Tag Archives: Ravi Zacharias Ministry

Ravi Zacharias
Leave a comment

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Archives of Humanity

Sharman Robertson strolls down an aisle of metal shelves and well-aligned file boxes, stopping midway to pull one down and into her arms. It is box B3F.1 and inside it are the remnants of Mother’s Day 1931—in greeting cards. Robertson is corporate archivist at Hallmark Cards, keeper of a vast history in pictures and poems. “You could launch 500 dissertations from the material here,” notes her interviewer, “from gender studies or marketing to design or art history to psychology or anthropology.”(1)

Card companies speak openly about the changing dynamics of culture and its affects on card-writing. There are categories and identified-groups today that would never have crossed card-makers’ minds decades earlier. Whether it is a changing culture or an expanding market that has had the most influence is hard to say—likely, it is both. Mothers have been adopting for years; they just haven’t always had an entire line of cards that focused on it. Yet despite the growing number of targeted relationships, there are still a great number of people who find card-shopping an exercise in missing the mark. More than once before a wall of cards, I’ve suspected I didn’t fit into a Hallmark category. But I wonder if more accurately it’s that the categories don’t really fit any of us. It’s not that the things said on my mother’s day cards aren’t real; it’s just that my mom is so much more real than anything a card could ever articulate for me.

Scripture’s unadorned images of motherhood do not fit neatly into categories either. Naomi was embittered by the death of her husband and her two young sons. Rebekah conspired with her son to trick her ailing husband. Sarah, Hannah, Michal, and Elizabeth—among others—suffered the despair and scorn of barren wombs. The parents of the prodigal son faced the blatant disregard of their youngest child and the exuberant relief of his return. Mary sang with hope when she learned she would have a son. Later, she would watch him die an agonizing death. Like those we celebrate on Mother’s Day, the women we find in Scripture tell their stories from a vast array of settings and situations. They come to us scheming or flourishing or despairing, silenced or prayerful or with a strength we can hardly fathom, but the confrontation is always real.

The humanity found in the Bible is not often something we stop to consider. Maybe it is more comfortable to try to line up with images of life on greeting cards than with these stories of struggle and desperation, mystery and bravery. And yet, it is in this very story weighted with every complexity of our humanness that God became human himself. To real and wanting people, a God in real flesh came near.

Hannah’s hopeful voice comes as she finds the courage to express her grief and position, and it is here that she finds God. The story imparts: “In bitterness of soul Hannah wept much and prayed to the LORD. And she made a vow, saying, ‘O LORD Almighty, if you will only look upon your servant’s misery and remember me, and not forget your servant but give her a son, then I will give him to the LORD for all the days of his life.’”(2) In tearful honesty, she sought God. And Hannah’s pain in childlessness became her child’s link to God.

The images of motherhood in Scripture give us insights into our ourselves, into our mothers, into the pain of lost hope, the ache of longed-for identities, the startling gift of prayer, and the beauty of faith. Many of these women describe what it’s like to feel abandoned by God, to cry out as with nothing—and everything—to lose. Their lives encourage us to seek God where God can be found, even along roads that aren’t what we expected. Their real and difficult stories are given a place in Christ’s story, and this speaks volumes into our own.

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

(1) Ted Anthony, “Mother’s Day Cards Change With Time,” Associated Press, May. 7, 1999.

(2) 1 Samuel 1:10-11.

Uncategorized

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Fabric of Counterculture

Leave a comment

 

Some years ago a group of Christian thinkers were asked to answer the question: How can followers of Christ be countercultural for the common good? Their answers ranged from becoming our own fiercest critics to experiencing life at the margins, from choosing our battles wisely to getting more sleep. A case could easily be made to add many other ideas to their thoughtful list, and its project leaders would agree. The possibilities for counterculturalism are perhaps as numerous as the cultures and sub-cultures of our globalized world. The idea was to get people thinking about what it means to be countercultural in the first place, a lifestyle Jesus heralded as a man with the government on his shoulders, one from whom others hid their faces, and for whom affliction was well known.

Of course, Jesus did not come to shape an insurgent army of cultural protestors. But he did turn both culture and cultural norms on their heads, and he continues to do so today. To crowds gathered in the first century, the wisdom of the rabbi from Nazareth was different than most. He taught with authority, but he also perplexed his would-be students with words about the first being last, and prostitutes and tax collectors making their way into the kingdom before religious experts. To crowds in the current century, this radical teacher continues to herald a radical message. Loving your neighbor is a command that runs counter to most cultural norms, loving your enemy all the more so. The entire Sermon on the Mount was, and remains, the most countercultural sermon ever given.

But still, the question persists: Did Jesus come to overturn cultural norms like he overturned the moneychangers’ tables? And exactly how, then, are his followers to be countercultural themselves? Are Christians to be inherently cultural naysayers, gypsies who wander through this world unattached and (hopefully) unaffected? Did Christ come to free us from the very fabric of culture and history into which our lives are woven? Or was his life’s ambition to unravel something much deeper?

To begin with, I think we misunderstand Jesus as a countercultural leader heralding a countercultural message if we separate his radical life and message from his radical work on the cross. Jesus did not come to destroy culture as we know it, but to save the world within it. “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets,” he told a Jewish world built upon the Law and the Prophets. “I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them” (Matthew 5:17).

Perhaps the best image of counterculturalism is an image of something that is being woven rather than unwound. Nancy Jackson, an artist who creates tapestries, notes the “countercultural” philosophy of weaving. “Weaving tapestry in our modern world requires a different mindset that has taken many years to cultivate,” she writes. “It requires faith that the world will still be here in two years…. Weaving a tapestry is good for the soul.” The equally foreign message of Christ is that God is not only near us, but that God’s presence is woven into all of life; God has been before us and will remain after us. The saving grace of God’s work among us can be seen throughout history, in the lives we live today, and in every stroke of time to come. Jesus did not come to unravel the fabric of the human story nor the human him or herself. On the contrary, he came to unravel confusion, shortfall, immaturity, sin, and chaos, and to make clear the beautiful tapestry made by a creator who has in mind the beginning, the middle, and the end.

Perhaps his followers are most adequately countercultural, then, when we live as people aware that there is an entire picture, when we counter the pervasive individualism that bids us to look no further than our own homes or schedules or priorities. Perhaps we are effectively countercultural when we testify to the radical work of the cross in the world and in our hearts, a cross which exchanges guilt for grace, ashes for beauty, collective sorrow for joy.  Perhaps we are countercultural when we see the startling colors of Christ’s life in our own stories and in our neighbors’ stories and know that these are only small glimpses of the magnificent work that God is weaving through all of time, every tribe, and partial tapestry.

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