Finding a Healthy "Off" Button?

An Always On pastor is one who truly has trouble separating his or her personal life from the job. Technology makes for easy access and this is both a blessing and bane for clergy (discussed in part one below). All of our lives have become increasingly more public and intertwined. As many debate the pros and cons of this massive influx of electronic transparency, it definitely poses some unique challenges for clergy that are worth discussing.

I know many pastors whose online lives are strictly business. Twitter exists to promote the upcoming church event. FaceBook exists to showcase photos from the last church event. Blogs are treated as theological treatises. I believe there is tremendous wisdom in this approach because it allows a pastor's personal life to remain largely private and separated from his or her work world. It's not too unlike many teachers I know who will not friend a student until after they've graduated. There's too much risk involved when "personal" and "professional" lives collide.

I know many other pastors who take a different perspective with their online identities and display a willingness to inject a healthy dose of personal life into the mix. For some, it is even part of their ministerial calling -- to live "authentically" with their congregations and remove the myth of what my mentor called the "Phantom Christian;" a term he used to describe a Christian whose life seems too good to be true (and in time, it is often revealed that this life was indeed too good to be true).

I've spent most of my ministry career as one of the latter types of pastors, meaning I tend to let it all hang out and let the chips fall where they may. What you see is what you get, warts and all. It's freeing because it is authentic, but it doesn't come without a cost. I am beginning to see great wisdom in the former method because of the buffer it creates around a most precious resource: Time.

On any given day, I will receive between 30-40 texts, emails, and phone calls. Not all of them require a response, but many do. Because most people are at work/school every Monday through Friday from 8:00 until 4:00, a significant portion of these contacts arrive in the evenings and on weekends. That makes setting any "formal" work hours difficult because the moment you start to feel settled in, that smart phone starts buzzing.

Couple that with the burgeoning reality of social media and the sheer volume of people mingling on social websites during the evening hours and suddenly the lines between work life and personal life really begin to blur. As pastors, we might be tempted to believe that we're logging into FaceBook as individuals, just ordinary people connecting with friends and family; however, to many of those who know us in our professional lives, we have just logged in as pastors.

Truthfully, despite whatever we might believe we are doing, we have in reality logged into FaceBook as both pastor AND person. It's not like there is a "pastor cap" that we can put on or take off with ease. No amount of protest or request for more personal space changes this fact. It is like trying to outrun your shadow.

If we can't outrun it or change it, how do we become "regular people" again?

What kind of spaces exist for pastors that are private, personal, and protected?

Finding a healthy "OFF" button is a must for Always-On pastors. Let me be just really honest about it here, I haven't found one that works just yet. I mean here I am on holiday weekend refusing to relax or find an off button. I am blogging about relaxing and finding an off button. I am working for Pete's sake! That's hypocritical to an extreme.

Far too often my personal "OFF" button has been a glass of red wine or an ice cold beer. That's not too unlike most of America I suppose; except we all know what happens: one becomes two, two becomes three, and three becomes something your body regrets. The phone still rings, the text messages still come, and the emails still 'ding' on the smart-phone, but let's be honest -- they are much easier to put on a shelf after two drinks.

This is no solution.  According to some studies, alcoholism among the clergy is a staggering 3-4 times higher than the general population. Those estimates may be high, but certainly there is some truth to the numbers. For many priests and pastors, alcohol has become the only way to resist the compulsions of returning that phone call or answering that text straightaway. I believe the Apostle Paul likely realized this tendency in minister-types early on, which is why he admonishes Timothy to appoint only church elders and pastors who are "not lovers of strong drink."

Sometimes my "OFF" button has a pure disconnect from everything, family included. Overloaded, I have unplugged the phone, but also allowed part of my soul to be unplugged too. I have retreated at times into a mass solitude, ignoring even my most basic needs; I start skipping meals, losing sleep, and as recently as this summer would sometimes chain dip an entire can of spit tobacco in only a few hours.

Other times I retreat into a comic book or better yet, an online game filled with comic book characters! Gaming has its own set of addictions though and it's not uncommon for me to forgo a responsibility in the home just for an extra hour of "play time." It's one boundary for sure, but it costs my closest, most tangible relationships in wife and family.

Although not my personal "OFF" button, many pastors have retreated into the arms of secret lover, carried out illicit affairs, or as in the one of the more publicized pastoral failures of Larry Craig, settle for cheap, meaningless sex in an airport bathroom; or go the Ted Haggard route and trade sex in order to feed a  methamphetamine addiction.

You get the picture. No need to bare out all the details, but if there is one thing I have learned about clergy, it is that we all handle the erosion of personal boundaries differently and not all these ways are healthy. It is often more an act of self-preservation than anything; an attempt to carve out a space that you can call your own because you emptied every last drop of your soul for everyone else. As someone once said, "You can never pour yourself out for others if your own cup is empty and needs a refill." Truer words have rarely been spoken.

Another thing is also most certainly true: the more connected a pastor is into today's technology-ridden culture of immediacy, the harder it will be to find the dividing lines between personal and pastoral time. Truthfully, pastors just about have to get out of town and leave the phone behind to succeed.

In my case, a good vacation really isn't a cure-all. My compulsions run too deep and I find myself returning calls and even making a few of my own. "Just checking in, for posterity's sake," I tell myself. I manage to convince myself that's ok to work on a sunny beach while my children build sand castles and I've been graciously given a week-long holiday to build a few of my own. "Just a quick call," I say. Right, that always works. Not.

Truth is, I've been on holiday for five days now and my mind won't shut off. So what do I do? I spend it contemplating ministry boundaries and writing a blog! And when the writing slows a bit, I jack up on extra black coffee to be more productive. It doesn't get much more ill than that. ;)

In the gospels, Jesus retreated many times from the crowds. He even retreated from the Twelve. I sometimes wonder if He had a cell phone if He would have been tempted to take it with him. Jesus said, "Come to me all who are weary and heavily burdened, and I will give you rest." This is one of many great promises that He made.

The irony of Jesus' saying is that answer to our need for an "OFF" button lies at the very center of our "work." The person that we've just put in 70 hours talking about, reading about, praying to, working for is somehow supposed to transform into our personal rest. A great irony indeed.

I think maybe at the end of the day, all this talk of an "OFF" button is misguided. Pastoral rest and personal boundaries are simply a different kind of "ON."

In that sense, the Always-On pastor must be just that -- Always On. It doesn't feel like a solution, but it is the best thing we can do. Retreating into His presence is a boundary all its own, if we allow it to be. It certainly beats the alternatives.

Stay rested friends!

The "Always-On" Pastor: A Personal Reflection

When I was a kid growing up in church, there were no mobile phones, no email, and definitely no such thing as a "FaceBook." If you needed your pastor, you called the office administrator and left a message. If it was an emergency and the offices were closed, you basically either looked at last week's bulletin for the on-call pastor, or you looked up your pastor's phone number in the book... but those home calls to your pastor were likely few and far between.

Fast-forward thirty years and much has changed. We moved from a time where no one had their pastor on the home speed-dial to instant access via smart-phones, texts, and social media sites. There's actually a great deal about this that I enjoy. It makes a luxury like a home office much more manageable. I can work, conference call, start a chat, and even video chat with congregants while still wearing my pajamas. Visits that a pastor would have been required to make in person thirty years ago can often be handled wirelessly and instantly using today's modern technology. I also greatly appreciate social media websites, like FaceBook, because they can alert me instantly to a member's status -- whether that status is joyful, anxious, or depressed. I can learn family names via pictures posted and get to know how various family traditions are celebrated. All in all, modern tech has brought an abundance of ministry tools to the table, for which I am grateful.

There are a couple of downsides though. Chief among them is what I have called the "Always On Pastor." The Always-On pastor is the one who just can't step away from the job. It isn't necessarily his/her fault, nor is it the fault of the pastor's congregation. It's simply the 'plugged up' world we live in now.

The Always On pastor has given his personal email, cell phone number, and home address to any who've asked. He or she has said yes to almost every request on social media sites, following several hundred people on Twitter, Instagram, Blogger, FaceBook, etc. At any given time, night or day, weekday or weekend, the Always On pastor could be connected to hundreds of different people at once, just like any of us... but people want different things from these connections when it comes to their pastors. Receiving dozens of texts, scores of email, and requests to "chat" the moment he/she logs into a social media site, the Always On pastor has trouble with boundaries.

Confession: I suffer from this condition. Part of it is just the way we pastors are wired (no pun intended). We sincerely WANT to read every status update that a friend or congregant posts on a social media site. We sincerely WANT to see every baby picture, grandchild picture, and beach vacation video. We want to do these things because most of us have a deep, deep love for people that compels us stay connected. That's why we became pastors!

Although I suffer from inner compulsions to be the Always-On pastor, I am trying to get better. It isn't easy. There are just too many cultural expectations to stay "on." Here are two examples of how this expectation goes down:

Scenario #1 --  Pastor walks into church Sunday morning and sees Jim-Bob sorting bulletins in preparation for the service. He slaps Jim-Bob on the shoulder and says, "Why so grim? It's just bulletins." Jim-Bob replies, "My uncle passed away on Thursday; that's why." Pastor feels embarrassed and says, "Sorry, I had no idea." Jim-Bob says, "I was surprised you didn't call. I mean, it was all over FaceBook. I even blogged about my childhood memories with him. I thought we were friends and you read my stuff." Pastor confesses, "No, I am sorry," and as the guilt slips in adds, "It was a busy week, I must have missed that particular post."

Scenario #2  -- The pastor and family are planning a movie night about an  hour after dinner. During dinner, the pastor's smart-phone has notified him of two emails and a FaceBook message. Knowing he has an hour before movie night begins, he moves to answer the emails. Then, the pastor quickly logs into FaceBook to check the message that arrived there. Up pops a FaceBook chat request from Sally-Jo:  "Sorry to bother you, but I have really been struggling with something." Afraid of sounding rude or dismissive, the pastor begins a chat with Sally-Jo that lasts through the first plot point of the movie he'd planned to watch with family.

In both these scenarios, the Always-On pastor is assuming a degree of guilt and allowing his personal boundaries to be eroded.  In the first scenario, the guilt is actually being applied by the congregant. Jim-Bob is applying pressure by implying that since the pastor doesn't read his blog or follow his every FaceBook post, then the pastor must not truly be a friend.

In this first scenario, we pastors rarely confront these kinds of expectations from our members. We feel the guilt of having missed a birthday, an announcement, or a special post that our members have placed on social media and we sidestep the disappointment they feel (and often project onto us) with a quick apology. It's the courteous thing to do, but is it the right thing to do?

I believe that over time if Jim-Bob's game is to repeatedly call the pastor out for not following his every post via social media, it may be time to have an old fashion 'sit-down' with Jim-Bob. There is simply a glut of information for pastors to muck through on the internet. Following every member perfectly can't and won't happen.

The second scenario is a little bit different. The correct response from the pastor should have been: "I hate to hear that Sally-Jo, would you like to schedule a time to meet and discuss?" The problem is that feels really harsh and abrupt. We pastors are softies and when people want to talk or need to get something off their chest, we feel obliged to hear them out immediately. That's a big part of our own illness too as we fail to set boundaries.

What strikes me as most odd about these scenarios is that our culture treats no other profession in this manner. Practically no one would consider befriending their psychiatrist or counselor via social media. And if for some reason they did, I doubt seriously they would ask for a quick counseling session at 8:00PM on a Thursday night. Can you imagine your doctor's amazement if you walked into his office and suggested he was falling down on the job because he failed to read your latest health-related FaceBook post? Or even keeping your doctor's personal cell phone number in your contact list and texting him health related questions through the week?

Always-On pastors are a product of both inner compulsions and societal expectations. We want to be connected and are mostly expected to stay connected. But there are simply too many ways to connect and too much information for any single person to follow in our modern world. Attempting to stay "Always-On" will lead to burn-out. It might even kill us.

Learning to find the off switch is difficult for pastors.  And that's the subject of my next entry.

Svevo's Closing Thoughts in Zeno's Conscience

Almost a hundred years ago Italo Svevo wrote a little novel entitled, "Zeno's Conscience." I read this book about four or five years ago because the opening chapters were reported to be a humorous accounting of Zeno's attempt to give up cigarettes. I got much more than I bargained for in the novel.

 

Zeno is neurotic for certain. He curbs his anxieties with nicotine; he is a hopeless romantic in his youth and a somewhat hopeless husband in his older age. One of the most interesting things about the novel is the way in which his psychiatrist insists Zeno is seriously ill (which he is in many ways), however, Zeno is never really as ill as those around him. His illness seems to be spotting everyone else's illness and taking a few stabs at them. Zeno never really denies he himself is ill. He knows it, which in many ways makes him more sane than anyone else in the book.

 

Curiously, Zeno ends his "confession" and the novel's ending appears below for your consideration. The law of healthful selection is lost and sickness begets sickness. Students of history will recognize the both the sentiment (eugenics) and the subsequent results of this kind of thinking in the 20th century.

 

But he goes further really by painting a grim alternative to healthful selection and he sketches is not in terms of physicality or beauty, but rather psychological wholeness. That got me thinking about wellness and culture -- and the way that sickness truly begets sickness.

 

Anyway, it's spoils nothing of the novel to post the ending here. And if you have time, check out the book. Here it is:

 

 

"Any effort to give us health is vain. It can belong only to the animal who knows a sole progress, that of his own organism. When the swallow realized that for her no other life was possible except migration, she strengthened the muscle that moves her wings, and it then became the most substantial part of her organism. The mole buried herself, and her whole body adapted to her need. The horse grew and transformed his hoof. We don't know the process of some animals, but it must have occurred and it will never have undermined their health.

But bespectacled man, on the contrary, invents devices outside his body, and if health and nobility existed in the inventor, they are almost always lacking in the user. Devices are bought, sold, and stolen, and man becomes increasingly shrewd and weaker. His first devices seemed extensions of his arm and could not be effective without strength; but, by now, the device no longer has any relation to the limb. And it is the device that creates sickness, abandoning the Law that was always on Earth, the creator. The law of the strongest vanished, and we lost healthful selection. We would need much more than psychoanalysis. Under the law established by the possessor of the greatest number of devices, sickness and the sick flourish.

Perhaps, through an un-heard of catastrophe produced by devices, we will return to health. When poison gases no longer suffice, an ordinary man, in the secrecy of a room in this world, will invent an incomparable device, compared to which the explosives currently in existence will be considered harmless toys. And another man, also ordinary, but perhaps a bit sicker than the rest, will steal this device and climb to the center of the earth to set it on a spot where may have maximum effect. There will be an enormous explosion that no one will hear, and the earth, once again a nebula, will wander through the heavens, freed of parasites and sickness."

Who Cares About the Sick?

Well, the long and short of it is -- the United States of America... well, sort of.

Don't believe everything that gets tossed around these days about our country's failure to spend money caring for the sick. Long before the Obama Care debate started, the U.S. was spending more money per person on healthcare than any other nation in the world. Now, we are set to spend even more.  The reality is that we already spend much more per capita on healthcare than other nations, including Canada, which according to most liberals, have healthcare figured out. We spend twice as much per person than New Zealand and 80% more than average Western nations like Germany, Denmark, or the U.K. (World Health Organization, 2010 statistics).

I know what you're probably thinking... The United States has a higher GDP, or Gross Domestic Product, therefore it can afford to spend more on healthcare, but it probably doesn't. Wrong again. Long before the Affordable Health Care applications began, the United States was spending nearly 18% of its GDP on healthcare (again 2010 stats). That's about double what Sweden, Ireland, or the U.K. spends relative to their GDP. In addition, the United States has nearly doubled healthcare expenditures as a percent of GDP since 2000, meaning we are spending far more than we did even a decade ago.

Once again, these expenditures have been rising long BEFORE Obama-Care, which will be adding considerably to the totals. This massive amount of spending is a relatively recent phenomenon as health care prices skyrocket and as Americans continue to let their bodies go to fatty foods, nicotine, drugs, and a lack of exercise.

There is a lot of false debate in this country about healthcare. Now the government is shut down in what has to be the most idiotic move the Republicans have pulled in ages. They want to change a few things in the law and have held the nation hostage to do it.

It's true, the nation is severely misinformed about healthcare. If you stop reading here, you will be to. You see, we really need to ask the right questions about healthcare before we apply solutions. Here's where we begin:

How can we be spending almost twice as much per capita as the rest of the world on healthcare AND nearly twice the percentage of our gross domestic product as other nations and yet, still be needing more?

The answer comes if we dig a little bit deeper and it carries some really damning evidence about our nation's health and healthcare system. Let's start with every liberal's favorite healthcare state, Canada. As noted, for as far back as I could see in the data, Canada has always spent less per capita on healthcare than the United States. Canada has almost always put a smaller percentage of the GDP toward healthcare (I think there was an exception in 2006).

Here's the real kicker though: Canada's system pays for nearly 80% of total healthcare costs individuals and families accrue. The United States, even by spending twice as much per person, government spending only covers around 50% of total costs accrued by individuals and families. In other words, we are not only paying more; we are getting significantly less healthcare for the dollar. The trade off we get is (a mostly perceived) immediacy and specialization with our healthcare needs -- luxuries that the majority of us don't need, or won't need until we get much, much older.

So let's talk about the false debate coming from the Right and the Left in this country.

Liberals like to tell us stories about people denied services and kicked out of hospitals because of their inability to pay. Some of those stories are true. What isn't true and what will NEVER be true is that spending more money will fix this problem. Why?

Spending more money on healthcare at this point is like

putting premium gasoline in a car with no tires.

We already spend twice what everyone else does.

The system itself must be reformed.

 

Conservatives like to point out how much money we already spend on healthcare, which is exactly what I am doing. They are correct, we spend more than anyone. What they don't want to acknowledge is that we don't get a good value on what we pay for because the greed in our beloved "Private Sector" has artificially jacked up prices for basic care, thereby fulfilling the dreams of budding capitalists everywhere. That's why we spend more and for the most part end up getting less. Fat cat insurance agencies and pharmaceutical companies not only bleed out those with insurance, they also get rich on the backs of non-profit hospitals, Medicare, and every sick and dying American.

Most of all of this is a recent phenomenon as medical technologies and new drugs are serving up "wonder cures" that all cost considerably more that standard care. We operate with a belief in this country that all of our bodies deserve the luxury "Lexus" treatment.

But there's more, unfortunately. While demanding the "Lexus" treatment, there are still huge swaths of the country that treat their bodies like a Chevy Pinto. Our current state of health in American is poor.

We already know that Americans are generally overfed and under-exercised.  A huge (pun intended) problem that drives costs through the roof as overly endowed bodies fall through the floor.

Couple this sagging-triceps reality with the approximately 200 billion we spend on drug and alcohol abuse -- we've got multiple problems on our hands. Next time you're out and about and happen to meet an emergency room worker from your local hospital, ask them what percentage of their day is devoted to the following:

1.   Drug overdose
2.   Alcohol or Drug-related crashes
3.   Alcohol or Drug-related suicide attempts
4.   Alcohol or Drug-related violence
5.   Hypochondria

You might be very surprised. Then again, you could be awake enough to know what's really going on in America, and it's got very little to do with how much we spend and everything to do with how & why we spend it: the downward pull on the total healthcare system.

That downward pull is two-fold:

A)  corporate greed leeching the sick, and

B)  personal irresponsibility and entitlement in a population refusing to practice self-care

And there's one more factor to consider, and despite naming the obvious, it must be named if we're going to be honest:

The United States spends more on healthcare because Americans go to the doctor more; our country healthcare system treats as much "Loss of Health FEAR" as it does the genuine loss of health.

We are some of the most over-medicated, fearful, and weakest people on the planet when it comes to illness. From running little Johnny to the doctor at the first snivel of his nose, to demanding antibiotics from our doctors every time our temperature crosses 100 degrees -- we are a nation of hypochondriacs, hell bent on getting only the very best care for each and every wart, hemorrhoid, or pimple that surfaces. We consume over 75% of the world's pain medication because every time we so much as twist an ankle we hold our hands for more opium candy. America will always spend more on health care so long as Americans are running to the doctor and popping pills at the first sign of discomfort.

Ok, rant over. And I didn't even get into frivolous patient lawsuits.

Here's the deal --

Instead of having a real debate about Obama Care, Republicans shut down the government. They are idiots, but we've known that for a while now. They wouldn't be getting much more done with Romney in office because they're not really known for their thinking prowess. They're often part of that overfed and under-exercised America described above. And talk show hosts that represent them are part of that pain-pill nation described above.

Obama Care is set to begin in 2014 and will help very many people. Genuine assistance is for certain. It will allow college students to stay on their parents insurance a little bit longer; it will removing pre-existing condition clauses from insurance policies; it may very well help my own family directly by lifting certain types of restrictions insurance companies put on their customers. People will be helped by this expansion -- at least the law is a step in the "sort of-almost-maybe-right direction."

Only the very callous are against government spending to aid the sick. But let's make no mistake, we already spend enough to more than enough to care for them in this country. We spend more than any other country in the world; we just do not spend the money in the right way. The long-term effect of Obama Care will only exacerbate the American problem because it doesn't address any of the real issues of personal responsibility and corporate greed; it inflates them with more government spending.

Drug manufacturers who are already getting rich on the suffering of the sick and the addictions of reckless, can now take even more money from the government's hand just as they have been taking it from private insurance for years. If you're a drug dealer (not the good kind of drug dealer), you would consider a move like this as simply expanding your market share. You can bet that morphine and hydrocodone manufactures everywhere will be popping a cork in celebration the day that America's poor have more reliable access to a $10 per bottle prescriptions to some of the most addictive substance on the planet.

With Obama Care, more Americans than ever before will have access to doctors they can run to with their common colds, sore elbows, jock itch, and ingrown toenails. More antibiotics will be prescribed for non-threatening conditions; more resistant super-bugs created, the magnification of disease will now receive even more blessings from government subsidy. All because we see money, not health, as a cure to illness.

The march of the obese will continue as it always has, some of them (but not all) with milkshakes and cheeseburgers in hand. Now, that march can gain a step with fully replaced knees, spring loaded and ready bear another 50 pounds. Government subsidized heart medication will be washed down with 32 ounces of Mountain Dew and followed by a cigarette, just like it always has. At the deepest levels, America's health won't be changing. Neither will it's purported "care."

Our gyms and running trails will still be packed every January with as many good intentions as ever, but remain sparse for most of the rest of the year, compounding heart problems, breathing problems, and muscle atrophy. All leading to strokes, heart attacks, pulled backs, and higher health care costs and disability payments for everyone.

Emergency rooms will still be littered with suicide attempts, drive by shootings motivated by drugs, meth overdoses, cocaine overdoses, and women beaten by their drunk husbands. The real drain on the system won't be touched by Obama Care, nor could it ever be addressed with government money because...

 America's soul is what really needs the healing.

The "Hemlock Merchants" manufacturing their cures for every discomfort we feel will be richer than ever before. The cost of healthcare will continue to rise and their coffers filled in ways we can only imagine. Private insurance rates will drop at first to compete with the government system, then they'll walk in lockstep together raising prices.  

 
As prices continue to rise from this utterly broken system run amok on the land, taxes to actually pay for the new healthcare law should go up too, but they won't. America will borrow to cover the difference like we always do. We'll default eventually. If not under this administration, then definitely the next.
 
You see, Government is headed for a shutdown either way.

And it's all because we're unwilling to fix the lion-share of the problem.... ourselves.  

Letting Pain Be Pain, Part Two

It would be hard to maintain our humanity if we didn’t ask spiritual questions about pain. The Bible is loaded with “heroes” who did this very thing, including Christ himself, who from the cross issued the famous phrase found in Psalms 22: “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” Questioning in this way is not only natural, but also appears in both the Jewish and Christian texts as an affirmation of our human need to wrestle with the “why” of pain.

I have only one real issue with the questioning of God and pain in our modern world. It comes when a person has rejected the faith life because of the problem of pain and yet, simultaneously, accepts the story of evolution as a beautiful thing, despite the clearly painful history it details. I don’t believe these two world views are mutually exclusive and personally hold to both as examples of beauty rising out of pain.

Natural selection indicates that the evolution of life on this planet hasn’t been solely random, at least not in the way we might commonly hear it described. Life adapts and evolves simply because survival beats the alternative. The science tells us that environmental pressure and strife (or pain) generate at least three alternatives for all species: extinction, cooperation, and initiative—the latter two are what promote adaptation, or change. The response to pain produces subtle changes that when magnified over time become significant changes.

Cooperation and initiative are as essential to evolution as an amino acid or strand of DNA. The biological building blocks are attached to their functions like water is to wetness. I see this as sacred in more ways that I can describe in this brief article. As life adapted to pain, beautiful ingenuity emerged—from the smallest cells to the group behaviors of large herds. That’s the scientific story in a nutshell, but it also strikes me as stunningly spiritual.

Since natural disasters were mentioned in an article below, we could start with the reality that volcanoes, earthquakes, and plate tectonics play an important role in supporting life on our planet by managing the release and absorption of carbon dioxide. A list of nature’s hidden benefits from environmental stressors (or pain) could go on for many pages.

Natural “disasters” are often held up as a reason for people to question the existence of God. How is it that God can be blamed for having made something terrible when that same terrible thing is essential in promoting and maintaining life on the planet? In science, nature gets a free pass on cruelty when one takes the long view of resiliency such pain produced. Why can’t God be in this story?

The answer we return is typically, “God could have done better.” To ask if God should have done better than the system we have is a genuine human response and a question have I asked many times. But scientifically speaking, it is like asking for a square without right angles. Whatever life God might have made absent pain, I can’t imagine it would be us. I can’t imagine such a life would be truly human, at least not as we understand it. Pain is a driving factor (perhaps even THE driving factor) of what makes us who we are… let’s not be so eager to shoot the horse we rode in on.

At stake for us then is really a deeper question, “Would we trade who we have become for whatever we would be in a world free from pain?” Personally, I would not; however, I can accept that answers may vary for others.

Admitting our propensity to cause pain (or turn a blind eye to it) is confession. Learning to cooperate with God’s solutions to pain is redemption. Cooperating with God and each other to eliminate suffering is justice. Demonstrating initiative and stepping out in the belief that light is greater than darkness takes faith; and all of these things— confession, redemption, justice, faith—these, and so many like them, give rise to a beauty inside that we could not know otherwise.

I believe that moving from the “why” of pain to the “what now” is infinitely more productive; it brings out the best and brightest in us. It’s what God did when He became human. He passed through the penumbra of pain “for the joy set before Him” (Philippians 2). In Romans 8, Paul says that all of creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth up until now. He says that the frustration of the universe and its enslavement to decay eagerly awaits the day when it will be freed from bondage. He says that creation sits on the cusp of a peculiar kind of cure: God’s children revealing His glory (which is His character, image, and presence) in the cosmos.

That’s ultimately where I want to be—I want to see us adapted, evolved, transformed into His image, to see the destructive power of a storm pale in comparison to the loving response that follows it; to see every suffering experienced in our world met with the fortitude that rises up from a life of joy and hope; to see humanity continue to reveal God’s character, likeness, and presence by eliminating pain through sound science, practical wisdom, and the spiritual compassion of Jesus Christ…to work in partnership with the Holy Spirit so that one day in the not so distant future, it might truly be “on Earth, as it is Heaven.”

As a human being, I have to let my pain be pain, meaning I don’t see how I get to this exact place and time without it. As a Christian, my response to pain requires cooperation and initiative as I try to walk daily with God, meaning I don’t see how I get past this exact place and time without adapting. Or as Paul puts it, I will remain stuck unless I am “conformed to the image of His Son.”

Letting Pain Be Pain, Part One

I read a story once about a girl who was born without the ability to feel pain. Normal things like cuts and scrapes would go totally unnoticed. She lacked the ability to tell the difference between cold and hot, or to retract her hand after touching something she shouldn’t have. Apparently, this is an extremely rare condition in humans.

This girl was apparently so immune to pain that her mother and father accidentally burned her in the bathtub when she was a baby and that’s how they discovered she had this condition. The hot water never caused her any discomfort; it never triggered any kind of response. Prior to being diagnosed, her parents had no idea they were hurting her.

As the girl grew older, she had to be constantly looked over. Some days she would show up from playing outside with her friends, bleeding all over her clothes but totally unaware that she had been injured. She spent weeks covered in terrible bruises that she never knew she’d received.
After years of living life this way, the girl’s parents began to pray every night that their daughter might one day wake up and feel pain again. They prayed she would feel pain so that she could live a full life. They prayed for pain to come their daughter and create for her a safer life. A strange prayer, indeed.

Pain is horrible and perhaps hurts us most when the ones we love are experiencing it. Which of us wouldn’t rather be on the surgeon’s table ourselves instead of watching a parent, or a child, or a spouse endure such suffering? Pain is no one’s friend. It is merciless and cruel.

And yet, by totally removing the experience of pain away from ourselves and from others, we would be subjected to an even deeper torture. Pain is nature’s most effective learning instrument. Because of pain and the responses it triggers, we avoid dangers, we live longer, and we stay healthier. Pain is everyone’s friend. Without it we wouldn’t survive.

It is no coincidence that in our culture today, we are just as private and locked up inside about our pains as we are our pleasures. Pleasure and pain make people uncomfortable when talked about openly because they are deeply connected and rooted in a total body experience. So like our pleasures, we privatize our pain and tuck it away, keeping it out of plain sight.

We keep our pain heavily sedated. Over 50 million antidepressants and anti-anxiety pills are taken in our country every day. Approximately 10 million gallons of alcohol are consumed in America every day. By the time the sun goes down today, Americans will have smoked 29 metric tons of marijuana. Today, our country will snort one metric ton of cocaine. America makes up only 5 percent of the world population and yet consumes over 80 percent of its pain meds. And that number has been growing by about 7 percent per year.

Western civilization seems to have real difficulty letting pain be pain, and personally, I believe we are made weaker for it. Like that child suffering burns in the bathtub, we have sedated ourselves to the point of endangering all that is best and brightest inside us.

I am not suggesting we dump all the Tylenol out of the cabinet or start berating people who are suffering from terrible disorders like depression and anxiety. But a quick look around reveals that we are terribly out of balance when it comes to letting our pain be pain.

I take a biblical perspective on pain and see in Jesus the following instructions for letting pain be pain from Mark 8:31-34.

1. Pain is not to be privatized. Notice that Jesus says openly and honestly that he will suffer many things. Private pain will drive us further and further into madness: into sedatives, sex, and shopping as a means to cope. Sharing our pain will bring us to embrace each other as fully human, fully aware, fully alive partners on this journey. Sharing pain promotes community and pushes us toward both human and spiritual solutions.
2. Not all pain should be prevented. Peter’s first response to Jesus’ public admission of pain is to try and stop it. Sometimes, that is our first response as well. As parents, would we ever allow our children to skip their vaccinations just because the needle prick hurt a bit? Some pain, certainly not all pain, but some of it, does in fact serve a greater good.
3. Pain should not be without purpose. Taking up a cross is pain with a purpose. No one is asked to sit and wallow in self-pity and pain. Nobody gets to wear pain on their shirt sleeve like some badge of honor. This kind of pain has purpose—we are going someplace together. We have a goal. And that goal is to pass through it to the other side.

Someone once said that “pain is the fuel we burn on the path to beauty.” I believe this is true. I have simply seen it proven to many times not to wholeheartedly believe it. Nature proves this to be true (and I would like to return with a follow-up article about this) and we know this is also true in art. As W. Somerset Maugham writes in his novel, “The Moon & Sixpence”:

“Why should you think that beauty, which is the most precious thing in the world, lies like a stone on the beach for the careless passer-by to pick up idly? Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the Artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul. And when he has made it, it is not given to all to know it. To recognize it you must repeat the adventure of the Artist.”

For me, the cross of Christ is the quintessential work of art in human history. The medium it uses to create with is our very lives. To repeat the journey of the artist is not for the careless passer-by. To experience the beauty of it is to let our pain be pain. And to, as the master instructs, “take up our own cross” and follow.

A Review of Roger Ebert's Last Letter

The history books will record Roger Ebert as a great film critic. He was that, and I am certain, much more to those who loved and knew him best. His loss has been felt by many around the globe because of the millions he touched. Ebert took us to the movies for years; he guided our ticket purchases, awakened in us a poetic appreciation for films we might not otherwise have seen, and best of all, he called the public away from the mindless, lowest common denominator of entertainment. His ability to critique film and his way with words had the effect of “raising all our boats” in the areas of culture, intellect, emotion, and even an awareness of the sacred.

Ebert’s ability to awaken us is what makes his death feel so tragic; but it is also what makes his now popularized letter, “I Do Not FearDeath,” equally as tragic. Ebert’s final critique came to us not in the form of a film review, but in a staunch and unwavering gaze cast toward seeming permanence of death. It has taken the internet somewhat by storm and been praised by many.

I confess, I found little praiseworthy in it. In fact, it primarily aroused in me a deep sense of pity to see a man with such brilliance and appreciation for beauty in life, take those gifts and place them in a room with such a low ontological ceiling.

Ebert begins his letter with the assertion that there is “nothing on the other side of death to fear.” The belief in nothingness after death is what Nobel Prize poet Czeslaw Milosz called “the true opium of the people.” Ebert himself confesses in his letter that the prospect of eternity “frightens me,” lending great credence to the observation of Milosz. The opium of nothingness can produce an intoxicating bliss when we come to believe that we’ve no one to answer to on the other side of death. The liberation granted in a belief of nothingness is probably far more pleasurable than any notion of God, for it is according to Milosz, “a huge solace in thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murder we are not going to be judged.”

I am not surprised to see Ebert’s letter so readily received by so many. Who wouldn’t want nothingness after death? Nothingness allows us to follow our own bliss in the time we have, to suck what marrow we wish from the bones of life, to find our own sense of purpose and meaning – to ultimately make a go of it with the ideals that suit us and please us best. That’s opium indeed.

What this world view ultimately lacks is a cross. The cross of Christ stands in stark opposition to the blissful addiction of nothingness. The cross implies direction, purpose, and it carries a stronger resolve than the comfort of just ceasing to exist. The cross indicates that it is often our discomfort that opens us to the deeper courage. The narrowness of it funnels our lives into tight ideological spaces which ultimately wring out of us the greater nobility.

I believe I probably would have never written a response to Ebert’s letter had he not quoted Walt Whitman. I am in love with Whitman and the familiarity of his Leaves of Grass wash over me much like holy writ. To equate the line, “I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,” to a belief in nothingness after death is a gross misreading of the good gray poet. In the lines preceding, Whitman says things such as:

“I know I am deathless…. The smallest sprout shows there really is no death and if there ever was it led forward to life…. There is that in me -- I know not what it is – but I know it is in me… it is not chaos or death – it is form, union, plan -- it is eternal life.”

The idea that Whitman may in fact be under our boot-sole testifies to his belief in life after death; it is neither a denial of it, nor is it some kind of awkward groping into nothingness. Ebert lowered Whitman’s ontological ceiling to fit his own and this perhaps disturbs me as much as anything.

Ebert continues his letter by making references to Richard Dawkins and meme theory which is little more than a tautological blanket tossed over an inept, naked Emperor who has spent the last 500 years trying to cage Platonic idealism. It is precisely the kind of mechanistic stain that Ebert applies to his own wife’s experience of the sacred in his letter: “Do I believe her? Absolutely. I believe her literally – not symbolically, figuratively, or spiritually…. I believe she did it in the real physical world I have described, the one I share with my wristwatch.”

I understand the sentiment – Ebert wanted to contextualize the experience without cheapening it and he made a valiant attempt to make this experience and so many like it, absolutely corporeal in its essence. Yet, at the end of the day what he aims for is hardly possible without severely cheapening the experience.

The beauty of a good film is that it takes us beyond the screen and into the wonder and imagination of the intangible. To say that such an experience shares the same space as a wristwatch is on its very best day, a gangly truth. That Ebert would never use such vernacular for his favorite film and yet chooses to apply it on the grand screen of human life is cause, not for celebration, but for unmitigated remorse.

I give his letter 2 out of 5 stars and hold out higher hopes, both for our species and for that which awaits us all in the Great Beyond.