Craning Towards Change

An attorney I work with posted on his Facebook page this morning that he was looking out of his office window, watching a guy operate a construction crane, and "wondering if that wouldn’t be a better option.” Across the street from our office building, a major construction project is underway (another high-rise is going up in Towson, where landlords can’t buy tenants . . . but that is another blog altogether).

Do you ever feel like there have to be better options for your career, your “life’s work?” I know, people feel like they aren’t allowed to think that right now because most are just thankful to have a job. But sometimes when the economy is sour, this feeling of longing for something else comes out strongest. We feel even more trapped, because it is not just a matter of wanting to pursue other paths, but being forced to stay where you are for fear of not landing on your feet elsewhere.

I know this attorney pretty well, and he is just buried under a load of work in preparation for a big trial. So, I don't expect to see him leaving law for a crane operator apprentice program. But most of us have probably expressed a similar sentiment at some time in our lives. I have. I think that I tend to make snap judgments in my mind, and so I guard against taking quick action. My decision to go to part-time status at my law firm has been germinating for over 3 years, and I twice went to my managing partner and said I wanted to go part-time, long before I actually did it.

It has been a good decision, I believe. Part of what made it good was not rushing into it, as much as I would have liked to have done so. I had time to plan, to prepare my family, and frankly, to pay down debt so it would be a possibility.

I am thankful to God for the good fortune I have had in employers and the ability to change my work life. I have been leaning into change for about 5 years now. And it was much harder, riskier than I thought it would be (I have a few extra gray hairs and 12 additional pounds to prove it). But we all want to be relevant, right? We want to matter somewhere. I spent a lot of time trying to matter to other people and to myself. What at a colossal waste of time. Mattering to God is so much better, and so much easier to accomplish. In fact, you just have to exist to matter to him. I don't get it right most of the time, I'm sure, but he is far more forgiving than people, and infinitely more forgiving than I am of myself.

God and Popcorn

It's officially Lent. Some of us decide to give something up we like, do something extra we would not typically do, or both. In the past, I've tended towards the giving up instead of the doing more (which, by the way, I think is easier--it's harder for me to forge good habits than to temporarily suspend not-so-good habits). I've given up TV, beer, chocolate, caffeine, and popcorn in recent years. The hardest of all? Popcorn.

I'm not kidding. I love popcorn. It is my favorite food. Not just snack food--but food food. I will eat popcorn for dinner if my kids are not home (because a good mother doesn't eat snack food for dinner, I guess). I like it with butter, with grated parmesan cheese, or with salt alone, and I make a crazy delicious version with bacon bits, cayenne pepper, and fried onions.

And I love to eat it with a cold beer while watching college basketball. So, I also gave up beer.  But not basketball (as I write this, I am watching the Maryland-Duke game on ESPN).  Sorry, but it's almost March.

So why do we do this? Someone asked me once why "people into Jesus" made behavioral changes during the 40 days before Easter. Well, sometimes I've done it because "that's what Catholics do," along with no meat on certain days during Lent and fasting on others. I have done it to comply with rules, and if I am honest, there were times when that was the only reason. But, of course, what's the point of that? Rules that exist simply for their own sake are empty. And rules that exist to show only how "holy" we are are Pharisaical.

In the past few years, I've attempted to make it more about Jesus. By missing something I like, it is a small reminder (very, very small) of the great sacrifice He made for me. Anything that focuses me more on Him and less on myself is definitely a good habit.

We are now in a season of penance, reflection, and preparation. As silly as it sounds, I have been reflecting on how I would like to prepare a delicious a bowl of buttered popcorn for myself. But if I eat it, I'll have to go to Penance (just kidding). No, by not eating it, I can focus in a physical way on Christ's very physical sacrifice. It's small, yes, but I'm small--I'm just a person, and God doesn't ask that I fast for 40 days as Christ did. He asks only that I focus on his Son.

Focus, Focus, Focus.

I'm hungry.

Choices, Choices

One of my favorite C.S. Lewis books is The Great Divorce. It’s not a book about marriage or divorce at all, as you might think. It is a counter-argument to the belief that there can be a marriage of heaven and hell—that bad things can “turn into” good, and that the concepts of good and bad are not really different. In this allegorical tale, Lewis takes theological license, and constructs a world where people in hell can take a vacation to heaven, and to stay there if they so choose. The narrator, possibly Lewis himself, encounters a number of souls in hell, and while their situations are all very different, we see the same trait in almost all of them: they choose to refuse to repent.

One soul in hell is an Episcopal cleric. He is a great example of someone who meandered down that gently sloping path towards hell. He was an important person in life—in fact, he was a bishop. But he chose to turn away from Christ along the way, in favor of being a Big Intellectual and securing book deals. A friend, already in heaven, confronts him with what he has done; the cleric never put up one moment’s real resistance to the loss of his faith. He allowed himself to drift, and in the process, pursue worldly things and status instead of Christ. What is interesting is that the friend also did the same thing, but the difference is that the friend, during his earthly life, repented. He saw the error of his ways.

But the cleric doesn’t seem to understand what his friend is driving at. Finally, the friend says to the cleric, “You have seen hell; you are in sight of heaven. Will you, even now, repent and believe?” And the cleric replies, “I’m not sure I've got the exact point you are trying to make.”

He’s not sure of the friend’s point? How could his friend have been any clearer? The friend offered him the chance to understand the truth, to repent, instead of dwelling in the cleric’s self-imposed cesspool of abstract intellect. This bishop and acclaimed writer is smart by all human standards. But he refuses to hear even the most plain and obvious of questions. Actually, it’s the answer he refuses to acknowledge—the answer of salvation. What does the cleric do in response to his friend’s direct question?

Nothing. He does nothing. He still chooses to refuse to repent. Yes, for a few minutes he toys with the idea of changing, but he wants guarantees—he wants to make sure he’ll be an important person in heaven and that there will be some intellectual life for him to enjoy. But, of course, the friend tells him that heaven offers nothing other than eternal happiness. So, what does the cleric decide he will do for eternity? He decides that he needs to get back to his daily existence in hell so he can make his speaking engagements.

While this seems unbelievable, is it really? Or is it so believable—people placing conditions on God and wasting their chances at heaven—that we don’t want to consider it?

By the end of the book, only one person is on his way to heaven. A man, whose pet sin was lust, utters the only words of true repentance, of changing his mind and heart, in the whole book. He says, “It would be better to be dead that to live with this creature.” He verbalizes—confesses—that death is better than sin. He agrees to let a friend in heaven extract his lust, represented by a lizard that must be surgically, painfully removed from the sinner.

Now, for all we know, this man might have lived a life of total depravity. Is it safe to assume that only blockbuster, repeat-offender felonies are the ones that doom us? I don't think so.

In another C.S. Lewis work of fiction, The Screwtape Letters, Lewis composed a series of letters from Screwtape, one of Satan’s minions, to his nephew, Wormwood, a lower level tempter for the devil, to assist his nephew in gaining the soul of a particular human. We might expect Satan’s tempters to go for the “big” sins, the really bad ones, to secure souls for hell. That’s not what happens in the story. Interestingly, it is the apparently innocuous sins that are of greater interest to the tempters. Screwtape teaches his nephew:

“It does not matter how small the sins are, provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards will do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”

This idea is not new. St. Augustine taught that even little sins add up—“if you take them for light when you weigh them, tremble when you count them. A number of light objects makes a great mass; a number of drops fill a river; a number of grains make a heap.”

If you have read St. Augustine’s Confessions, you’ll now that he knew something about sin himself, and was well equipped to speak about it. He tells us to tremble when we count them. Why? They add up. And that should make us tremble.

On a more modern note, the Christian rock band Casting Crowns sings, in a song entitled Slow Fade, “people never crumble in a day.” Before we hit the bottom of the barrel, we undergo a cumulative, consistent crumble.

Did you ever notice how many discussions of hell reference a method of travel? I think that is because the road to heaven or hell is just that—a journey, a path, a trip. We do not live in a world where all roads, if followed long enough, draw us gradually to God. We live in a world where every road, after a few miles, forks into two paths, and each of those two forks again, and at each fork, you must make a decision. You must make a choice.

This is not a posting of doom, but of hope. And choice. The path to heaven is a life-long one, and the path to hell can be too. Our daily activities really do matter. Not everyone who chooses a wrong road is doomed to hell, thank God. There would be precious few souls in heaven if that was the case. But our rescue from the wrong paths, from taking the wrong forks in the road, depends on us getting back on the right road. The choice is ours.