Review: Christ-Shaped Character

April 23, 2015April 23, 2015 / rtrube54 / 1 Comment

Christ-Shaped Character by Helen Cepero, Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2014.

Summary: Cepero, through personal narrative and formational teaching and practices, traces a path of growing to be more who we truly are as reflections of Christ through the embrace of love, faith and hope.

As a teenage follower of Jesus, I often agonized as I considered the high ideals of the Christian faith and the reality of my often-misbegotten attempts to follow Christ. I despaired with how far I fell short, and it was only gradually that I began to understand that, nevertheless, Christ had chosen me to be his and that the formation of my character was something to which he was deeply committed and would work out through the journey of a lifetime.

In this book, Helen Cepero believes that the three great virtues of love, faith, and hope of which Paul speaks provide that path along which we might walk by which Christ forms us both in who we truly are and as reflections of his own character. The table of contents for this book might be helpful for prospective readers to see how Cepero unfolds this:

Introduction
Part I: Choosing Love
1. Choosing Life—Living as God’s Beloved
2. Compassionate Hospitality—Choosing the Other
3. Forgiving as We Are Forgiven—Loving the Unlovable
Part II: Choosing Faith
4. Following Jesus—Learning the Language of Desire
5. Embracing Vulnerability—Finding Strength in Weakness
6. Living with Integrity—Sustaining a Life of Commitment
Part III: Choosing Hope
7. Paying Attention—Watching for God
8. Seeing Blessing—Living into Possibility
9. Trusting in Christ—Improvising a Life
Appendix 1: Journeying Together Along the Pathway of Love, Faith and Hope
Appendix 2: Bibliography
Notes

Each chapter begins with a personal story related to the chapter theme, followed by a “taking a closer look” section in which she invites the reader into a journalling exercise, a prayer practice that relates to the theme, a closing discussion of what it means to chose to embrace this aspect of love, faith, and hope and some prompts for further reflection around listening to our own stories, to the story of scripture, and to the continuing story of love, faith or hope. The book concludes with an appendix giving ideas for group discussion of the book and an extensive bibliography of further readings around love, faith, and hope.

Cepero’s personal stories were what engaged me the most and they reflected her own journey along the path she commends for us. They were not self-indulgent reflections but rather windows onto the choices into which she believes each of us are invited. For example, the chapter on embracing vulnerability describes her own desperate vulnerability when she belatedly brings her desperately ill, weeks-old child to an emergency room, facing her own failure as a mother by surrendering her son to those who might better care for him. She then leads us into seeing how the embrace of our vulnerability is the doorway into knowing the compassion of God for us in our weakness.

In a later chapter, she begins with the story of lying in a hospital bed after one of many surgeries to correct a hip dysplasia. She describes the visit of a pastor who sees her not as physically damaged but as intellectually curious. When others bring her stuffed toys, he brings her books and blesses an intellectual and spiritual curiosity that led into Cepero’s life calling. She uses this to speak of the power of blessing another and embracing that blessing of hope in one’s life.

I am thankful for the unnamed pastor in this story. I had the privilege of working alongside Helen Cepero at a conference for graduate students and faculty in 2002. Her insight and formational pastoral care toward participants in the track we were working in was a gift to us all, a blessing. I came to know her as someone authentically living into the journey she describes and maps for us in the pages of this book. If you’ve struggled, like me, with the disparity between your life and your sense of the Christ-shaped life, I would warmly commend this book.

Lady Wisdom’s Unheeded Call

March 15, 2014 / rtrube54 / 5 Comments

I’ve been reading a bit lately about a subject I don’t hear much about these days–wisdom. My hunch is that we don’t like this idea of wisdom because it seems to suggest that there are ideas of how to live well that are already “out there”–that might have a certain “fixed” quality about them that aren’t subject to our own “make it up as we go” kind of life. It seems to me these days that our preferred method of gaining wisdom, if we care about this at all, is learning from our mistakes. And I have a hunch that many of us do learn this way (I have) and yet it seems that this way is fraught with lots of pain for not only ourselves, but that it leads to inflicting pain on those around us. And sometimes, we don’t live to profit from the lessons–we are merely an object lesson for others. Is there a better way?

One of the books I’ve been reading recently is Hear, My Son by Daniel J. Estes, which looks at the first nine chapters of the book of Proverbs. One of the interesting truths that it has reminded me of is the notion that there is a certain wisdom and order that has been woven into the fabric of creation.

“By wisdom the Lord laid the earth’s foundations, by understanding he set the heavens in place; by his knowledge the watery depths were divided,and the clouds let drop the dew.” (Proverbs 3:19-20, NIV)

Wisdom tells us that despite how “empowering” it was for Thelma and Louise to drive over a cliff into the Grand Canyon, that this all would end very badly.

It is often times not nearly as dramatic. The laziness that fails to clean out a gutter leads to overflows that damage walls and structures. Water has to go somewhere! The neglect of sleep and the abuse of my body lead to illness and other physical problems. Pulling nutrients out of the earth without replacing them depletes soils and makes good land useless until replenished.

A teacher observed to me once that we not so much break God’s laws as break ourselves against them. And as I think about it, I’m struck that such “wisdom” may be the Creator’s gracious means to save us a good deal of pain in life, rather than a mean-spirited attempt to take all the fun out of life.

I think where this is really hard for me is my own self-will. I want to live life in the words of Frank Sinatra, “my way”. Even though Lady Wisdom in Proverbs 8 makes a compelling case, it is often my own self-willed notion that I know better that closes my ear to her voice, even though her pleas come with promises of blessing:

“Blessed are those who listen to me, watching daily at my doors, waiting at my doorway. For those who find me find life and receive favor from the Lord.” (Proverbs 8:34:35, NIV).

The last word in this quote is the hardest for me, even though I believe in God and have followed Christ for many years. While I don’t mind someone watching over and helping me when I’m sick, or needy, or in trouble, the truth is most of the time, I don’t want God’s help or even to admit that my life is being lived before someone who can be called “Lord.” Yet Proverbs suggests that this is the most profound wisdom of all, foundational to everything else:

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge,
but fools despise wisdom and instruction.” (Proverbs 1:7, NIV)

Some fears are healthy. Proverbs says that the recognition that my life is lived for God is actually a healthy fear. I think how that works for me is that it leads me to cry for God’s help to live wisely before him in all the nooks, crannies, and crevices of my life. Everything matters, and God would spare us unneeded pain–there is plenty of pain without that which we bring on ourselves. If there is a choice between living well and making life hard–do I really want the latter? Better to listen for the voice of Lady Wisdom…

The Power of a Blessing

November 23, 2013 / rtrube54 / 1 Comment

Sometimes you get surprised by the familiar thing that you suddenly see in a different light. The word “blessing” gets tossed around a good bit and, I have to admit that when I hear people talking about blessings, I just hear, “yada, yada, yada.” That is until the other day when a speaker made me take a fresh look at the powerful impact of spoken blessings.

The speaker was R. Scott Osborne who has written The Book of Blessings. His website offers the book in .pdf form for free and also has a link to the App Store for “The App of Blessings.” He shared with us how he got into this as he observed some of the blessings that surround Jewish sabbath observance. He adopted some of this in his own home in a Christian version of this practice, and then began each week to find a blessing in scripture that he would pray for each of his daughters. As these accumulated in a journal, he felt God speaking to him that he needed to research this. Out of this came the conviction, in his words, “When we speak blessings from the Bible, we are literally imparting God’s blessing. The Lord has given us this authority along with the freedom to use it” (from the website). The idea is that when we speak these blessings, we act on God’s behalf. God is the one who blesses but we become instruments of blessing as we speak these words.

At first glance, I’m tempted to think there is something a bit formulaic or superstitious in such things. Yet as I reflect further, it occurs to me that this actually squares with what I believe happens each Sunday when we read the scriptures aloud publicly in worship. In some churches, the congregation will stand as the reader comes into their midst with the gospel. And when this is done, it is not just to read a text, but the belief is that in a fresh way, God is present in the midst of his people speaking to them through this word, written and spoken. In some contexts, this is spoken of as a “performative speech act”, that which when spoken brings into present reality the thing spoken of.

Isn’t this what, in a habitual and not often thought about way, we do when we say “God bless you” when someone sneezes? We are actually praying (or at least wishing) good health for the person whose sneeze may mean the onset of a cold or worse. And isn’t this (if you participate in such things) what we are doing when we pray the Lord’s prayer, or other prayers of the Bible in our circumstances, or even for a particular person. Someone once said in effect that the best way to know we are praying what God wants for a person is to pray the prayers we believe God inspired.

During Scott’s talk he shared this “model blessing” from the book of Numbers:

May the Lord bless you and keep you; may the Lord make His face shine upon you, and be gracious to you; may the Lord lift up His countenance upon you, and give you peace. (Num 6:24-26, NKJV)

While I’ve heard this many times, for some reason, when Scott spoke this, I remembered something I’ve not thought of for a long time. This is the blessing my dad spoke over me each night when as a child I said my prayers before bed. Remembering this alone was a blessing. I remember not only the love I felt from my dad but also the deep comfort as I snuggled in bed and thought about the fact that God would keep me through the night, that his face shone with approval upon me as his child, that he looked toward me and gave me his peace. Like many children I had night fears at times, and as I recalled, this was one of the things that banished them.

I can’t help wondering if there was more to it than that. I feel that I’ve lived a blessed life in so many ways and often in my work and, even in pastimes like singing, or writing, or even working in the yard have a sense of God’s pleasure upon my life. I don’t think there is anything special about me in this but rather wonder if in fact my father in these blessings was an instrument of the blessing and protection of God in my life. I know in fact that this was true in many lives he touched and remember even in his last years that there was a particular patient in the assisted living unit where he lived with whom he would pray regularly.

I’ve sometimes spoken of the idea of “blessed to be a blessing”. Often I think of this in terms of my actions, but I am also challenged to wonder if the practice of praying and speaking blessings on those I care for is something I’ve overlooked.

I wonder if any of my readers have stories of receiving or giving blessings, whether in a Christian context or not. I would love for you to add your story of blessing to mine.