Sometimes the faith journey feels like an exercise in multiple personality management I find that I am often a different person when with other people of faith compared to when I am with what our friend Gary Davis calls “normal people”…

This manifests itself most strikingly in the words and language I use when I am with these different groups of people. When I am talking with someone who I know is “a believer”, I find myself seamlessly using Christianese lingo a lot in describing how life is going. Phrases like “it was such a blessing”, “praise God”, “during my quiet time the other day”, “how can I be praying for you?” make it into the conversation with ease and fluidity.

But when I am having a conversation with someone who may not be “a believer”, I find myself seamlessly and fluidly using “regular” lingo. Phrases like “we were lucky indeed”, “thank goodness!”, “I was thinking the other day”, “so how’s life going?” make it into the conversation instead of the Christian jargon.

Even the term “believer” is a dead giveaway - just what do Christians mean by that anyway?
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“There is a fire
And motion of the soul which will not dwell
In its own narrow being, but aspire
Beyond the fitting medium of desire;
And, but once kindled, quenchless evermore,
Preys upon high adventure, nor can tire
Of aught but rest”
~ Childe Harold

Quote on intro page to Book II of “Ben-Hur : A Tale of the Christ”

One of the revelations I’ve had recently about the Christian attitude toward growing in faith is the mainline Christian confusion about U2 - “how could they be a Christian band if they wrote a song titled ‘i still haven’t found what i’m looking for’?”
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Recently I read this quasi-humorous quasi-serious satirical take on the evangelical Christian approach to spiritual life:

You Might Be Evangelical If …

While I chuckled at the items on the list, and nodded along in understanding with many of them, one item in particular stood out:

You might be evangelical if …

7. … you tell God what to do when you pray. This becomes clearest when you attend a non-evangelical service and the Episcopal priest, say, begins, “We pray for the worldwide church, Lord,” and you wait to hear what he will pray about the worldwide church but instead he moves on. “We pray for our bishop, George,” and while you wait to hear about George’s great needs, he moves forward: “We pray for the sick in our midst: Helen, Steve, Raven…” For the evangelical, by contrast, it is a point of pride to intuit God’s desire: “We just pray that you will give Steve strength as he heals. We ask, Lord, that you knit those broken bones together and help him keep his wound clean beneath the cast. And Lord, for his mother, as she juggles nursing her son now with her job down at the post office, and her grocery shopping every Monday, we just ask that you give her extra strength in her body and love in her heart and gas in the tank of her Crown Victoria.”

How true! In my evangelical past I have certainly thought that this was the only right way to pray - that nonspecific general prayers were feeble and weak, and that a sign of a mature Christian who asks for prayer requests is to ask for all the minute details of each prayer “target”.
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Our friend Rachel recently posted the following spot-on comment about the agenda-driven evangelical response to the AIDS crisis:

whitewashed sepulchres filled with dead men’s bones

One of the comments to the post talked about the Talmud’s take on charity, aka Tzedakah, and the ranking system for the different levels of charity. I found a concise summary here:

Tzedakah : Charity
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Alexis and I were talking recently about the idea of missional living - living a lifestyle of serving others for the purpose of fulfilling God’s promise of blessing in their lives. We got to thinking about this lifestyle while we were taking a missions course earlier this year, and during that time we learned some surprising things about our motives for doing so.

We had thought of missions or a service-oriented lifestyle as being primarily one where we would go to some peoples that were in need of our assistance - seeing ourselves as God’s gift to the world, so to speak.

Putting it that way, of course we see now how arrogant such a view is
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