we’ve known or experienced, such as I did in Brazil, we experience disruption. Disruption upends assumed expectations, interrupts our perceived self-efficacy and control, and complicates all that we’ve come to rely on and trust.

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French modern artist Georges Rouault was born in 1871 just outside Paris in the part of the city devastated by war. He was born in the midst of civil war. His mother gave birth to him as she sought shelter from heavy bombardment. Rouault would also live through the horrors of both World War I and World War II. He was drawn to art early in his life and encouraged by his mother, first training in a workshop that produced stained glass. By 1891, he was a pupil of Gustave Moreau in Paris, and a classmate of Matisse. But Rouault struggled deeply as an outsider. His art was disconcerting to everyone.

The church saw Rouault’s work as dark and unwanted. His contemporaries found his obsession with the cross far too religious, his interest in iconography and the French medieval aesthetic unwanted artifacts of the past. He was frequently referred to as “the artist of darkness and death.” He was accused of being able only “to imagine the most atrocious and avenging caricatures” and being “attracted exclusively by the ugly.”(1)

T.S. Eliot once praised the gift of artists who can hold a sense not only of the “pastness of the past but also of its presence.”(2) This is an apt description of Georges Rouault. His work considered the horrors of suffering that he saw presently and troublingly all around him alongside of the human Son of God crucified on a Roman cross, who somehow stood vividly in Rouault’s mind in the very midst of it. He saw the grotesque, the degraded, and demoralized of the world: the sorrow of clowns, the degradation of prostitutes, the hypocrisy of judges. And alongside these things, he saw the sacred, wounded head of Christ as the only one who could make sense of it. He saw within the bleak condition of the world and the fallen reality of our souls the presence of God in human form, standing within the darkness with us—and for us. Rouault inhabited an imagination steeped in the gifts of Holy Week and Easter, marked by the life, death, and resurrection of Christ.

In my own liturgical tradition, during the season of Lent as the church prepares for the feast of Easter, there is a practice called “burying the hallelujahs.” We refrain from saying hallelujah during Lent, hallelujah being an ultimate expression of rejoicing that means “God be praised.” For the forty days of Lent we are invited instead to remember our deaths, to call to mind our need, our sin, our apathy, our finiteness. During Lent, we mourn with the world, with the church far and wide, and we challenge ourselves to sit with it all.

This year, as we watched an unseen enemy move with deadly force around the world, I was thankful for the burying of our hallelujahs and a ready language to lament with neighbors I will never meet but with whom I grieve. I needed the imagination afforded by Lent and Holy Week. And in the midst of our continuing global health crisis and a suffering humanity in its wake, I need the imagination of Easter. We don’t bury the hallelujahs in cynicism or despair. We bury them because this is precisely where Easter itself begins: with a God who doesn’t bypass the darkness, but takes us through it. In the midst of this darkness, this grief, this death, this injustice, this moment of suffering, Jesus himself is present.

In the 70s and 80s when death squads were operating in countries of South and Central America, a liturgy emerged in the church by which Christians dramatically enacted faith amidst the pervasive fear perpetuated by the imagination of the nation state. Where death squads spread fear by “disappearing” those bodies that stood in their way, the church saw the resurrection of Christ and his own fatally wounded and “disappeared” body as a dramatic counter-narrative of resistance. Thus, at the liturgy, the names of those killed or disappeared were called aloud, and for each name someone from within the congregation would declare: Presente. “Here!”(3)

In this cultural moment, there are many who would meet this liturgical act or any mention of the resurrection, for that matter, with dismissal. Maybe even an understandable dismissal. Like words of comfort at a difficult funeral, while the sentiment might be needed, it will not undo what has been done. The death squads were not deterred by this communal act of rallying around a consoling word, and neither will Covid-19. These names are the names of people who were actually lost. In a heartbreakingly real sense, the “disappeared” are most definitely not presente. Those presently mourning loved ones lost to a virus that stole even the dignity of saying goodbye must feel this most acutely.

It is not hard to tend to an imagination that tells us that the “disappeared” belong to a group that will never stop growing: genocide, cancer, bombings, nameless lives wasted, tragically cut short, buried and gone. But whether confessed in sorrow or in cynicism, the assumption behind this imagination is that the dead can be buried once and for all and forgotten. What the churches facing these death squads seemed to understand better than most of us is that Christ gives us permission to lean into the tension of these seemingly contradictory claims: Buried. And Presente.

The bold proclamation of Easter is that bodies are not buried once and for all and forgotten. Suffering and injustice, viruses and cancer, murder and depression: None of these will have the final word. Easter is God’s promise that the darkness of Holy Saturday was far from empty, and the same is true of our darkness today.

In Georges Rouault’s Miserere series, there is a piece entitled “Resurrection,” where Christ’s resurrected body is depicted in that memorable cruciform image. It is both triumphant and a triumph that we feel compelled to reach for, to long for, as it breaks in. Rouault shows us victory, but we are also left longing for it, lamenting that it isn’t here yet.

Easter invites us further into this sacred, confounding space. We can delve into the darkness—perhaps holding the names of loved ones lost or lamentation we don’t know how to voice beyond groans—because this is a Suffering Servant who dares to hold it all. Beauty and ashes. Light and utter darkness. The risen Christ is present in all of it. Presente. He is here.

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

(1) William A. Dyrness, Rouault: a Vision of Suffering and Salvation (Grand Rapid: William B. Eerdmans, 1971), 43.
(2) T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” The Egoist, 1919.
(3) Story told by Rowan Williams in Choose Life: Christmas and Easter Sermons in Canterbury Cathedral (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 133-134. See also William Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1998).

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“My baby’s dead! My baby’s dead! My baby’s dead!” This is the cacophonous refrain playing from the living room as I am jolted out of slumber by my father. What is this awful sound? Why is my mom screaming?

“Mikey’s dead, son.” Mikey? My dad never called Mike Mikey, but there is no easy way to tell a 5-year-old child that their brother has died. Adding a “y” to the end of his name was about the best he could do to soften the blow. As the reality of the situation sank in, the world began to taste and feel a little different. There had been an irreversible rupture in the cosmos. My brother, Mike, in his senior year of high school, had just been killed in a car accident along with one of his best friends. Jesus did not, so far as we can tell, take the wheel, as the song goes. The wheel stayed on its path to destruction, reminding us all that chaos lurks behind every façade of safety in a broken world. April 28, 1988: The day my mother entered into Mary’s Good Friday passion.

Mom was not the same for a very long time. My father tells me that we would often find her crying alone. By some sort of inner prompting, my 5-year-old self would sit on her lap and hug her, tell her everything would be okay, and that I loved her. These moments were very special and cemented a close bond between mom and me. Sometimes we need someone to mourn with us, sometimes to encourage us, and sometimes both. Christians may take some sort of pride in looking different from the world, but when it comes to death we often look very much the same: afraid.

For centuries, theologians overlooked the question of how Mary might have felt, but debated whether one could use the phrase “God died on the cross.” The most debated portion of the Apostle’s Creed is that portion which affirms that Jesus did, in fact, go to the land of the dead after his death. Jesus died. The Messiah died. God’s chosen one, the Son of God, the Son of Man suffered, died, and was buried. But long before this became a confession that the church would uphold through centuries, plagues, and persecution, Mary was not thinking of doctrines. She was agonizing over the loss of her son. She was present at the crucifixion, one of the few remaining people from his life to see him off. Mary was thinking: my baby is dead. He was alive. Now he is not.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – In the Depths →

My wife and I have now had the chance to attend a couple of performances by the excellent Atlanta Symphony Orchestra where we listened to the rarely performed Symphony No. 5 by British composer, Ralph Vaughan Williams. I have always enjoyed his music, but about halfway through each performance, I found myself wondering why I find it so gripping, soothing, and even a tad, well, unsettling. Throughout his music, there is a sense of unease with flashes of calm or peace or whatever you want to call it breaking through.

Vaughan Williams wrote with a sense of the ominous on the horizon. As a medic during the First World War, looking across the shredded French landscape, he surely considered that something so big was happening as to change the world forever. He struggled to reconcile something so heartbreaking with what was once pristine. This violent transition signaled the sad reality of loss.

These thoughts fueled his Symphony No. 3 also known as the Pastoral Symphony, which he completed after the war. Beset by trench warfare, Vaughan Williams produced one of the most memorable pieces of 20th century music: at turns slow and somber, haunting and full of melancholy, and yet containing moments of hope and even triumphalism. The piece aurally paints a picture of beauty slipping away never to be recovered. In so much of his music, one finds a sense of sadness. But even more than this is the constant feeling of universal longing. Longing for a place we once had or shared. Longing for a time unmarred by panic, whether made by humanity or nature. Longing toward restoration and wholeness.

One of the Bible’s most gripping descriptions of longing comes from Deuteronomy 28:32. With dramatic examples, Moses describes life as it might look apart from God, broken and marred. “Your sons and your daughters shall be given to another people, while your eyes look on and fail with longing for them all the day.” Here the Hebrew term translates “longing” (kaleh) to “failing with desire.”

What a vision for us today. We see a way of life we have enjoyed for a century, and we feel it slipping out of our hands. Falling stocks, a frozen housing market, retirement plans jettisoned, weddings and funerals conducted with no one in attendance. Not the life we were brought up to expect or for which most of us saved and looked toward. We long for what we thought was promised us. But right now, we look upon all of this with failing eyes.

The last weeks have been surreal. Videos of over-capacity emergency rooms. Government officials coming to grasp how to navigate an unseen enemy. Social distancing. “Stay-in-place” orders. Businesses closing. Death unfolding in real time. To be sure, we are not embroiled in a global military conflict. But we have lost our sense of normalcy, and we are grasping with how to cope with it.

The notion that we would long for something necessarily implies that we are not satisfied. C.S. Lewis is well-known for suggesting that our longings indicate that we are made for another place and time.(1) It is a natural state for our souls to long for something, and our earthly desires serve to alert us to a real, if eventual, fulfillment of what truly satisfies.

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“Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem! Behold, your king is coming to you; righteous and having salvation is he, humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.”

These old words sprung to life when an awkward request from the Rabbi had to be carried out by a nervous disciple. Jesus, their teacher, asked them to go asking for a donkey, so he could ride into Jerusalem. I wonder if some knew that he was walking into a trap, or perhaps it would be a trap from which he would emerge and pull off that one hattrick that would prove him to be their radical warrior king. Is this where he would shame the empire and show its finite capability in quenching the coming kingdom? Jerusalem, a congested city of many reveries and divided allegiance, was alive with festivities. It was the Passover and its lamb was watching from a distance. He watched the city as though watching his path towards a lover for whom he would give everything to love, yet knowing that the ultimate act of his love would be unrequited. The elite of the city undermined him, with their eyes and scaling hands they had already weighed him.

But there was a place where this Savior was visible. Just like his entry into the world, he was shown to be of the highest order of royalty to the lowliest in society: the shepherds, the peasants Mary and Joseph, prophet Simeon and prophetess Anna. Throughout his life, these margin bodies, the adulteresses, tax payers, and outcasts, they saw God with them, talking to them, eating with them, putting their lives together. And there, at the edge of the city, they saw him. And so they did what the common people did in that culture when a king would grace their streets. They placed palms on the floor to let him triumphally parade himself among them.

In this hour of global crisis, this part of our Lenten journey finds us forced to pause with pain as we reflect again on this Holy Week entry into the city of Jerusalem. Covid-19 has dealt a global blow to us that has us feeling exceptionally out of control. Whether we have our social immersion at the margins of the city, where life is hard and poverty and lack of access makes room for more destruction, or in the heights of the affluence of the city, where consumption disguises itself as the acquisition of meaning, where anxiety and emptiness cause havoc, in this moment we have a common vantage point. We see that the flesh alone has no capacity to shield itself from forces bigger than itself. Our finiteness is on full display.

All of us would not be lost for words to describe our disorientation in this period. The haunting realization that there is no certainty around our approach and longing for a future after this virus calls us to find a more tangible and concrete point of reference for time and its motion towards purpose. It is this kind of Lenten season that invites us to re-enter into the story of Holy Week with a more humble posture. We all stand at the threshold of the city with him, hoping that somewhere in the distance, our warrior king could flip the script on us and give us a reprieve from this global nightmare.

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A Lenten Lament

Suffering blurs the vision. Through the fog of confusion or the veil of tears, afflictions obscure our lens of life. They tend to displace our emotions and reconstitute our rationale. Normality is often abruptly upended. Suffering becomes what feels like an inescapable labyrinth of lament.

This emotional entanglement is explored throughout various books of the Bible, but it is particularly palpable in the Old Testament. The Psalms, for example, express various authors’ raw feelings, and the unhinging nature of suffering is on full display:

“My soul pants for you, O God… My tears have been my food day and night… how I used to go with the multitude.”(1)

In our distressful moments, we long for this language of lament. We long for approval to voice our sorrows, an invitation to lament both individually and corporately. This invitation is found in the Christian religious tradition called Lent. This 40-day period is a time of spiritual and emotional preparation leading to the events of Holy Week and the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. It is a time where all who lament can feel encouraged to do so. It is also a time where the suffering of Christ reorients our focus. We are not alone.

Jeremiah was arguably the biblical figure most known for his intimate relationship with sorrow. He was burdened with the unenviable task of prophesizing God’s justice and ultimate judgement against his fellow Israelites, who, despite warnings, were engaging in unjust practices and behaviors. Their disobedient hearts resulted in exile and the destruction of their beloved city. Throughout his lengthy book, Jeremiah endures rejection, suffers loneliness, languishes in isolation, and sustains beatings. Anguish is ever-present. “My grief is beyond healing; my heart is broken… I hurt with the hurt of my people. I mourn and am overcome with grief.”(2)

In the midst of our current global crisis, we feel besieged by the presence of suffering, too. Like Jeremiah, our eyes may feel like fountains of tears. Perhaps it is the persistent prick of seclusion. In this time of social distancing, isolation can be even more discomforting. Perhaps the anguish of anxiety looms in a ubiquitous manner. Uncertainty and the unease that accompanies it have ironically become synonymous with regularity. Perhaps the loss of a loved one has soaked our joy in sadness. Hope can feel as fleeting and remote as the mandated lack of human embrace.

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Someone told me recently that he wondered if humans only truly ever pray when we are in the midst of despair. Despite creed or confession, is it only when we have no other excuses to offer, no other comfort to hide behind, no more façades to uphold, that we are most likely to bow in exhaustion and be real with God and ourselves? “For most of us,” writes C.S. Lewis, “the prayer in Gethsemane is the only model.” In our distress, we stand before God as we truly are: creatures in need hope and mercy.

The words within the ancient Hebrew story of Jonah that are of most interest to me are words that in some ways seem not to fit in the story at all.(1) Interrupting a narrative that quickly draws in its hearers, a narrative about Jonah, the text very fleetingly pauses to bring us the voice of Jonah himself in his own words before returning again to the narrative. The eight lines come in the form of a distraught and despairing, though poetic prayer of desperation. And while it is true that the poem could be entirely omitted without affecting the coherence of the story, the deliberate jaunt in the narrative text seems to provide a moment of significant commentary to the whole. The eight verses of poetry not only mark an abrupt shift in the tone of the text, but also in the attitude of its main character who has been swallowed up by despair and darkness. The poetic words of the prophet, spoken as a cry of deliverance, arise from within the belly of the great fish that has swallowed him. It is a stirring image reminiscent of another despairing soul’s question: O Lord, cries the psalmist: Where can I flee from your presence? If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. If I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me.

Jonah’s eloquent prayer for deliverance stands out in a book that is detailed with this prophet’s egotistic mantras and glaring self-deceptions. By his own actions, Jonah finds himself in darkness, and yet it is in the dark that he speaks most honestly to God. The story is vaguely familiar to many hearers, and yet memory often seems to minimize the distress that breaks Jonah’s silence with God. The popular notion that Jonah went straight from the side of the ship into the mouth of the fish is not supported by either the narrative as a whole or Jonah’s prayer. As one theologian suggests, “[Jonah] was half drowned before he was swallowed. If he was still conscious, sheer dread would have caused him to faint—notice that there is no mention of the fish in his prayer. He can hardly have known what caused the change from wet darkness to an even greater dry darkness. When he did regain consciousness, it would have taken some time to realize that the all-enveloping darkness was not that of Sheol but of a mysterious safety.”(2)

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Enveloping Darkness →

In his 1989 book, In the Name of Jesus, Henri Nouwen recounts a time of grave spiritual atrophy. Nouwen was a highly regarded Ivy League professor as well as an in-demand speaker and author. He was the toast of any town. And most impressive of all (to me), he was personal friends with Fred Rogers.

Nouwen was also growing increasingly empty inside. When an opportunity arose to work with Daybreak in Toronto, Henri bravely walked away from his old life and jumped into service for the intellectually disabled. He had gone from the pinnacle of renown in Christian circles to serving a marginalized group where there was sure to be little thanks and even less fame. And yet, he was revitalized during this time.

Once Henri had to go to a speaking engagement but did not want to go alone. He ended up taking “Bill” with him, one of the permanent residents at Daybreak, and the two had a great time. During breakfast the next day, Bill asked Henri if he had liked the trip. Henri said that, yes, he had enjoyed the trip very much. Bill responded with, “And we did it together, didn’t we?”

Henri writes: “Then I realized the full truth of Jesus’ words, ‘Where two or three meet in my Name, I am among them’ (Matthew 18:20). In the past, I had always given lectures, sermons, addresses, and speeches by myself. Often I had wondered how much of what I had said would be remembered. Now it dawned on me that most likely much of what I said would not be long remembered, but that Bill and I doing it together would not easily be forgotten. I hoped and prayed that Jesus, who had sent us out together and had been with us all during the journey, would have become really present to those who had gathered in the Clarendon Hotel in Crystal City.”(1)

I saw this up close and personal when a Lutheran pastor I worked for (whose name really is Bill) answered the call to lead a diminished and declining flock in a smaller town. No one wanted to lose this talented teacher and preacher. And this was not the best career decision to make; in the metrics of worldly success, this was a demotion. That was the point, though. He told me that we must truly go where God leads us and anything else is simply career advancement. We need be people who proclaim with Isaiah, “Here am I. Send me!”

These counterintuitive stories are reflections of Christ’s example. In the Lenten origin story, Jesus goes without food for 40 days, and so Lent is typically a time of “fasting” from certain foods, although now someone may choose to fast from social media, watching Netflix, etc. If we look deeper into the narrative, though, we are introduced to some of the most grand paradoxes. There is something fascinating taking place behind the fast.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Giving Up the Self →

Confession: I love Tom Waits. How do you classify him? He has been many things: a lounge singer, a street poet, actor, songwriter. He has the voice of a rusty exhaust manifold. One aspect of his persona(s) over the years that is endlessly fascinating is his way of tapping into the words and thoughts of the common sense of common man. Some of his characters are salt of the earth; others are down-on-their-luck lovable outcasts or outsiders.

In his song “Chocolate Jesus,” Tom describes a divine confection for those who cannot or do not want to go to church on Sundays:

Well, I don’t go to church on Sunday
Don’t get on my knees to pray
Don’t memorize the books of the bible
I got my own special way

I know Jesus loves me
Maybe just a little bit more
Fall down on my knees every Sunday
At Zerelda Lee’s candy store

Well, it’s got to be a chocolate Jesus
Make me feel good inside
Got to be a chocolate Jesus
Keep me satisfied.(1)

Much of the song is up to interpretation: Is he describing the one with a young, innocent faith? The one who would rather do their own thing because church has too many rules? The apathetic? The one who wants salvation without sacrifice? The one who wants God without the pain of past church experiences? Sometimes there are understandable reasons why people want the chocolate Jesus, the one who just loves them, makes them feel good inside, and keeps them satisfied.

This has been me before. Perhaps you can relate. Before I became a Christian, I would visit churches from time to time looking for something, but it was never there. That might have been a self-fulfilling prophecy, but it was the honest feeling. Years later, after becoming a Christian, I felt lost in a discipleship-less church that was big on rule-following but felt very small on love. Eventually I left and fell back into old patterns of a life without God. I tried church and it wasn’t for me. Wearily, I just wanted the God who loved me as I was.

Looking back, though, I notice something about that young man: I wanted the chocolate Jesus, sweetness without nutrition. God did love me as I was, but I started to get the impression that that was the end of the story.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Giving Up Chocolate →

“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 or both, 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 chairman of the board of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries.

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It was a day without hope: March 11, 2011. The 8.9 magnitude earthquake set off a devastating tsunami that washed away coastal cities in Northeastern Japan. Thousands of homes were destroyed. Roads were impassable, transportation destroyed or shut down, and power remained down for weeks in the cold temperatures of early spring. All around were scenes of desperation, as stranded survivors cried for help, buried alive under the rubble of what remained of their cities, communities, and homes. Things couldn’t get much worse when the damage to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor was discovered, making it impossible to return home. Over three hundred thousand were left homeless and over eighteen thousand people died.

March 11, 2011 was a day without hope for me, as well. Like many around the world, I couldn’t believe that yet another massive earthquake and tsunami of such magnitude—like the Southeast Asian tsunami of 2004—had wrought so much destruction and devastation. Yet on this same day, I attended the funeral for my husband who had died suddenly on March 2, 2011. I felt as if I was buried by the rubble of grief over his lost life and the life we shared together for nearly twenty years.

Even those unacquainted with the biblical narrative have likely heard the familiar story of the raising of Lazarus from the dead. It is one of the critical events in John’s Gospel for it is the last miracle Jesus performs prior to his entry into Jerusalem and his crucifixion.(1) As readers of this story, we have the privilege of knowing the triumphant ending, but for Mary, Martha, and all who loved Lazarus, his death and burial must have also felt like a day without hope. Mary and Martha had sent word to Jesus informing him of their brother’s illness. Surely he would rush to their aid and save their ailing brother. Lord, he whom you love is ill.

But rather than rushing to their side, or simply speaking the words of healing as he had done for others, Jesus delays going to them. The Gospel reads: Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus, so when he heard that he was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was. Jesus delays going to them and this sets up one of the difficult tensions in this passage. Jesus loves this family, and yet his delay means Lazarus will die, and worse, his delay will prompt the grief, heartache, and misunderstanding that must have arisen by his absence.

When Jesus does arrive, Lazarus has been dead for four days. Jewish belief taught that after three days the soul would leave the body and corruption would set in. So for those who mourned Lazarus, there was no hope of resuscitation or of saving him now. The fourth day was truly a day without hope. And yet this is the day Jesus shows up.

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It was a cold February at Christ of the Desert monastery, high in the mountains of northern New Mexico. Behind the chapel, author William Bryant Logan noticed an open grave, the disturbed red soil waiting in a tall mound beside it.

“Has a brother died?” he asked a monk.

“No,” the monk answered, “but we cannot dig in winter, so we opened this grave ahead of time, just in case.”

To many of us, an open grave is unnerving, the thought of soil disturbed and waiting is a thought entirely unwelcome. “An open grave is an open mouth,” writes Logan. “It exhales all the suggestion of the dark.”(1) In the Western world in particular, we have a complicated relationship with death and dying, dismissing as much of it as we can manage from sight, mind, and society. An open grave is a gaping wound we prefer to turn our eyes away from.

Death is one of the subjects the Christian journey of Lent invites followers to consider along the forty day journey. Lament, perhaps particularly lament as it pertains to the grave, is offered to us as a companion. Yet, Christian theologian J. Todd Billings describes lament as an expression of grief, a practice—maybe even a word—that has fallen out of use in modern times. It is a discipline often avoided, at times even buried in Christian liturgies. “[I]n a growing trend,” writes Billings, “many funerals completely avoid the language of dying and death as well as the appearance of the dead body—turning it all into a one-sided ‘celebration’ of the life of the one who has died.”(1) Such language might be fitting for certain worldviews, particularly those worldviews where death remains an enemy that puts an end to the life we are celebrating. But the biblical paradox about death attends to far more of the human experience. This, too, the journey of Lent invites us to reclaim—and I believe this may well be a gift to many of us struggling under the weight of the world’s present pain.

The Christian worldview affords the hopeful (and far more multivalent) language of celebration to be sure—Christ has indeed conquered death—but likewise, Christians are afforded the equally hopeful language of lament. We are given permission to groan as mortals who do not yet taste the fullness of the victory Christ has won, as creatures who confess with their Creator that death is an enemy of God. Where we fail to face this fuller vision of our own mortality, writes Billings, “we attend to one side of the biblical paradox about death, forgetting that even the death of a very elderly person is not ‘altogether sweet and beautiful’… [At the grave of Lazarus], Jesus still wept—even for one who would be raised again. And so should we.”(2)

For Billings, the signs of death’s current reign and the dire need for the language of lament are not the mere theological abstractions of a theology professor. In a book he never fathomed he would write at the midpoint of his life, Rejoicing in Lament: Wrestling with Incurable Cancer and Life in Christ, his own need for the language of lament is voiced in personal terms. It is equally clear that lament itself is a gift of the church for the world.

In one section, Billings describes his own congregation, with its array of people and stages of life, a church that on a regular basis baptizes people into new life and holds funerals marking death. This collective, human journey struck him as he led a Sunday school class shortly after his diagnosis. “In this room are cancer survivors who have gone through chemo; and there are others who have lost spouses and other loved ones to cancer and other disease and tragedy. The congregation is the only place in Western culture where we develop relationships, celebrate our faith and life together, and also extend those same relationships all the way through death and dying… That is a gift of the church. I would go so far as to say that a top recommended question from me for ‘church shoppers’ might be this: who would you like to bury you?”(3)

For any death-denying culture, the church sits as a striking counterpoint, empowered by the crucified Jesus to tell a vastly different story. But the whole story needs to be told. The Bible’s “laments, petitions, and praises—have been a staple of Christian worship for centuries. They, along with the sacraments of Christ’s dying and new life, have incorporated death into the story of Christian worship.”(4) The Christian imagination is not one that has to bury its head in the sand, taking its cues from our culture’s qualms about death and suffering. To lament is not to undermine that we are a people who live in hope. On the contrary, it is a gift of God for the people of God, who discover in the vicarious humanity of the crucified Lord both a more profound rejoicing and a more honest lament. Whereas some worldviews have no basis for the practice of lamentation (to whom would we lament?), for the Christian it is a part of the journey, a testimony to our identity in Christ. “To mourn and to protest is to testify that the gifts of creation are truly wondrous,” writes Billings, “that the communion with God and others that we taste in Christ is truly the way things are supposed to be—and thus alienation and death are not truly ‘natural’ but enemies of God and his kingdom.”(5)

For days marked by loss, it is a weighty thought, full of God’s care for multifaceted journeys: for crossings from birth to death, for journeys marked by both celebration and suffering, for moments of thirst and for places of provision. Because of Christ, the Christian is given a language and a leader through all of it: beside still waters, through dark valleys and green pastures to a table prepared in the presence of enemies, with tears to shed at the tomb of a friend and suffering carried on a personal cross. There are no abstractions here. The Christian story is mercifully not one that asks us to deny the dark and painful realities of life. Death is not pushed away in denial, but incorporated into God’s redemptive story, held by a storyteller who knows every part of the journey to resurrection, even the open grave.

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

(1) William Bryant Logan, Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995), 48.
(2) J. Todd Billings, Rejoicing in Lament: Wrestling with Incurable Cancer and Life in Christ (Grand Rapids: Baker,2015), 108.
(3) Ibid., 101.
(4) Ibid., 109.
(5) Ibid., 100.

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“On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate your pain today, Sir?”

Ironically, the question, a hospital’s attempt to understand and manage the pain of cancer patients, only seemed to cause my father more pain. He hated the daily inquiry that seized him almost as consistently as the sting of the growing tumor. It aggravated him deeply, more than I could say I understood. It was a philosophical quagmire for him that somehow mocked pain and amplified the problem of suffering. If he answered “10” in the midst of a painful morning, only to discover a greater quantity of pain in the afternoon, the scale was meaningless. The numbers were never constant, and what is a scale if its points of measurement cannot stand in relation to one another? If he answered “10” on any given day would that somehow control the ceiling of his own pain? He knew it would not, and that uncertainty seemed almost literally to add painful insult to an already fatal injury.

Considerations of pain and suffering are among the most cited explanations for disbelief in God, both for professionally trained philosophers and for the general public. If a good, powerful, and present deity exists, why is there so much pain and suffering in the world? Even for those who argue that the existence of God and the presence of evil can be reconciled, the vast amount of suffering in the world certainly compounds the dilemma. We can sympathize with Ivan Karamazov in his depiction of the earth as one soaked through with human tears. Imagine not merely one person measuring their pain on a scale of 1 to 10 but innumerable individuals: the temptation is to add all of these scales together as one giant proof against God.

In his 1940 book The Problem of Pain, C.S. Lewis warns us against espousing such a temptation. “We must never make the problem of pain worse than it is by vague talk about the ‘unimaginable sum of human misery,’” he writes. “Search all time and space and you will not find that composite pain in anyone’s consciousness. There is no such thing as a sum of suffering, for no one suffers it.”(1) Or, said in another way, there are as many problems of pain as there are conscious beings—and God must deal with each and every one of them.

For someone like my dad, for whom weighing pain was both disparaging and unfeasible, this would perhaps have been one comfort in a maddening abyss of darkness. It means his own problem of pain was not lost in a sea of meaningless scales and indescribable measurements. It means that his frustrating, inconsistent ceiling of sorrow was itself held in the arms of God—and not vaguely absorbed in an immeasurable sum, nor given a distant, theoretical answer. It means that God had to come near not simply to pain in general, but to him and his cancer in person.

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Why is it that God does not seem to approach in a much more obvious way? One answer has been that God’s existence is not a matter of reality and facts. Isn’t it more of a faith position, anyway? Isn’t it more about a leap in the dark than an embrace of evidence?

I would agree that God isn’t “forcefully obvious,” but I don’t think that this confines God to being a “take-it-or-leave-it” matter of faith. I think it makes more sense to see God as clearly visible, whilst not being forcefully obvious.

Did you know that the Bible actually recognizes the validity of this question? First, we see passages that affirm the human perception that God seems hidden. In Job 23:8-9 we read, “But if I go to the east, he is not there; if I go to the west, I do not find him. When he is at work in the north, I do not see him; when he turns to the south, I catch no glimpse of him.”

Interestingly, there are also many examples of God appearing as if veiled in darkness, whilst still simultaneously offering his presence.(1) For instance we read that, “The people remained at a distance, while Moses approached the thick darkness where God was.” Jesus, too, invites people to trust in him and then leaves and hides himself. In John we find the story of a paralytic man who is healed, but then Jesus slips away into the crowd. Luke records that as news about Jesus spread, “he often withdrew to lonely places.” Later, Jesus tells the disciples that, “Before long, the world will not see me any more, but you will see me.” Interestingly in many of these cases, God provides a clear sense of presence, while at the same time veiling the fullness of that presence.

So perhaps an unavoidable part of the Bible’s answer to why God seems hidden is because it’s true. But why? And what about those times when we need a present God most, when God could offer us real hope in times of suffering?

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Why Isn’t God More Obvious? →

Typically, people think science and miracles are at odds. That’s what I once thought. But in fact, it’s only within the regularity of science that God can reveal Himself to us mirac­ulously. It is science that makes miracles possible. It’s only because scientifically virgins don’t get pregnant that God can reveal Him­self in a virgin birth. It’s only because scientifically people don’t rise from the dead that God can reveal Himself through a resurrection. And likewise, God can reveal Himself in each of our lives.

The more I talk with people, the more convinced I am that the experience of miracles is universal. I like asking people, even the most scientific of people, “Have you ever had an experience that made you think there might be a God?” Usually there is an awkward lull and then some nervous laughter, but, if you wait long enough, almost without fail the person will say, “Well, there was this one time when…” And then they will tell you a remarkable story that has God’s signature all over it!

Most of the people I speak to have amazing stories, but they’re worried that they are the only one. They’re worried that others will think they’re weird. They start to wonder if maybe it’s all just in their heads. We need to share our stories, and we need to invite others to share their stories as well.

Here’s a story of seeing God’s finely tuned design in an individual life. A student from China showed up at a university open forum where I was speaking. One of my colleagues, Daniel, greeted her, and she said her name was “Alva.” My colleague replied, “That’s an interesting name; what does it mean?” Alva responded, “It means ‘by grace washed white as snow.’”

Daniel’s eyes went wide, and he asked Alva if she was a Chris­tian. She said, “No, not at all.” Daniel said, “Do you realize that your name is basically the heart of the Christian message?” She had no idea; she had just chosen this for her English name because she liked the sound of it.

Daniel began to explain the Christian message to her, and she was increasingly being drawn to God. Then the talk started, and halfway through the talk I quoted and put up on a PowerPoint slide, “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow” (Isaiah 1:18). Daniel excitedly tapped the shoulder of Alva, who looked astonished and said, “I told you; that’s your name!”

At the end of the talk, Daniel and another of our colleagues con­tinued to explain to Alva the love that God has for her and the sacri­fice that God made for her. Alva decided she wanted to be a Christian, and my friends had the supreme privilege of praying with her to affirm that commitment.

There is one more detail to the story that fills me with awe. My talk for that night was already typed and printed before the week began, and the PowerPoint was done. But at lunchtime of that same day, my wife, Jo, and I had a distinct sense that something was miss­ing from the talk. So we rushed home after a lunchtime event, and we added just one additional handwritten page to the talk and just one additional PowerPoint slide.

What did that slide read? Isaiah 1:18: “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.” God beautifully crafted all the details of that day so Christ could reach out to that one young woman named Alva.

There are two things in the Bible that are spoken of as God’s poem. First, Romans 1:20: “For since the creation of the world God’s invis­ible qualities…have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made.” The Greek word for “what has been made” is poiemasin, from which we get the word poem. God’s creation is the poem of God.

Second, there is Ephesians 2:8–10: “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” For we are God’s “handi­work.” Another translation says we are God’s “masterpiece,” and this is the same word—poiema.

God not only designed the universe; God designed Alva and named her, and God has plans for her life as carefully fine-tuned as God’s plan for the cosmos. The same is true of each of us.

Vince Vitale is director of the Zacharias Institute at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

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French existentialist Jean Paul Sartre closes his play Huis Clos (“No Exit”) with the pronouncement, “Hell is other people.” The play offers a sardonic vision of hell as the place in which one must spend eternity with individuals one would barely seek to spend five minutes with in real life. As one writer notes, “The most terrible, exasperating torment, in Sartre’s eyes, is the agony of soul caused by having to live forever alongside someone who drives you up the wall. Their annoying habits, their pettiness or cynicism or stupidity, their disposition and tastes that so frustratingly conflict with yours and require, if you are to live in communion with them, some sort of accommodation or concession of your own likes and desires—that, says Sartre, is Hell.”(1) Living in a world in which tolerance is the highest value, most readers find Sartre’s vision highly narcissistic or the logical conclusion of an exclusively individualistic, existentialist philosophy.

For many others, however, Sartre’s sentiments are not so easily dismissed. Living, working and interacting with other people can indeed create a hellish existence for many. And most of us, if we are honest, can quickly think of the names of several individuals whose personal habits or grating personalities makes relating to them very difficult at best. Sartre’s honesty, albeit through a cynical lens, also exposes a truth about the realities of human tolerance. On the one hand, we generally base our capacity for tolerance on loving those who are easy to love or who are broadly similar to our own way of living and viewing the world. On the other hand, we are easily tolerant of external causes, ideals, and principles, which are quickly lost when we come into contact with individuals who shatter that ideal image.

I was reminded of Sartre’s insight while serving at my church’s hospitality ministry dinner. Homelessness and hunger for the working poor is a perennial issue where I live. While homelessness remains an abstract idea, it is easy for me to ‘love’ the broad category of people who are poor or homeless. Yet, every month at my church dinner for the homeless—the full-range of humanity on display right in front of me-I often see the ways in which my ‘love’ is merely a form of patronage. Eating with individuals who have not showered in weeks (or months), who suffer from mental illness or chemical dependency tests my love of humanity in ways that the abstract category of homelessness never will. A preference for categories makes it very hard for me to love the real people seated all around me.

A contemporary of Sartre, C.S. Lewis wrote about this tendency to love causes and ideals more than real people in his novel The Screwtape Letters. He saw this hellish tendency as a carefully constructed diabolical strategy. The demon, Wormwood, was advised to “aggravate that most useful human characteristic, the horror and neglect of the obvious.”(2) The obvious, Lewis notes through his character Screwtape, is the human capacity for both benevolence and malice. Their misdirection and exploitation is not as obvious to us. Diabolical Uncle Screwtape explains to his nephew Wormwood:

“The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbors whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know. The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary…but you must keep on shoving all the virtues outward till they are finally located in the circle of fantasy.”(3)

If benevolence, tolerance, or love are simply attached to remote ideals involving people we never have any direct contact with in the day-to-day, how can that really be benevolence? In the same way, how can we say we love our neighbor when our malice towards particular habits or personality quirks is on full display? How quickly we lose our temper with family members; how easily we show offense at those who do not see it our way; how readily we devise strategies to withhold love, or to punish our ever-present offenders?

Lewis highlights a predominant theme in the teaching of Jesus. Throughout the gospels, Jesus corrects the prevailing notion that the neighbor is one just like me, who agrees with me, and sees the world as I see it. The “neighbor” is other people—not an abstraction, but a living, breathing person with habits, views, and quirks that will not only get on our nerves, but also tempt us toward contempt. And love is only a real virtue when it is lived out among real, human relationships. As Lewis’s character Screwtape notes wryly:

“All sorts of virtues painted in the fantasy or approved by the intellect or even, in some measure, loved and admired, will not keep a man from [Satan’s] house: indeed they may make him more amusing when he gets there.”(4)

Sartre was honest in revealing the often hellish reality of living with other people. We would much rather love an ideal, a concept (the homeless, or starving children across the world) than the people right in front of us, in our lives right now. In the life of Jesus, we see a man who loved those individuals directly in front of him; he gathered around him a group of disparate people from tax-collectors on the left, to zealot revolutionaries on the right. He delayed arrival at a temple official’s home because an unknown woman touched the hem of his garment. He delivered a man so out of his mind that he had been driven from his community to live in desolate caves. In front of the most important religious officials of his day, he allowed a woman of questionable reputation to anoint his feet with perfume and use her tears and hair to wash them.

The love of Jesus is not a pie in the sky ideal for people he never knew; it was tangible, messy, and ultimately cost him his life. In Jesus, we see heaven on display in the hell of individual lives. If we seek to follow him, vague ideals about tolerance must give way to flesh and blood reality—loving the all-too-human in front of us.

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

(1) Lauren Enk, “Hell is Other People; Or is It?” Catholicexchange.com, August 12, 2012, accessed July 10, 2013.
(2) C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, Rev. ed., (New York: Collier Books, 1982), 16.
(3) Ibid., The Screwtape Letters, 30.
(4) Ibid., 31.

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A British journalist by the name of Christopher Booker argues that all of literature can be classified into seven basic narratives. Though many would deem the idea itself deficient, Booker exhaustively identifies each category in his book The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories. One such category he describes is the “Voyage and Return” plot. Here, Booker catalogs, among other works, Alice and Wonderland, Peter Rabbit, and Gone with the Wind, each of these stories chronicling a hero who travels away from the familiar and into the unfamiliar, only to return again with new perspective.

Among his list of “Voyage and Return” plots, Booker also identifies Jesus’s parable of the Prodigal Son. He describes the parable as many of us understand it. The younger son demands his inheritance, travels to another country, squanders his money until he has nothing left, and finally decides to come home again pleading for mercy. When told or heard like this, it is a story that indeed fits neatly into Booker’s category, and perhaps neatly into visions of the spiritual journey. Journeys to faith and to God are often stories of coming and going and returning again.

But is this an accurate understanding of the parable of Jesus? Is the story of the prodigal son really about the son? Is the spiritual journey about our coming and going or God’s?

My story of faith and belief, like many others, cannot be told without some admittance of wandering to and from that faith, in and out of God’s presence, walking with and without Father, Son, or Spirit. When I think of my place among the spiritually vibrant, I am immediately aware of my drifting soul and less than heroic role in the story. Prone to wander, Lord I feel it; prone to leave the God I love, sings the hymnist. I imagine the assembly of the faithful as a grand ballroom of crowned guests with beautiful robes while I find an inconspicuous place in the back of the room. The world of beautiful souls—with its ardent disciples from early centuries and suffering saints from today—does not seem a place in which some of us feel we belong. Some of us feel a bit more like humorist Groucho Marx, who once declined the offer of membership into an organization with the reply: “I don’t care to belong to any club that would have someone like me as a member.” If I myself am the main character in my story of faith, this is the story I must tell.

Thankfully, I am not.

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I have little doubt that the single greatest obstacle to the impact of the Gospel has not been its inability to provide answers, but the failure on the part of Christians to live it out. I remember well in the early days of my Christian faith talking to a close Hindu friend. He was questioning the experience of conversion as being supernatural. He absolutely insisted that conversion was nothing more than a decision to lead a more ethical life and that, in most cases, it was not any different from other ethical religions. I had heard his argument before.

But then he said something I have never forgotten: “If this conversion is truly supernatural, why is it not more evident in the lives of so many Christians I know?” His question is a troublesome one. In fact, it is so deeply disturbing a question that I think of all the challenges to belief, this is the most difficult question of all. I have never struggled with my own personal faith as far as intellectual challenges to the Gospel are concerned. But I have often had struggles of the soul in trying to figure out why the Christian faith is not more visible.

After lecturing at a major American university, I was driven to the airport by the organizer of the event. I was quite jolted by what he told me. He said, “My wife brought our neighbor last night. She is a medical doctor and had not been to anything like this before. On their way home, my wife asked her what she thought of it all.” He paused and then continued, “Do you know what she said?” Rather reluctantly, I shook my head. “She said, ‘That was a very powerful evening. The arguments were very persuasive. I wonder what he is like in his private life.’”

Because my Hindu friend had not witnessed spiritual transformation in the life of Christians, whatever answers he received were nullified. In the doctor’s case, the answers were intellectually and existentially satisfying, but she still needed to know, did they really make a difference in the life of the one proclaiming them? The Irish evangelist Gypsy Smith once said, “There are five Gospels. Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and the Christian, and some people will never read the first four.” In other words, the message is seen before it is heard. For both the Hindu questioner and the American doctor, the answers to their questions were not enough; they depended upon the visible transformation of the one offering them.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Apologist’s First Question →

“[W]e are perpetually disillusioned. The perfect life is spread before us every day, but it changes and withers at a touch.”(1)

The author of this comment did not have the dashed hopes of a person weary of contemporary political promises or the daunting purposelessness of life. His was not the disappointment of a child after his once-adored video game lost its thrill or the dispirited outlook of a millenial overwhelmed with options and fearful of missing out on something vital. No, long before video games existed, long before Generation Y was disillusioned with Generation X or X with the Baby Boomers before them, disillusionment reigned nonetheless. A social commentator in the late 1920s made this comment about his own disillusioned culture, words which, in fact, came more than a decade after a group of literary notables identified themselves as the “Lost Generation,” so-named because of their own general feeling of disillusionment.  In other words, disillusionment is epidemic.

As humans who tell and hear and live by stories, the possibility of taking in a story that is bigger than reality is quite likely. (Advertisers, in fact, count on it regularly.) Subsequently, disillusionment is a quality that follows humanity and its stories around. Yet despite its common occurrence, disillusionment is a crushing blow, and the collateral damage of shattered expectations quite painful. With good reason, we speak of it in terms of the discomfort and disruption that it fosters; we frame the crushing of certain hope and images in terms of loss and difficulty. The disillusioned do not speak of their losses lightly, no more than victims of burglary move quickly past the feeling of loss and violation.

And yet, practically speaking, disillusionment is the loss of illusion. In terms of larceny, it is the equivalent of having one’s high cholesterol or a perpetually bad habit stolen. Disillusionment, while painful, is evidence which shows the myths that enchant us need not blind us forever, a sign that what is falsely believed can be shattered by what is genuine. In such terms, disillusion is far less an unwanted intrusion than it is a severe mercy, far more like a surgeon’s excising of a tumor than a cruel removal of hope.

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Scott Stossel, the editor of The Atlantic Magazine, described his life-long struggle with anxiety in an article written in 2014. With incredible candor, Stossel described some of the most debilitating experiences with his illness:

“I wish I could say that my anxiety is a recent development, or that it is limited to public speaking. It’s not. My wedding was accompanied by sweating so torrential that it soaked through my clothes and by shakes so severe that I had to lean on my bride at the altar, so as not to collapse. At the birth of our first child, the nurses had to briefly stop ministering to my wife, who was in the throes of labor, to attend to me as I turned pale and keeled over… On ordinary days, doing ordinary things—reading a book, lying in bed, talking on the phone, sitting in a meeting, playing tennis—I have thousands of times been stricken by a pervasive sense of existential dread and been beset by nausea, vertigo, shaking, and a panoply of other physical symptoms… Even when not actively afflicted by such acute episodes, I am buffeted by worry.”(1)

While I often worry, I have never experienced the kind of crippling anxiety that Stossel describes in his article, or that I frequently hear about from dozens of individuals in search of relief from chronic anxiety. Yet many of us feel as if we are always on edge or we sense an underlying feeling of dread. For our world is often a very frightening place. Indeed, the time that we live in has been described as the “age of anxiety.” Perhaps this is true, in part, because our 24/7 access to technology ensures that we are immersed in global images and headlines of terrorism, epidemics, the threat of environmental collapse, violent crimes, economic woes, international conflict, and political strife. Particularly in the West, the incidence of anxiety-related diagnoses are increasing among individuals of all ages, including among teenagers, college-students and young adults who have grown up in a technological age full of anxiety-producing images.

Even if one’s experience with anxiety is not as profound or pervasive as Sossel’s, it can still be all-consuming. For at its root is a fearful imagination that generates an outlook of suspicion and inadequacy: The world is a terrifying place; there are not enough resources; no one can be trusted and I am not enough. Viewing one’s existence in this way generates a mindset of scarcity and inadequacy which in turn perpetuates worry and anxiety in an endless cycle.

It is noteworthy, I believe, that Jesus chose to address worry and anxiety among the many other important topics on which we have recorded teachings. In fact, Jesus addressed worry in what has come to be called The Sermon on the Mount, which most scholars agree is the central teaching for following in his way. In this sermon, Jesus presents an alternative imagination—or way of viewing the world—that is not based on fear or scarcity, but on fullness and abundance.(2) Jesus describes the kingdom of God—a way of being in the world based on the way in which Jesus taught, lived, and operated. Here, in the sermon in which Jesus instructs his followers to “love their enemies” and that they are “the light of the world,” Jesus also includes worry as an equally critical topic.

While it is not likely that Jesus had anxiety disorders like Sossel’s in mind, perhaps he included teaching on worry because of its function on multiple levels of human existence. Jesus recognized that anxiety animates a particularly powerful imagination or outlook on life that is grounded in fear: fear that prevents open-hearted living and fear that precludes full-presence in each and every moment. So powerful is this imagination that Jesus prefaces his teaching about worry with a reminder of its totalizing power: the eye is the lamp of the body, so then if your eye is clear, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light that is in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!(3) In other words, one’s outlook shapes one’s total orientation.

Jesus instructs his followers to not be anxious for their lives. Instead, he lays out a different imagination—again, a deeper perspective that can hold our anxiety about security and want. Jesus uses two illustrations from the natural world to explore this deeper imagination. He asks his followers to consider the way of the birds and to contemplate the beauty of flowers as an antidote for worry and an invitation to reconsider our notion of security. Look at the birds of the air, that they do not sow, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns… Observe the lilies of the field grow; they do not toil nor do they spin.

Where I live, we can have very strong winds coming off the bay. When we do, which is quite often, I get to watch the most spectacular array of eagles, gulls, ravens, and hawks coasting on the thermals. They are not in a hurry to get anywhere; they are content to be blown by the wind, even tossed about and blown off course; they do not appear to be consumed by any other task than to be carried by the wind. I don’t see the birds around my house and in my yard losing their feathers or wringing their wings in anguish over finding food—even though they have no guarantee of their next meal. They do not operate out of a sense of scarcity even though they are completely dependent upon their environment for provision and care. In the same way, the variety, intricacy, and beauty of flowers and plants is not gained by striving after those attributes, or as Jesus says by “toil or spinning.”

And Jesus asks us to consider their ways. We, who worry, are tempted to be driven by fear—a fear that drives the relentless accumulation of resources or a fear that tells us we are not enough. Jesus asks, are you not worth more than the birds? Will God not so array you as the flowers are arrayed? Jesus says, look to the ways of the birds and the flowers and see a different imagination, a way of being in the world that is motivated by trust. Such trust arises from faith and dependence upon the God who provides for the birds, and the flowers, and for all of the creation.

The call to an imagination that takes its cues from the birds and the flowers comes from one who was not removed or protected from a world that invoked fear and anxiety. Instead, Jesus entered into that world of scarcity and want, of fear and anxiety. In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus was in distress to the point of death and like Stossel described of his own anxiety, he was profoundly sweating to the point that it was like drops of blood.(4) Out of this distress, he cried out to God to deliver him from those who would betray and crucify him. And in his Sermon, he reminds his listeners that each day has enough trouble of its own. In the midst of that trouble, Jesus tells his followers that God knows what we need. Like the birds and the flowers—both of which are completely dependent upon an environment that can bring scarcity or abundance—Jesus issues a call to surrender to trust in the One who will provide.

In fact, Jesus suggests, surrender is the only viable option, for he reminds his listeners that we cannot add a single year to our lives by worrying. In fact, we likely lose years of our lives by worrying. And here is another invitation from the birds and the flowers: theirs is an existence completely centered in the present moment. And with a kingdom imagination, it is a present filled with opportunities and possibility. Seek first the kingdom, Jesus says, and all these things will be added to you.

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

(1) Stossel, Scott. Surviving Anxiety. The Atlantic Monthly, January/February 2014.
(2) Matthew 5-7.  See Matthew 6:25-34.
(3) Matthew 6:23.
(4) See Matthew 26:37-38; Mark 14:33-34; Luke 22:44.

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