Archive for the ‘Community’ Category

27 Oct

Is “What Would Jesus Do (WWJD)?” a Good Question?

Posted by Jennifer Clark Tinker in Community, Inspiration. Tagged: , , , , , .

WWJD? Pencil

My son came home from our church’s harvest festival with a “WWJD?” pencil. These initials stand for the question “What would Jesus do?” In my latest podcast at Life & Liberty I explore the fad prompted by this question and weigh the merits of asking it. I also created a handy “infographic” as a visual companion to the audio message.

>>>Click here for access to the audio and visual of my musings on the topic of “WWJD?”<<<

If you can’t click the link above, you can copy and paste this link to your browser:

http://www.davidhousholder.com/wwjd-revisited-02454-life-liberty/

18 Oct

Letting Love In: A Book Review of “The Wall Around Your Heart”

Posted by Jennifer Clark Tinker in Community, Inspiration. Tagged: , , , , , .

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>>>Click here for access to my in-person, audio interview with Mary DeMuth, author of The Wall Around Your Heart<<<

I have had the privilege of serving on the launch team for Mary DeMuth’s new book, The Wall Around Your Heart. As a member of the team I received an advanced copy of the book to read.

I am a big fan of Mary’s blog and anticipated that the book would be excellent, of course. But it was even better than I expected.

The Wall Around Your Heart is based on the idea that when people hurt us, it is natural to want to put up defenses to protect ourselves. But Mary says that when we wall ourselves off from painful relationships, we also keep ourselves from healthy relationships that can help us heal.

Using The Lord’s Prayer as a road map, Mary walks the reader through the journey of healing from relational pain. Mary goes phrase by phrase, and sometimes even word by word, through The Lord’s Prayer gleaning insights about God’s love and the blessing of community along the way.

Immediately when I learned of this book, some old hurts came to mind. I had a feeling that God was going to use this book to help me deal with some of those old hurts.

I know that I had been harboring bitterness in my heart–even unforgiveness at points.

What really blessed me about The Wall Around Your Heart is that Mary acknowledges the yuckiness of relational pain. She acknowledges how very, very hard it can be.

Mary doesn’t sugar-coat pain. She has personally experienced more pain in her lifetime than I can even imagine. She goes into more detail about that in the book, but suffice it to say she understands pain.

What Mary does that is so different than a lot of Christian authors is that she points out the love that God has even for people who have hurt us. She notes, “we cannot love our enemies until we see the twin truths: God loves me. God loves them.”

This approach to the question of forgiveness helped me see my old hurts in new ways. It gave me more compassion and grace for those who have hurt me.

But the book is about more than just forgiveness. In a chapter titled, “May Your Kingdom Come,” Mary names five different types of kingdoms that we create for ourselves that keep us from allowing God to reign in our lives and hearts. I was really challenged by some of those!

The only aspect of the book that was a little tricky for me was a fine point about theology that I didn’t quite understand. In one or two places Mary talked about God being “sovereign” and that is a concept that I haven’t really learned much about in Lutheran theology classes I’ve had. But even at that Mary does not try to propose pat answers to the questions of why bad things happen to us.

Mary DeMuth, author of The Wall Around Your Heart

I strongly recommend The Wall Around Your Heart for anyone looking for God’s hope and healing from relational pain. It is well-written, it deepens how we think of The Lord’s Prayer, and it is full of grace.

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You can order the book from my Jennifer Tinker’s Fave Titles section of the online book store at Life & Liberty or ask for it at your local bookstore. You can also listen to my in-person interview with Mary DeMuth and you can read about my two meetings with Mary and what it is like spending time with this woman of God that I admire.

4 Oct

Shutdown as Opportunity

Posted by Jennifer Clark Tinker in Community, Leadership. Tagged: , , , , , , , .

I don’t know when I became this person–one who says something about politics. Then again, I’m not really saying anything–I mean, I’m not arguing a side.

What I want to suggest is that this impasse about the Affordable Care Act (ACA) presents us with an opportunity that is all-too-easy to miss with all this shutdown drama.

I’ve written before about the idea that the more different we are, the more we need each other. In that post I made specific mention of the marriage issue, but, if I took out those references, the same post is pretty much what I want to say about this shutdown situation.

The reality that a decision cannot be made is a clue that there is more to explore about what is at stake in the ACA.

Instead we draw lines and take sides.

We characterize and demonize the opposition.

We can’t see why those other guys won’t budge.

We blame them for the shutdown but excuse our own dogmatic insistence on our own way.

I’m saying “we” instead of “they” because we are continuing to play out the stalemate in our statuses and tweets. We the people are as divided as the congress.

But it doesn’t have to be that way!

What I mean to say is, maybe instead of locking horns, we could look for common ground. Instead of blaming the other side, we can each take the time to listen.

Differences of opinion can be a gift. Hearing all sides helps us make well-rounded decisions with widespread acceptance.

This shutdown, this impasse about the ACA presents us as a nation with the opportunity to listen more deeply to one another.

This kind of listening often leads to creative solutions that are better than what either side could come up with on their own.

It’s easy to blame the Republicans for holding this up–hasn’t this already been decided? But the Democrats could agree to slow things down–wasn’t 2014 a rather arbitrarily-chosen year to start?

I’m just thinking what would be so bad about taking some time to get on the same page? And if there are desperate needs for healthcare right now, then why not adopt a temporary measure to address those until we’re more settled about the larger healthcare situation?

We could take this opportunity to work this through, or we could just shut down on one another. I’d like to see us work together creatively to do what is in the best interest of all people.

What if instead of a dramatic shutdown, we chose to make a dramatic shift in how we engage tough issues as a nation?

6 Sep

Life in the Spirit is Not a Game

Posted by Jennifer Clark Tinker in Brokenness, Community. Tagged: , , , , , , , , .

“It can’t mean anything: going back to the selling game? It doesn’t mean anything. It can’t be the reason you’re here,” Mike says.

Ruby scoffs, “It’s a game whose rules I understand. And for a while at least, that’s just gonna have to be enough…It’s better than having no game at all.”

–Ruby in Paradise (R), 1993, Victor Nunez

A Game Whose Rules I Understand

I like to play games, lots of games. And I’m a bit of a strategist. I kind-of hate this about myself even while secretly plotting how I’m going to beat your pants off. I like to learn a game and study its rules so I can exploit weaknesses in the way the game is set up. By finding this advantage I can prevail against my opponent. Often times it gets chalked up to luck–everyone else thinks they played their best too, so I must’ve gotten lucky. But I know I found a way to gain the upper hand.

A game whose rules I understand is a game I can use to my own advantage.

In the same way, I think sometimes I have played at the 10 Commandments like they’re a game whose rules I understand. And if I can understand those rules, I can exploit even those.

The game I’ve played with God’s Law is the one where the rules are all very clear. So clear, in fact that I could do whatever I pleased and justify it on a technicality. Meanwhile I watched other players like a hawk, making sure they stayed in bounds.

No Game at All

The truth is, the commandments are just a glimpse, as in a mirror dimly, of what God wants for His people. I believe the commandments are worthwhile to teach and study. And I believe that the “spirit” of the commandments is so that all may go well with us (Deuteronomy 6:3).

But the commandments are not God. And following (or exploiting) them is not a game that we can ever, ever win. In fact, living out our faith is not a game at all.

Life in the Spirit is much better than a game.

Better than a Game

My husband has a way of playing games like there is actually something more important than the game itself. It drives me crazy really. He’ll get off on a tangent of conversation with other players just as I’m about to make a brilliant play!

He said once, “I don’t play games to beat people, I play games to be with people.”

And that’s just the thing–we don’t just play at life like its a cosmic game of winners and losers. Life in God’s created world is so much more than that.

In this life, we get to be in fellowship with the God who created us! We get to be in solidarity with all our neighbors on this planet! If commandments help us love and honor God and neighbor, then that is the most important thing. But when we become more worried about beating others or beating the game, then it’s time for a ‘Game Over.’

God With Us

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It’s easy to say and harder to do to live like people matter more than rules. I mean, I still get caught up in trivialities of board game strategies! So to think of people in day-to-day life as being more important than whatever other ‘game’ I’ve got going is also a challenge.

And since rules only tell us so much, God did something radical. God came to us, to be one of us, to be with us in Jesus. God in Christ showed us what it really means to “be with” rather than “beat.”

And Jesus, he’s a God whose love I can understand. And it his Spirit in me that empowers me to live in love with my neighbors. And love rules!

30 Aug

The Ministry of Accepting Questions

Posted by Jennifer Clark Tinker in Community, Inspiration. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , .

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I was in elementary school before my family began attending church on a regular basis. Whereas Lutherans ordinarily baptize infants, I wasn’t baptized until the age of 9, the summer after my third grade year. As a school-aged kid who hadn’t been in church my whole life, I felt like I had a lot of catching up to do to learn about the faith. The attention given to me in my childhood that enabled me to learn more and grow in the Lord, I attribute to the Spirit of God at work.

My usual mode of processing the world is to ask questions, lots of questions. And I’ve been that way since I was a child. So, as I tried to catch up with my peers, I asked a lot of questions about all this God and Jesus stuff.

I am deeply grateful to the Sunday school teachers who fielded these questions. To be honest with you, I don’t remember anymore exactly what questions I asked. What stuck with me though was the sense that it was okay to ask questions.

I mean, if you think about it, there is something rather bold about some kid questioning the very existence of the God of the universe. But one Sunday school teacher after another stuck with me as I tried to get my mind around it all.

One year in particular I remember asking my usual million questions, but it seemed that my questions were beginning to annoy my fellow students. I began to feel self-conscious when I had a question to ask and wondered whether it was worth asking knowing that I was irritating the other kids.

But I asked anyway. And when the other students groaned and begged to get on with class, the teacher, Mrs. Johnson, patiently entertained yet another question from me. I saved a couple of less pressing questions for after class, after the other students had left. Mrs. Johnson gave me the extra time I needed.

When I then apologized to Mrs. Johnson for asking so many questions and for holding up the class, first she told me not to worry about holding up the class. But then she said, “Keep asking questions! That is how you learn!”

When the world might otherwise dismiss a pesky kid, when other kids would rather get on with the lesson, Sunday school teachers like Mrs. Johnson saw me and my questions as valuable. And I just know the hand of God was in that. The love and patience that my teachers showed me were evidence of God at work in their lives.

In turn, the faith that took hold in me is evidence of God at work in my life. My friend, Clint Schnekloth just posted on his blog today about a conversation he had with a mentor about different ways of being in the world. It was an interesting post, but it was something Clint said in the comments that really struck me as I prepared to write this post:

One thing another mentor told me one time: “For some people, there is a division between heart and mind. For you, your mind and heart are the same thing.”

For me, thinking through issues, asking questions and processing things in my head is inextricably linked with what stirs in my heart. So, when I asked questions in Sunday school as a kid and tried to get my mind around who exactly God is, the answers I got and the care I received sparked my life-long and heartfelt journey of living faith.

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