Preach Grace Until You Believe It: The 99.

The difference between Lucifer and Michael is attitude, and perspective, and choice. They both believe the same things, but one accepts that truth.

One of my Bible professors once used the metaphor of a man on a ship to explain grace. The man was on a cruise where fancy meals were served in beautiful dining rooms. But he, being poor, stayed down in steerage and ate moldy bread he had brought with him. Near the end of the trip, he found out that the nice meals were free of charge — they were included in the fare — and he’d been eating the moldy bread for no reason.

I hated that story for two reasons: One, that stinks. Two, I know what it’s like to eat the moldy bread — to miss out on God’s free grace — and I hate to hear about it. But I especially hate to be told that it is essentially my fault that I wasn’t upstairs. How was I supposed to know? When I tried to leave my bread and go up, why did I feel regret and turmoil?

And why, Bible professor, do your lessons about grace always make me feel so unwanted and unable to access said grace? Why do they make me feel that something in my power is what’s keeping me from going upstairs? Real grace is from a God Who comes into the galleys and pounds on the doors until we leave our mold and follow Him. But we are often taught instead that He is a captain holding His caviar aloft with a tiny fork, waiting for us to wake up and shaking His head when we don’t.

I have often waded through the guilt from this approach, and my conclusion now is that grace, for us, is less about grace and more about the mental and emotional hurdles that keep us from it. Whether we don’t believe it’s true, believe that we can’t have it, or believe that the God behind it actually wants something from us in a sinister way, we fight it. It’s not banquets or moldy bread — it’s childhood heartache, legalism, broken relationships, or the waste of the world. These things tell us that, even if grace is real, it’s not there for someone like us.

I’ve often heard Christians who come from works-oriented backgrounds (read: poor understandings of grace) say that they are “one of the 99.” This refers to the parable where Jesus leaves all else behind and chases one lost sheep. When that soul is found and returned, the rest of Heaven — presumably including the 99 — rejoice.

The bitter Christians say they are one of the 99 — one of the good ones who lived “correctly” and never got to see the real love and grace of God because they were minding their business and doing right while He chased the bad ones. They lament not being able to experience God fully, and that them being too spiritually aligned has ruined their relationship with God to some end.

But the catch here is that these types of people aren’t one of the 99. They can’t be.

The real 99 understand grace. The 99 are in love with God. The 99 are the ones who get it and can’t help but be thrilled when another comes over — because they know that they themselves didn’t climb to Heaven. They, too, were carried in at some point, just like No. 100 is being embraced on his or her way through the door.

These Christians who think they are “one of the 99" are likely far worse. Far from being right with God, they have the most polluted view of their Savior. They know what truth is, but their actions question the basics of Who God says He is.

They’re outside the fold, or down in the basement of the ship, and they’re not coming in or up. They’re focused on whatever grieves them so — whatever lifestyle they feel bound to live to “please God” — and, because they’re so focused, they have little chance of seeing the God waiting patiently behind them, or knocking on the door, or holding the giant billboard telling them that the only thing keeping them from grace is themselves.

That makes the faux 99 the most bitter of all, because not only are they outside of the grace, as they thought, but they’re not pleasing God via another route, as they thought, either. He doesn’t want whatever they’re doing. He wants them to have His grace. But they’re so handicapped that they misunderstand grace to the extent that they don’t even know how to accept it.

These 99 are actually the one — but they’re the one whose head is still in the brambles, whose Shepherd is still waiting.

The difference between the 99, and the one, and the ones who are yet to become the one, is just one thing: acceptance. Do you accept that grace is what God says it is — wonderful, free, waiting to be given — or do you insist on making it whatever you have twisted it to be? Do you hate it for the mangled ways you’ve seen it in your life, or do you choose to believe what God says it is?

The difference between Lucifer and Michael is not what both know to be true. They both know Who God is. They don’t argue with His love and mercy. The difference is that one accepts, and believes, and acquiesces to God’s will. The other will fight it and hate it forever, no matter how badly it ends. Grace requires only the submission of one’s will, but for some, that is too much.

What turns us from the sheep whose head is stuck in a bush, or a person stuck eating moldy bread, is the same. We so desperately want the right, but we’re so desperately twisted in our attempts that we must be stopped. We have to be kept from trying, through our efforts, to access grace. We must be prevented from bleating our views so loudly that we can’t hear God’s. We must be rescued, pulled away, by a loving God. We won’t ever know to go upstairs — or know that we’re living or merely toiling outside the fold — unless Someone literally saves us.

The moral of the story is not the stupidity of the sheep, or the haplessness of the sea traveler. It’s also not how much we don’t want to be the servant in the parable of the talents, who thinks badly of his master and hides the blessing he was given, even though he knows he should be a thankful, joyful go-getter. It’s not how much we’re the nine who walked away when only one came back to thank Christ, and it’s not how we’re eternally the older brother, either. These, again, focus on us, and how we have always felt inadequate to change our hearts.

The point is that, even if we’ve only once been these people (and we all have, a hundred times over), we have thus fulfilled the one requirement for grace. Christ didn’t come to save the perfect, and those of us who in some way think we have done any good, and especially enough good that we’re somehow out of the reach of God’s full grace — well, we are the most lost of all.

Whether it be someone who has never found God’s grace, or those who know it and call themselves Christians but feel that grace has evaded them on a daily level, we all stand to be rescued again.

Call yourself the Lucifer, and say you’re one of the 99.  Stay downstairs, paralyzed by the supposed middle ground. Know you’re unthankful, and unknowing of what to do with God’s greatest gifts.

Then turn around. You are not in a catch-22. You are not living in a world of regret, where you could somehow keep yourself eating moldy bread and miss out on the banquet of God’s grace. You’re not the vengeful servant, and you’re not one of the nine that walked away.

Because, if you’ve turned and looked behind you, you’ll have done the one thing required to find grace. You’ll have stopped looking at yourself, and you’ll be looking at God instead. He is the point of all this, after all — not the sheep, not the passengers. Now, accept.

Read This Stuff.

This is a great article on what makes a true team. This is a great article on what makes a true human (hint: It's about Michael Jordan). Both should be read, the sooner the better.

Journalists are stellar complainers.

The old adage about journalism is that it's there "to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted." What it doesn't mention is that journalists are often afflicted (real or not), and of the few places they find true comfort, one is when they are griping about their problems with each other.

That's what made me smile the most when I read this article about the New York Times' editor, Jill Abramson, and this quote especially (she was asked what the biggest drag was of being the executive editor): "I don't get to complain anymore. It's just true. Some of the most delicious time that you spend as a journalist is like, complaining. At no times have I had fewer actual friends to gossip with, and kind of complain with, or at least commiserate with. That is a hard part of being the boss. Newsrooms are just full of cantankerous complaining people. It's so enjoyable to be part of that."

Well said, Ms. Abramson.

Journalisms.

I found some fun stuff on Poynter today. First up we have the war journalist action figure. He's got a pretty serious camera and nice duds, but let's be honest -- no man worth his salt is taking a goatee into a war zone.

The other find is this lovely piece that explains why I no longer have a job as a copy editor. It includes this video, which I have embedded for your viewing pleasure. One note, though -- the animosity between reporters and copy editors (and day people and night people) isn't just a byproduct of a newsroom. It's the larger life case of people who do it right vs. people who don't, or two sets of people who do it right but don't communicate. Newspapers are just awesome places to see it get really bad before people combust.

The Limits of Ambition.

30 Rock ended tonight, and that demands 5,000 words and a copious amount of cheese. But I'm going to limit myself, because if 30 Rock taught us anything, it's that you don't have time to give everything its due, and what it really deserves.

30 Rock has been with me my entire adult life. I discovered the show when I was looking to kill some time the summer before I started graduate school in Boston, and I quickly became addicted while catching up in Season 2, watching a half-dozen episodes a night. It stayed with me through graduate school, where I struggled to unite my goals and hopes with the possibilities and prejudices before me, and it continued on until I entered the job world, which was even more depressing.

When 30 Rock really got into my soul, though, was when I began my time as a young professional. You could only smile every time you heard Liz Lemon say, "You really can have it all!" because that was the battle we all were fighting. Home, work, school, friends -- Liz showed me how to balance, how to fail, and how to really not let it bother you that you can't balance and that you fail, even when you still really care.

The amount of similarities between Liz and I is astounding -- as it is, I'm sure, for any 20-something girl. Liz and I both have a distinct German heritage, which made me especially enjoy those bits in the show, and we both have the same personality, meaning we both tend to have to work with people of another type of personality (the freaking Tracy Jordans of the world). Her family structure, workplace decisions, and hapless love life were also familiar. The only thing I always lacked was a Jack Donaghy, but now that I think of it, I think I do have a Jack in my life. It's either a blend of my brothers or that ambition demon that sits on my shoulder.

Ah, ambition. That's what it was all about, wasn't it? Wesley Morris wrote a great piece for Grantland on 30 Rock, and while he had many fine points about the overall show, and especially its implications on race and the larger TV culture, my favorite parts were when he revealed how the show so truly reinforced that it was a mockery of itself. Tina Fey is a great writer, and a great actor, and Alec Baldwin, the other stars of the show, and the writers behind it are all excellent. But in their excellence, they chose to glory not in what we could do if we could create our own perfect world, but rather to glory in how we create just something in a world that is never perfect.

Morris calls 30 Rock "a farce about the pragmatic limits of ambition," and he couldn't be more right. The show is all about ambition -- Jack's amibition, Liz's ambition, even the skewed ambition of the Tracys and Jennas and Kenneths. It's ambition not necessarily to be the best, or to claim some great something, but rather to take that untouchable thing you've always chased. Money and fame (Tracy and Jenna), happiness by triumph (Jack), or the perfect job and perfect world (Liz) -- it's all each person's desperate heave to get that thing, only to find that life doesn't allow it, or that you can't keep the other things you've gained (like people) when you're chasing that ambition.

As the great Conor Oberst says: Ambition is a loaded line. But we've all got it deep within us, even though it manifests differently in everyone. In 30 Rock, it played out in every life in varied ways, and in those ways, it showed a true amalgamation of real life.

The show's final episode tonight summed up the characters' pursuit perfectly, but it also did it in a way that was very 30 Rock. That is, it mocked the face of regular TV writing, made fun of culture, turned the tables, and threw curveballs. Yet, also in true 30 Rock spirit, it did not do it in a mean way, or to give a sense of loss. Instead, 30 Rock gave its supporters one final nod of the head to its true theme, that even amid the crap and everything not working out the way it should, good still happens.

That's the lesson of life, and the lesson of ambition if handled properly. Ambition is a demon if you can never tame it, but it's a joy when you can chase it and then settle for less, not feeling any loss in doing so. Liz long lamented that she couldn't actually "have it all," but when left with less than having it all, she discovered she had gained what she really wanted. Jack couldn't ever fulfill his ambition or find true happiness, but he discovered enough of himself that he finally found peace, which is what he was really looking for all along.

30 Rock fulfilled the John Lennon-bred cliche that life is what happens to while you're busy making other plans, but it did it in a way that affirmed that, if you pay attention to life as it's happening, even when you're chasing those other plans, you can have both the life and the hope for the future plans. You really can have it all.

Liz chased her dreams of a good show, and of having a family, and she never ended up with utopia. But she was able to discover richness in the pursuit, and to find at the end that she had what she was hoping for -- not a perfect family and a stress-free life, but a family, and a life. During her long, tiring road, she hated all the struggles with Tracy and battles to get things to just go right once. But she also loved her night cheese, and that funky middle-of-life area she got to live in for so long. When she finally reached her dreams, she knew she had to move on and take them, because that was what she had been aiming for all that time. But it didn't diminish that she knew she loved what she left behind, which is something that many people never pause to realize. They're too busy hoping to get to the next stage that the good parts of the struggle never show through.

The 30 Rock ending comes at a point where I'm transitioning from that blur of a life where everything is unbalanced and wrong to something that's starting to resemble the life I've imagined. Of course, it could all go up in smoke easily, but it looks as if I've left my 3 a.m. nights eating fat food in front of 30 Rock behind for good. I hated those nights so much, getting home all alone and knowing I wouldn't be able to see people the next day because they'd be working while I was free, and they'd be free while I was working. But I also loved those days, because there was a certain adventure to living that desperado life where I just had to make it happen all the time -- and then I got to go home, and be alone, and eat night cheese.

You hate it so much when you're going through it, and you know you want to -- and have to -- aspire to something more. But you also love it, because it's an excuse to not have everything perfect for a while, and to know that every crappy moment is preparing you for the time when things really will start to fall into place. Better yet, you're learning what you really do want, and ambition becomes less a tormenter and more of an impetus, a place to funnel ideas and then pick the one you decide you like after the hard slog, rather than being chained to wanting them all.

I'm going to look back on my Liz Lemon years knowing they clarified a lot of what I really wanted, and that they were fun in themselves even while adding up to what my future ended up being. But above that, I'm going to always love this time, and 30 Rock, for teaching me that ambition is not a foe. It's a tool -- a great, big, Jack Donaghy-acronymed tool whereby we strive and fall and slip and hold on and then see what matters.

Liz Lemon may be off the air, or teaching improv to senior citizens on cruise ships. But she's spawned more than that bespectacled granddaughter.

Her little children are running around Boston, further enthused and prepared to struggle for balance but loving it when it fails. Yes, Lemon: Blerg. We really can have it all.

Communication 101.

This is pretty awesome.

Sandy Hook Elementary, and Salt.

Fridays are my day off, so I'm generally disconnected from the world. I usually walk from my home in Cambridge, Mass., across the Charles River to Boston, where I get a slice of amazing pizza from New York Pizza. Yes, the pizza there is better than in New York.

Then I go to Starbucks, where I bury myself in magazines and newspapers I haven't had time to read due to work. I am perfectly content to let myself get lost in old problems or synopses, knowing that the world can't have changed too much to make what I'm reading outdated.

So by the time I arrived home late Friday evening to check the news for the first time that day, I was coming up on 12-hour-old information about what happened in Newtown, Conn., at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

I was quickly dismayed -- of course, by the news. But also by how I found out.

My social media feeds are sprinkled with Christians and non-Christians, blue-staters and red-staters, diehard liberals and old-school conservatives.

So what does it tell you that the first way I found out that 28 people had died is by one person going on about the Second Amendment and the other pressing legislation for gun control?

The best one was a former classmate from Liberty University, who posted a link to school killings in China, saying that happened without guns, so it wasn't time for restrictive gun laws. I also liked the many posts full of this original thought: "GUNS don't kill people -- people kill people!"

Right. Because on a day when people die, when children die, when the world has another gigantic reason to argue against the existence of God and the redemption of man, that is what we are worried about. That guns shouldn't be blamed. And that tragedy happens in repressive countries, too. (I'm sure God is pretty happy, too, that all those Chinese children died so my former classmate could have that great rebuttal to everyone who didn't like what he said about the Second Amendment.)

What does it tell you when the more sympathetic responses come from your non-Christian friends than your Christian ones? What does it say when the quickest solutions offered are about things like rules and laws, and not about the state of people's hearts? What does it mean when we are on Facebook instead of rushing to the site of the disaster, much like those parents rushed to find their children Friday morning, leaving their cars parked a quarter of a mile away, still running with the keys in the ignition, to push past policemen for glimmers of hope? Don't we, as Christians, have a greater, life-breathing hope, and a greater reason for urgency?

Christians, I am ashamed. And I ashamed again that you are most likely dismissing what I have written already. I understand that we see our freedoms being infringed upon, and our world turned away from what we believe is right, but get a grip. It's one thing to see the world deteriorate; it's another to use its deterioration to start whining about people who we think are wrong, and to suggest human solutions to fix outward effects of problems. We know a King Who says He wants to change hearts.

Since when were we called to rub it in people's faces when their sin leads them to heartbreak? Since when were we called to rub it in people's faces when other people's sin leads to their heartbreak?

Give me arguments about why we should be involved in politics and vote for this or that -- sure, I will listen. I'm not necessarily the biggest cheerleader when it comes to legislating morality, but I have voted for things that I think will give this country a better environment for good to win out. But it's one thing to carefully weigh issues and elect officials based on beliefs and creed. It's another to flood your Facebook feed with garbage about guns when hearts need healing.

If this entire country was overrun with gluttonous, arrogant, baby-killing socialist pigs, our response as Christians should still be the same as it is when we have a praying president. Love. Be kind. Share hope. Preach peace. Practice graciousness.

Be freaking salt in a world that needs it.

Do you think that it helps? Do you think that it helps when you tell people that guns don't kill people, people kill people? And not just the right wing -- left wing, you too. Do you think that it helps when we carp about mental health programs and bullies? Do you think that it helps when we act like legislation will change people's hearts?

Why are we not out there, binding up the broken-hearted? Why do we think any amount of law or crap is going to change people? Why are we content to just change outside forces and think that people won't feel pain anymore, or need our God in their lives?

People change by the power of Jesus Christ, and we as Christians have been called to share that very same Jesus Christ with a world that has no clue Who He is and what He really means. It's bad enough that we don't do this. But it's even worse that we lead people to think that Christians are obsessed with picking political fights when 20 kids get blown away at close range by semiautomatic weapons like the ones soldiers use in dusty wars in the Middle East. It doesn't matter if you're right -- kids are dead, and insensitivity will remain in people's minds for a long time.

It's one thing when Mike Huckabee gets up there and says what Christian leaders tend to say at times like this: That this happened because of a deterioration of values in life and the classroom. Personally, I may agree with him on a large scale -- we need God in this nation. But you don't say that, and you especially don't say it at a time like this, because you're not God, and you don't know that.

Being right is not the goal of Christianity. Reconciling mankind to God is, and that usually means providing help after people have messed up, not telling them they've messed up from a soapbox miles away.

We can tie everything bad back to politics. We can tie everything bad back to Christians not getting their way. We can tie everything bad back to things not happening the way we think they should. And you know what? Stuff still happens. People still get hurt. People sin and maim and die. And even if we're right -- even if we have the "I told you so" -- they're still lost unless we help them. (But please, keep track of the "I told you so" count, like any loving parents would when their kid burns his hand on the hot stove yet again. That is love.)

I took a moment from being ticked off Friday and talked to God, asking Jesus why all this had to happen, and what I could possibly do from my little, removed perch so far away. And all I could think of was when Lazarus died, and when Jesus showed up. He should have been there sooner. He could have healed him. He was about to raise him anyway.

And Jesus wept.

He just cried. He groaned in the spirit. He did that deep, guttural, heart-wrenching noise that lets someone know that you care, and that this should not have been.

He didn't chide them for not being good people. He didn't call them sinners. He didn't strategize about ways to change things. And He certainly didn't pin the deterioration of this world on a lack of gun control, mental health problems, or student supervision.

He just cried, His message to the world being that sin happens, but that He's there, and He cares.

So I cried, and then I slept on the seeds of this post for two nights and decided it was worth a shout.

I read stories of the Middle East every day, and I see that dozens of people get killed each day in Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq. And I wonder what it must be like to live in those places, and to hear that a bomb has just killed 42 people. What do you do? It's normal, right? It happens, and you just have to move on.

I hope that random death never becomes commonplace for us here in America, where it's getting closer to that as office killings, school shootings, and other tragic events happen more and more, and at levels that were shocking just years ago. We may be getting into that type of situation.

If we are, may it shine a light on Jesus Christ, and may it highlight the followers of Him who weep when it is time to weep. May messages of hope be as synonymous with violence as the questions of why and attempts to solve the problems have been. (And remember, these "solutions" and feeble fixes are coming from people who have nothing else to trust in. It makes sense to try all they may.)

I find it odd that so many people out there think a bunch of liberals or conservatives could thwart God's plans -- that a gun law here or lax control there could ruin life in a way that 28 people dying could not. But that is where we seem to spend a lot of energy these days.

Being salt in this world is a radical idea, and difficult. I struggle to do it.

But consider this a challenge you can hold me to at any time, even if you won't pick up the call.