Courage in all four corners - part 2

The problem with chopping self into pieces manifests at the times you could really use strong body and mind but only one understands the scenario. It's why they say running is so hard, and runners are so strong. You don't only discipline your body to run the miles or the speed you want, you discipline your mind to take the same strain. And the same in reverse. Say you work a job that stresses your mind while you sit in a chair. Then, at home, you try to unwind by sitting in a chair and watching TV. The body is made to act as a release valve.

I've grown used to running without Ben and I sometimes like the silence. I don't wear headphones, either. I might get a song – set to my pace – stuck in my head and I'll pass mile after mile with it. Or I might think about nothing at all. And the stress collects in sweaty patches on my forehead, my upper back.

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Your mind is a battlefield, I read Sunday morning, curled up in my bed. The temperature has dropped here. It's 62 degrees in my house and it was 80 just a handful of nights ago. Every year I have to learn again the tenets of layering clothing.

Our culture obsesses over the mind. A new aspect of psychology studies Happiness. Scientists study which areas of the brain light up when musicians improvise. And we live in fear of the mind when it's broken and twisted, compelling someone to harm others or himself.

I can tell you the importance of mental courage when it comes to this blog's usual subject matter, but the audience I'm aware of doesn't necessarily share our pursuit of alpine climbing or hiking. And people who do what we do already understand mental toughness. So I'm going to take this another direction.

Let's explore depth.

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My sister (also participating in #write31days) reminded me in her Day 3 post that we enjoyed a privileged upbringing. My parents gave us space to explore and, my dad especially, pushed us to include our brains in the exploration. He said he could accept whatever we grew up to believe as long as it had a foundation of truth pushed to its limits. Popular ideas can be right, but only once pursued to their depths.

It takes courage to examine. Not only is it possible that by following some of our worst thoughts, we enter a war no one else can see, but by engaging where we once accepted, it's likely we'll start to reject conventional.

But Jesus ("You have heard that it is said...") intends us to do so.

When I realize weeks have gone by without my noticing, I usually see a pattern of avoiding time that's quiet because I'm avoiding confronting a thought with which I'm uncomfortable. Boredom is one of those things. A bored Christian has to ask herself what she doesn't believe about God and His abundant life.

Besides being true, the phrase ignorance is bliss is an escape route and I've never thought about that before is a symptom of fear I see often in Jesus-loving Christians who will talk about the way they feel until they've run out of words but will not use their minds to discern those feelings or read their Bible to transform their thoughts.

I struggle with being argumentative because I like to feel smart. That's not what I'm talking about when I say it's time to go deeper. In the Google age where I can ask any question and get a curated list of writers who have done the researching and thinking for me, it's time to ask for wisdom.

In his sermon on the first few verses of Romans 6, John Piper said the way to think courageously is to think and live with patience through pain and complexity. Don't skip over it. Don't sideline topics as high-brow or difficult because you don't know how to think about them. I recommend you listen to the whole thing. Here's a snipit from the introduction:

In the American church especially, we have created all kinds of Christ-coded quick fixes and solutions and programs that smooth out the problems of our lives, make our lives a little more livable and don't go very deep. Therefore we're not the kinds of saints our forefathers were. We're not sages ... We're not very strong in the midst of pain and suffering and persecution. We're pretty thin-skinned and pretty flimsy saints. 

J.I. Packer has a very good book called A Quest for Godliness about the Puritans. He compares the Puritans to the redwoods in California. You can drive through a redwood. You can drive your car through a redwood – a living one! So he said the redwoods are like the old British Puritans. ... Many of them died for their faith. Their roots go unbelievably deep down into the soil of the Bible. And the branches of these lives go unbelievably high into the mysteries of heaven. And the trunks of these Puritan trees sustain forest fires and do not die but only get scorched. That's how strong and deep and high are the redwoods. He said the Puritans were like that. He read his eyes over the contemporary American pragmatic / quick-fix / mile-wide / inch-deep church and he said, "Affluence seems for the past generation appears to have been making dwarfs and deadheads of us all." So much impatience with depth. So much impatience with complexity. So much impatience with pain. [We say,] "Just give me a list. Tell me how to make soup [serve], tell me how to take the mask off [kill sin]. I'll do it! But don't bend my brain with complexity and mystery and make me think and by all means don't create any discomfort or pain for me because, frankly, I just want my life to go a little better." ... There aren't many sages in the American church. ... Roots unbelievably deep in the Bible. Branches unbelievably high in the glories of heaven. A life lived of 10, 20, 30, 50 years of suffering and pain and confusion and fought it all through and thought it all through. Where are the sages – men and women? 

I've said it already: When you know who you are, you'll know what to do*. And how can you know who you are if you do not ask hard questions?




*Mark Driscoll said this repeatedly in his sermon series on Ephesians, which delved into a Christian's identity in Christ.