Spiritual growth

Review: God, Where Are You?

/ rtrube54 / 1 Comment
Cover image of "God, Where Are You?" by Dominique Young

God, Where Are You?

God, Where Are You?, Dominique Young. NavPress (ISBN: 9798898020217) 2026.

Summary: In the midst of pain, God may seem distant. Healing begins when we drop our masks, discovering God’s love and presence.

Let’s be honest. There are times when it just feels like God has left the building. Life isn’t working out as we’d like. Or, we are in the pit of deep depression or besieged with anxious thoughts. Dominique Young writes out of her own experience of depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation. She is a child of divorce and growing up was traumatic, at times. People in church had no clue. Faith felt like a facade she maintained, one she longed to drop. Yet, paradoxically, it was only when she dropped the facade that she discovered the nearness of God. In this book, she walks readers through her own healing process.

First, before we find God, we need to find ourselves. Sometimes, we’ve so cleverly hid behind the masks that we don’t know where we are. She helps us identify where we are mentally and emotionally. Then, she helps us identify the costumes and masks we’ve used that leave us so disoriented. As we do this, we discover our brokenness, the depth of our emotional emergency. Perhaps the most scary thing is naming it. But this is a step toward help and healing Young wants us to learn to be OK with. Finally, she helps us identify the lies we’ve been told and to replace them with truth. For her, the lie was that arguments must lead to separation, leading her to shut down when differences arose. She learned that love casts out fear.

Second, She addresses finding God. Young observes that often, our question, “God, where are you?,” is a rhetorical one. She challenges us to exchange that for an honest and earnest search, believing that God will find us as we seek Him. But sometimes, the darkness of our experiences of abandonment is so intense, we wonder where God was in the trauma. She encourages us to ask this but also to lean into what we know of God’s attributes and to look for evidence of his presence in the darkness. Then there is the issue of failure. Young uses her own experience of failing in creating an organization to explore God’s presence in our failures. Lastly, she explores the presence of God in the storms of our lives.

Third, she explores finding “us.” By this she means finding a walk, a life with God on an ongoing basis. For Young, it begins with the reality that God doesn’t just want to inform us, he wants to change us. Pain in our lives is sometimes one of the ways he does this. Also, we often want God to show up in power to change things when he wants us to learn the power of his presence with us in hard situations. Not only that, God wants us to learn its not all about us, but that being loved, we become instruments of his love with others. Finally, finding us means celebrating not what I’ve done, but what we’ve done.

Each chapter includes a Tracing God Devotional, Reflection Questions for journaling, and a prayer. In addition, Young often pauses during chapters to ask readers to reflect. This is not a book to be read quickly. Rather, one does well to have a journal at hand, and a box of tissues. It might be good to read with a trusted friend, practicing removing masks. And if it is too painful, use that as a cue to take a break, care for yourself, and return to what is painful with a trained counsellor who can accompany you through the pain.

Dominique Young invites those in pain who struggle with God’s presence to take the next step and follow a more intentional process of being honest both with oneself and God. Her own discovery of God’s presence and love in her dark places encourages the reader to persist in a seeking faith that is not a facade but one birthed both in adversity and biblical truth. And she holds forth the vision of not simply encountering God’s presence but making one’s life in that presence.

_______________________

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: The Way of Perfection

/ rtrube54 / 1 Comment

The Way of Perfection, St. Teresa of Avila, Foreword by Paula Huston, Translated by Henry L Carrigan, Jr. Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2009.

Summary: St Theresa’s reflections on growing in love, humility, and the life of prayer.

About a year ago, I reviewed a different, out of print, edition of this work from the same publisher. The folks at Paraclete were so generous that they sent me their “in print” edition of the same work, published for the 500th anniversary of the writing of this work. In addition to a foreword by Paula Huston reflecting on her own encounter with this work, the translation is one into contemporary English, with instances where the translator changed sentences in the passive voice to active. In reading this edition, I felt like Theresa was speaking directly to me.

The Way of Perfection breaks down into two parts. The first focuses on the spiritual life and how one of those in the Carmelites might progress in becoming like Christ. She explains the benefits of poverty, the importance of unceasing prayer and the necessity that women love each other equally without favoritism, which can wreck the harmony of a house. She instructs on detachment from all earthly affections to focus on the love of God. This includes gifts from family. She addresses answering unjust accusations:

“No one can ever blame us unjustly, since we are always full of faults, and a just person falls seven times a day. It would be a falsehood to say that we have no sin. Even if we are not guilty of the thing we are accused of, then, we are never entirely without blame in the way that our good Jesus was” (p. 57).

She devotes several chapters to mental and vocal prayer and contemplation. She urges people to pray as they are able and that the Lord is as pleased with our vocal prayers as our silent mental praying. She stresses that the state of contemplation, resting in the Lord, is a gift that may come equally to those praying vocally or mentally.

The second part turns to the great vocal prayer of the church, the Our Father. Theresa takes us through the prayer phrase by phrase, mining its richness. She marvels how much Jesus gives us in the first words, “Our Father.” She reflects on the significance of “hallowed be thy name” and “thy kingdom come” side by side, that the presence of God’s good rule on earth reminds us of the holiness of his name. She acknowledges the challenge of yielding our will to God. She tends to spiritualize the idea of daily bread, focusing on the bread of Christ. Perhaps it is well that our need for daily physical bread be a reminder of the need to be daily nourished in Christ. She emphasizes the underlying love of each other behind the prayer to be forgiven as we forgive. “Lead us not into temptation” is not a shrinking from spiritual conflict but our awareness of our vulnerabilities to temptation and the protection of God.

I’ve but touched on the richness to be found in these pages. It certainly did not hurt me to read The Way of Perfection again. I suspect that multiple readings are warranted because, in each reading, we are different people and will hear different things.

_______________

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher.

Review: Having the Mind of Christ

/ rtrube54 / 1 Comment

Having the Mind of Christ, Ben Sternke and Matt Tebbe. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press/Formatio, 2022.

Summary: Looks at the changed paradigms one must understand to experience deep and lasting change in our lives.

If one is thoughtful at all about one’s Christian life, we grasp that somehow, this means becoming more like Christ in our attitudes, dispositions, and behavior. In short, it means change, even radical transformation in our lives. Catechesis, spiritual disciplines, and faithfulness in the ordinary are all a part of it. The authors of this book contend that along with these good things needs to come a transformed perspective–new paradigms, new ways of thinking grounded in how God engages with us in Christ.

The authors identify eight axioms that reflect this new way of seeing. In fact, they liken them to corrective lenses, that bring reality into focus for us. The eight axioms are:

Axiom 1: God Is Love, So It’s All About Love
Axiom 2: God Is Always Present and at Work
Axiom 3: God Is Just Like Jesus
Axiom 4: God Meets Us in Our Messy Reality
Axiom 5: God Cares About (All of) It More Than We Do
Axiom 6: God Does the Same Work Through Us and in Us
Axiom 7: God’s Love Always Reckons with Power
Axiom 8: God Transforms Us Through Embodied Participation

On the face of it, none of these statements seems earthshaking. Yet there is a certain “bluntness” in these axioms and fresh insight in the chapters that elaborate them that makes this come alive. For example to talk about God being love takes the authors into the idea that our lives are meant to be lived in loving communion with God–all the time, in all the ordinaries. For God to be always present and at work means we don’t have to persuade God to be working but to look for that presence and work. God doesn’t “show up.” He’s already there. I love the symmetry of God doing through us in the world what he is doing in us, but also recognize how we try to separate that work, bottling it up in us or trying to do in the world what we are not allowing God to do in us.

Perhaps the most challenging chapter is the one on God’s love always reckoning with power. The authors make the point that “God’s love is not powerblind.” They point to examples in the ministry of Jesus in which he recognizes power, redistributes power, and redefines power. They write:

“God’s love in Jesus works inside the current system of power to bring equity and justice to the marginalized and oppressed, while at the same time seeking to subvert and upend the current system of power that created the conditions for inequity and injustice to begin with. In other words, God’s love doesn’t simply put new people on the top of old oppressive hierarchies. God’s love seeks to topple the unjust hierarchies and show us how to live together in love, practicing justice and peace with one another to establish communion-in-love with one another and God” (p. 123).

Each chapter includes with an experiment of trust to help integrate the new paradigm into our lives. As the book concludes, the authors invite us into active trust, defining belief as acting as if something is true. They propose a cycle of compassionate awareness toward what is happening in our lives, bringing what we see of ourselves into creative alignment with what we see in the gospel and discern the lies we’ve believed and the truth to which we are called, culminating in cooperative action with God involving our embodied lives and relationships.

This is a helpful book not only for young believers but for those who have been following Jesus for some time. We easily take our eyes off God and make it about what we need, ought, or should do. Did you notice that each of these axioms begins with God as the subject who acts? Having the mind of Christ is having a mind centered on who God is and what God is doing in the world and with us, and in light of that, our only sensible response of loving, trusting, and acting in faith. And in that is the transformation we long for.

____________________

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher.

Review: Living in Bonus Time

/ rtrube54 / 3 Comments

living in bonus time

Living in Bonus Time, Alec Hill. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2020.

Summary: The President Emeritus of InterVarsity/USA recounts his experience of surviving cancer, how he experienced disorientation and growth, and reframed his purpose in life in light of his “bonus time.”

I still remember the day when I opened the video from then President of InterVarsity/USA, Alec Hill, and heard the news that he was stepping down from his position to fight a rare form of cancer, Myelodysplasia Syndrome (MDS) that could take his life within eighteen months. I work for InterVarsity and Alec had energetically led us in fourteen years of growth. He communicated personal concern for us as a couple when my wife faced a cancer diagnosis for us. I was stunned, and joined with thousands of others in prayer for him.

alec hill

Alec Hill

This book describes his journey from that time onward. The first part of this book describes a journey of descent.  A bone marrow donor match was critical to his survival. As it turned out, his brother Grant was an exact match. For Alec, this meant toxic chemo and full body radiation to destroy his white blood cells, while Grant received injection to boost his stem cell production. Hill describes the side effects of this treatment, including the risk that any infection could kill him, requiring isolation from all but his wife Mary, and scrupulous sanitizing of surfaces. He also describes the struggles with depression and the “dark night of the soul” through which he went, and his struggle to hang on to the disciplines that had sustained him in health. He struggled with why this had happened to him. Had he done something to cause it? He warns against the prosperity preaching and false messengers who unhelpfully approached him. And when the treatment worked and his blood counts rose and health returned while friends in treatment died, he wrestled with survivors guilt.

The second part of the books focuses Hill’s transition to new realities as he realizes that he is among those who survive cancer. He describes the lessons of control–over-control like that of Steve Jobs, who thought he could out-think pancreatic cancer, or under-control, which becomes passive in the face of cancer. He recognizes that appropriate control involves humility, trust, gratitude, and rest. Cancer forced him to learn dependence on others–family, friends, professional caregivers, and other cancer patients. In this section, he also discusses the challenges caregivers face and the needs caregivers have for self-care. Perhaps the most significant chapter in this book was his one on identity. He talks frankly about the experiences he faced in self-perception, bodily changes including those affecting sexuality, social roles and spiritual identity. He writes:

Cancer is a watershed event that divides our lives between BC (before cancer) and AD (after diagnosis). If given a choice between our BC and AD selves–what we look like, how we feel, how we perceive others regard us–most of us would gladly select the former.

The final part of the book describes how Hill came to terms with “bonus time” (a phrase he draws from soccer, where at the end of regulation time, the referee can extend the play with bonus time. He identifies how survivors often show growth in grit, spirituality, and boldness (e.g. why am I afraid what people think when I’ve had cancer?). Surviving cancer can lead to a clarifying of purpose as one faces one’s mortality. He proposes that clarified purpose comes through surrender of control to reliance on God, assessment of our responsibilities, resources, capabilities and calling, and attentiveness that requires slowing down. For Hill, it meant a shift from executive leadership in a fast-paced collegiate ministry to the thoughtful mentoring of young leaders. He concludes with a pair of chapters on redeeming the time and on wonder that get to the most important aspects of bonus time–savoring one’s life, loving, living freely, giving of himself, and delighting in wonder.

No two cancers are alike. Neither are cancer journeys, some of which end one’s life and some that pass through the valley of the shadow of death into survivorhood. One thing that is true is that one is not the same–physically, emotionally, mentally. There are bodily changes, fears of recurrence and survivor guilt, and chemo brain. But there are also the opportunities of additional years of life and the question of how one will live those years. Alec Hill has given an incredibly honest, but also life affirming account of his journey. He takes us through his process in the hope that it will be helpful to others. In this, he practices something he learned through cancer–no one survives alone, but rather with a host of others who walk with one on the way–including other survivors. He supplements his own story with those of others, questions and scriptures for reflection, and a helpful bibliography organized around chapter topics.

This is a wonderful resource for cancer survivors and caregivers. It should be noted that Hill’s Christian faith pervades this memoir, not in a preachy way, but rather as what sustained him and helped him as he clarified what life in the bonus time of surviving cancer would look like. Hill’s aim is not that people imitate him, but rather through his reflection questions and insights, discern their own paths in “bonus time.”

________________________________

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Review: The Winding Path of Transformation

/ rtrube54 / 5 Comments

The Winding Path of Transformation.jpg

The Winding Path of Transformation, Jeffrey Tacklind, Foreword by Cathleen Falsani. Downers Grove: IVP/Formatio, 2019.

Summary: The author proposes that spiritual growth means walking in paradoxical tensions of glory and humility lived out in a winding journey toward the transformation of our character and spiritual freedom.

Jeffrey Tacklind proposes that the path to spiritual transformation is lived in a middle place between glory and humility, and similar tensions or paradoxes. In truth, we often find ourselves in that tension, at once longing for greatness, while conscious that we are finite and fallen creatures. We are “glorious ruins” in the words of Francis Schaeffer.

Tacklind traces this journey for us, using incidents in his own journey to illustrate this journey, one that is not arrow straight but winding. He describes an encounter with an alder tree in a dry stream bed, with roots that grow deep to draw any bit of water and branches flexible to bend with wind and flood. To be rooted without being rigid is indeed to live in a middle place. He describes vocational tensions of ambition and rejection and hearing God just say “do this” as he engages a visitor to his congregation in a coffee shop, one who was spiritually seeking and asking questions.

He walks us through the winding trail of life’s different seasons of birth, death and resurrection. He urges us to face desolation to find joy, to wait in a pressured, distracted world, to face our longings to belong and the pain of choosing to stand between opposing sides without belonging to either (naming a pain I have often felt).  He invites us into a path of living in the questions rather than grasping for certitude.

The path to transformation is a slow path as it wanders toward wholeness. There is the struggle to discover who “me” is, drawn as we are by “shoulds” and comparisons. Sometimes, it is small prayers and consequent obedient faith that discovers God in the small things like finding a son’s lost report card award card. It is learning that it is in our brokenness that the work of the cross manifests in our lives.

A fly-fishing episode illustrates another part of the path. God has his own ways in our joy grief, our glory and humility. Pulling fish out of the river is more than just a good cast and setting the hook. It is yielding to the wisdom of the river, the wisdom river guides learn in studying the river for where the fish are. It is a wisdom that ceases striving and yields. God leads us out and leads us back, again and again in life.

One has the sense of listening to someone whose life is very much a “work in progress” and his refreshing candor helps us relax into the possibility that life and spiritual progress are like that for all of us, and that’s OK. This is not a book of prescriptions for a fulfilling spiritual life, but an account from one pilgrim to others of what the journey is like and insights into the way God meets us in the tensions and contradictions and perplexities of our lives. You may have reached the point in your journey where all the “answers” of how the Christian life works don’t seem to quite fit your own winding path.  This work might better help you understand the true nature of the journey on which you’ve embarked, while encouraging you with a hope that may be even richer than you thought.

________________________________

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Review: Ecologies of Faith in a Digital Age

/ rtrube54 / 1 Comment

Ecologies

Ecologies of Faith in a Digital Age, Stephen D. Lowe and Mary E. Lowe. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2018.

Summary: Proposes an ecological model of faith formation and the possibility of creating this kind of spiritual ecology in online educational settings.

It was in a college biology course that I was first introduced to the reality of ecosystems. My biology prof wisely told us to select a patch of nature and to take time to observe all that was going on–from the soil and the creatures that lived in it to the vegetation, shrubs, trees, to insects, animals, and birds. I never thought before of how these were not disparate elements but interdependent on each other to flourish.

Stephen and Mary Lowe propose in this book an ecological model of growth for human beings consisting of six elements: physical, intellectual, emotional, social, moral, and spiritual ecologies. The first part of the book develops this ecological motif in scripture, particularly in the parables and Paul’s image of the body of Christ. The authors argue that this is possible not only in shared physical communities but that spiritual ecological communities may form online as well and contribute substantively to each other’s growth.

They especially engage the criticism that online community is a weakened form of mediated presence. They note that the doctrine of the communion of saints and the bonds of the Holy Spirit are not limited by distance and share examples from thoughtful online discussions eliciting more than what people would say in a classroom to compassionate support when difficult circumstances are shared with a group on Facebook. Online connections serve as a form of social capital, as do in-person connections, and sometimes these intersect. Instead of creating autonomous, isolated learners, online technologies foster connected, collaborate learning and growth. The Lowes also note how this is not new to our day. The Apostle Paul uses the mediated communication of letters, read by emissaries as a way to be absent in body but present in spirit to churches in different locations. They also note the power of reciprocal influence in social networks, especially as the diversity of those networks increase (diverse natural ecosystems tend to be far more robust).

The final part of the book focuses more on the nature of connectedness, looking at our connetions with Christ (syn Christo), with each other (synkoinonos) and the “one anothering” that runs through the New Testament. They propose the idea of ecological or contagious sanctification with examples of leaven and root and branch systems used in scripture.

Finally they propose a series of propositions for thinking ecologically about spiritual growth:

  1. God created a universe that exists and functions as a cosmic ecosystem.
  2. The earth exists within a larger cosmic ecology and operates by ecological laws.
  3. Natural growth follows ecological laws and teaches us that everything grows through ecological interconnections and organic interactions in a mutualistic relationship of interdependence.
  4. Ecological laws that govern natural growth operate similarly in the spiritual realm.
  5. Christians have a spiritual connection to Christ and other Christians, which forms a spiritual ecology.
  6. The spiritual connections we have with other Christians create opportunity for reciprocal exchanges of spiritual nutrients.
  7. The spiritual ecology created by Christ through the Spirit is unbounded by time and space, enabling Christians to enjoy the benefits of this reality at any time and in any place, whether in person or online.
  8. Christians who share a connection to Christ through the Spirit receive an imputed holiness that makes them mutually contagious and provides us with the ability to spread our contagion in online ecologies of learning (pp. 211-222).

This last point seems to engage in theological imprecision. Scripture speaks of the righteousness of Christ being imputed to the believer, but not holiness, a progressive work of the Holy Spirit in transforming our lives. I also question how we can spread something imputed by God. We can only point others to the one who imputes righteousness through Christ. That said, Christians may certainly influence one another to endeavor, with the Spirit’s help, to live holy lives.

I also thought that this book tries to do two things and does one reasonably well, and one less well. The book makes a good case for an ecology of spiritual growth, for the ways we are interdependent upon one another, whether together, or separated by space and time, in fostering each other’s growth. This book thus makes a good case for online community and its power to contribute to our growth in Christ.

What the book does less well is describe how this may be done well, as well as dealing with the dysfunctional aspects of online media. Just as good gardeners work with the ecology of places in choices and arrangement and cultivation of plants, it seems that those who curate online spaces likewise can do things either to foster or inhibit spiritual growth in those spaces. It would have been very helpful for these educators to give more specifics, and not just anecdotes, of how they translated their theory into practice.

Good gardeners often plant in groupings rather than single plants. Plants thrive together.  The Lowes help us see that the same is true for Christians–we grow better together, and together can include online forms of togetherness. These can be substantive, and formative. Hopefully this work will contribute to the development of good practices that foster such outcomes.