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    The Gnat & The Scab

    Hi friends!

    Last month, something straight up miraculous happened.

    Like, when I told my aunt the story, she said,

    “I believe you! I do! I know you! But you have to admit, that’s pretty hard to believe.”

    I agree!

    And yet…

    Here’s the story 🙂

    It begins with a conversation about marriage.

    More specifically, it begins when I expressed that just the thought of marriage was enough to make me low-key panic.

    Think eels in stomach, heart palpitations, convulsive swallowing, etc.

    Not because I thought marriage was bad!

    Not at all!

    In fact, I thought and think that marriage is a wonderful thing, but a month ago, I wasn’t sure it would be (in fact I was pretty sure it wouldn’t be) good for me.

    My sister recently got me to read Thomas Hardy’s Far From The Madding Crowd (she rec’d the Carey Mulligan movie, and after viewing, I had to read the source material), and early on, there’s a proposal scene where the heroine, Bathsheba Everdene, turns down the first of what will be three suitors, saying,

    “Well, what I mean is that I shouldn’t mind being a bride at a wedding, if I could be one without having a husband.”

    And I was like, mood.

    Except, it wasn’t even the thought of a husband that I objected to!

    It was the thought of the honeymoon.

    Friends, a fair few people over the last few years have heard me say that post-I Dos and retirement to a rose petal-strewn hotel room, I would do a full on ROADRUNNER to get away from the groom.

    It’d be like that scene in Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone after Harry sets a massive snake on his cousin Dudley at the zoo and his uncle interrogates him as to what the heck happened:

    My poor husband would be like,

    “One minute Sarah was there and then she was gone! It was like magic!”

    Abraca-abstinence!

    I’m not even joking, friends.

    And if you’ve been here for a bit, you’ll know the reason why is that from the ages of 5-20, I was a porn addict.

    I’ve written about it here.

    I’ve spoken about it here.

    But suffice to say pornography did a number on me, not only with respect to what to expect when it came to sex, but also with respect to how I saw myself, which was as an object–something to be degraded and abused.

    A real, live blow-up doll.

    And the thought of any person, especially my husband, viewing me like that was enough to incite an actual panic attack if I thought too long about it.

    Which is why I’d just sort of drawn a veil over the whole marriage question.

    UNTIL THIS CONVERSATION.

    Because on the heel of me expressing a much less succinct version of the above, my interlocutor said that while they understood why my past with pornography would make me sex-reticent in the short term, they weren’t sure they understood why it was that, over five years porn-free, I was still so viscerally averse to physical intimacy.

    And asked me to explain it.

    No one had ever asked me to do that.

    And for several moments, I was a bit dumbfounded.

    I honestly wasn’t sure how to explain it, but finally I said,

    “It’s like… it’s like there was a monster living in my house since I was five years old. This huge monster that dominated my life and made me always feel afraid and ashamed and like I was trapped and disgusting. And when God slayed the monster five years ago, I took its carcass and shoved it in a back bedroom and plastered over the doorway. But the monster’s still there, and whenever I see something that reminds me of it or I walk by the room, those feelings of fear and shame and captivity and self-disgust echo through the plaster.”

    They thought about that for a bit and then said,

    “When I was little, I had a dream that I was curled up on the floor with a monster standing over me. I had my head down, eyes shut, hands over my ears. I was really scared. But then, one day, I took my hands off my ears, raised my head up, and opened my eyes, and I saw that what I thought was a monster was really a gnat.”

    Friends, it was like a lightning rod went through my head.

    Because Romans 16:20 says, “The God of Peace will soon CRUSH satan under your feet!”

    And, listen, I’ve had that bit of Scripture memorized for years, but on April 25th, 2024, in the span of seconds, it just clicked.

    That after five years spent growing in wisdom and stature and favor in the Lord, I wasn’t that scared, ashamed, captive, disgusted, degraded little girl anymore.

    And relative to me, porn (which, make no mistake, is fully demonic) and even satan himself, far from being monstrous Jabberwockies, were freaking gnats.

    And I could just swat them or stomp them into the pavement.

    It was a total paradigm shift.

    And I left that conversation feeling both buoyant and discombobulated.

    Because it was like fifteen (arguably twenty) years of my life had been overwritten.

    The monster was a gnat. The monster was a gnat.

    And if, for instance, King Kong was reduced to the size of a grain of rice, the movies kind of wouldn’t make sense.

    So, suffice to say, my mind movie was reeling, but as I went to bed, I was like

    “Lord, I don’t exactly know what just happened, but I know You. And I trust You will make it make sense.”

    Oh! And I also made a next day appointment with an optometrist.

    (This is relevant, I promise :))

    See, pre-monster->gnat conversation, I’d been walking around Stanford with my sister and gotten something in my eye.

    For reasons not relevant to this discussion, my eyes aren’t great at tear production, so when something gets in them, it can be pretty irksome.

    And after a full day of trying and failing to blink/pray the speck away, I was like,

    “I really don’t want to spend my visit doing eyeball contortions. To the optometrist!”

    Lil sista accompanied me because she knows I’m kind of a wuss when it comes to eye doctors.

    She was a great sport about it <3

    And it wasn’t exactly pleasant (although, the doctor himself was EXCELLENT–competent, comprehensive, and compassionate. Seriously, God bless him!).

    He did the whole kit and kaboodle: inverted the eyelid, put dye in, irrigation, and q-tip.

    And finally he said,

    “So… there’s nothing in your eye.”

    At my incredulous expression, he added,

    “Oh, it’s definitely irritated. My guess is that something was in your eye, and it caused a corneal abrasion. That’s what’s causing the foreign body sensation every time you blink. The abrasion on your cornea.”

    On one hand, I was glad I didn’t have something lodged in my eyeball.

    But on the other, I’d been hoping for a quick fix–just take the speck out and no more irritation–but the doc’s prescription for resolving the foreign body sensation was more or less patience and

    “Try not to get anything else in your eyes.”

    Which is very sound advice, and the next stop we made was to CVS where lil sis helped me get the most goggle-esque sunglasses on the premises.

    I pretty much wore them the rest of the trip 🙂

    But the miracle’s completion actually happened as we were leaving the doctor’s office.

    See, little sis had a bodacious bruise on her leg (it’d been there for a few days), and as we walked out, she looked down and said,

    “I kind of like bruises.”

    And just like the night before, a lightning rod went through my brain.

    Because as my corneal abrasioned eye went to her bruised leg, the thought–and I know it was airdropped by God–came,

    “Bruises are evidence that there was once an acute source of pain. It’s gone, but the bruise will need more time and tending to fade.”

    Just like the doctor had just told me.

    “There WAS something in your eye. It’s gone, but the abrasion will need time to go away.”

    And just as I had that thought, another lightning rod came:

    “Porn was the acute source of pain. It’s gone, but you plastered over its carcass, leaving it to fester and go rank, instead of letting the abrasion heal all the way.”

    Friends, I think I let out an audible gasp because now the lightning rods were coming in FAST.

    Me post-optometrist 🙂

    Because as I had that thought, a conversation I’d had with my sister MONTHS prior slammed into my head.

    It was after one of her friends had been badly scraped in a biking accident and had to go to Stanford medical.

    The doctors told her friend that instead of putting bandages on the abrasions, they recommended medical grade honey (for moisture and antibacterial purposes) and gauze (to keep the wounds well ventilated).

    Lil sis had thought I’d be interested in that prescription because I’m a big fan of holistic/natural medicine (like using manuka honey instead of neosporin), and would you look at that, Stanford (Stanford!!) doctors were providing vindication!

    Lil sis had also said,

    “They told her, contrary to popular opinion, it’s actually bad to let wounds scab because a scab is just a bunch of dead, dried up cells that acts like a cork over the injury, keeping it from healing fully.”

    Friends, in that moment, it was like scales fell from my eyes.

    Or, more specifically, like a giant, five-year-long scab had fallen off my life.

    Because I realized for the first time that I’d allowed the wound porn had wrought for fifteen years to scab.

    And that for a further five years after the monster was dead, I’d plastered over the wound with deadened flesh instead of allowing the sweetness of Christ and the fresh wind of the Holy Spirit to come in and form new skin.

    I turned to my lil sis and basically word vomited all those realizations, and as I did, I felt–felt–the sweetness of Christ and the fresh wind of the Holy Spirit come in and the wound just… vanished.

    It was like magic 🙂

    And here’s a funny thing which is just further confirmation that God is Lord of time and there are no accidents.

    Porn hurt me for 15 years.

    God healed me in 15 hours.

    Legit, the monster->gnat conversation was at 10pm Thursday, April 25th, and I was walking out of the optometrist with my lil sis at 3pm Friday, April 26th.

    Pretty fantastic 🙂

    FURTHERMORE!

    Hebrews 13:8 tells us that Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

    He has an unchanging plan and character, and He’s not only a great physician, He’s a monster slayer.

    So if YOU have wounds that need tending or monsters that need slaying, I urge you to turn to Him.

    It’s been over five years since I did, and He has made (and continues to make!!!) all the difference <3

    Look up and lift your eyes
    The future’s open wide
    I have great plans for you,
    Your past is dead and gone
    Your healing has begun
    I’m making all things new,
    I’m reaching out, I’ll chase you down
    I dare you to believe how much I love you now
    Don’t be afraid, I am your strength
    We’ll be walking on the water, dancing on the waves

    Fun fact: Lil sis was listening to the above song the AM after the monster->gnat conversation and before the optometrist appointment. I’d never heard it before, but it definitely caught my attention. And let’s just say, it’s been prophetic 🙂

    The Weighty 180

    Friends, it has been five years–FIVE–since I started CC.

    *mind-blown emoji*

    It’s seriously coo-coo bananapants to me.

    A lot has changed, but the purpose of CC has stayed the same:

    To hold myself accountable and to hopefully encourage others along the way 🙂

    TBH, I need accountability and encouragement on the daily because while I still 100% believe that ’til you get plopped in a grave, it’s never too late to change, it is NOT an easy thing to admit you’ve been going the wrong way.

    It just isn’t.

    And today, I’d like to chat about why that is.

    I think there are three main reasons we double down instead of turning around, and they’re as pervasive as they are pernicious.

    BUT!

    They can be addressed.

    And hopefully, by the time you’re done reading this, you’ll be better able to see them and their influence for what they are–death weight–cut their chains, pump the brakes, and do the requisite about face 🙂

    Reason We Double Down #1: Pride

    Friends, I don’t know about you, but I don’t always take correction well.

    My mom will readily attest that I can be pretty stubborn once I’ve settled on a course of action.

    If I’ve picked a direction, I want to stick to it.

    However!

    As in the earlier gif from Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, there are instances (more than we want to admit) where we pick the WRONG direction, and sticking to it (i.e. refusing correction) will be calamitous–not just for us–but for innocents.

    AND YET!

    When concerns are raised that

    “Hey! You’re going the wrong way!”

    Instead of listening, we dismiss and disdain.

    Or, at least I do, anyways.

    Ex. We dismiss the other person as some form of incompetent.

    “He says we’re going the wrong way.”
    “Oh–he’s drunk! How would he know where we’re going?”

    Or else determine that, relative to us, they are a peon of a person, and for that alone, we refuse to listen.

    An EXCELLENT example of the latter can be found in The Prince of Egypt.

    When Moses approaches Pharaoh with a plea to “Let my people go,” Pharaoh, looks at his scruffy, sheepy, erstwhile brother, and says, quite famously,

    “No.”

    But before that, Pharaoh made a whole meal of his relative superiority–not just vis a vis Moses–but vis a vis everybody, saying,

    “I am the Morning and the Evening Star.”

    i.e. “Everyone revolves around me. I don’t move–let alone reverse course–for anybody.

    But as it often happens, The Alpha and Omega comes at him fast, and pretty soon Pharaoh’s chosen path is beset.

    Several plagues in, Moses laments:

    This was my home
    All this pain and devastation
    How it tortures me inside
    All the innocent who suffer
    From your stubbornness and pride

    But Mr. Morning and Evening Star is like:

    You who I called brother
    How could you have come to hate me so?
    Is this what you wanted?

    Then let my heart be hardened
    And never mind how high the cost may grow!
    This will still be so:
    I will never let your people go!

    Which just goes to show that John Stott was 100% correct when he said,

    “We would rather perish than repent. Rather lose ourselves than humble ourselves.”

    It is so often the case that ego makes us inert–refusing to look up, see the WRONG WAY signs, and turn.

    We’d rather watch the whole world–ourselves included–burn than admit we messed up and do a 180-reverse.

    But!

    Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that we ARE willing to grant that perhaps our ability to path-pick is imperfect.

    Crazy, I know 🙂

    (Though, if you actually think you and your picker are perfect, maybe check out this blog post.)

    Even with some humility in play, there are still two big reasons (at least in my opinion) that we double down on going the wrong way.

    Reason We Double Down #2: The Fear of Man

    Alright!

    So, maybe we’ll admit that the path we’ve picked is deficient.

    But it’ll be an inside thought.

    Definitely NOT something we’ll be sharing with the public.

    After all, we don’t want to be perceived as chicken.

    Which, it must be admitted, is a major risk when it comes to making a 180-shift.

    Particularly if other people were cheering or goading us onwards to begin with.

    I mean, if we go suddenly tearing off in the other direction, what will those people think?

    That we’re noncommittal? Cowardly? Weak?

    Finding Nemo‘s inciting incident scene depicts this dilemma beautifully.

    After being goaded by his new friends

    And getting excoriated by his dad

    Nemo goes for a dubiously directed swim.

    It doesn’t go super well for him.

    Now!

    We can see that action impelled by peer pressure and adolescent pique concludes sub-optimally.

    But, in the moment, derision and censure from the peanut gallery are powerful things.

    No one wants to be seen as weak.

    In C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters, even the demon Screwtape admits,

    “We have made men proud of most vices, but not of cowardice.”

    Getting cast as a chicken is seriously ignominious.

    And it carries with it the added danger of being eaten.

    After all, those peanuts can scent weakness.

    In his book RAGE, Bob Woodward recounts an interaction at then-President Trump’s Mar-A-Lago estate where he endeavored to assess Trump’s willingness to apologize for past mistakes.

    Dan Scavino, Trump’s social media director, had walked in. Trump pulled him into the debate.

    “He [Woodward] thinks I should apologize,” Trump said, “I think if I apologized, it would be a disaster. I don’t know.”

    “A hundred, percent,” Scavino said. “The media would kill Trump.”

    Death by MSNBC.

    But seriously.

    It’s an interesting thing.

    That refusing to admit past errors–let alone do an about face–(which might appear to observers as strength) is really a sign that we’re high-key afraid.

    After all, peanuts can really bring the pain, and it’s that fear of full on social anaphylaxis which makes it hard to say,

    “Oh shoot. I’ve been going the wrong way.”

    Because right on the heels of that comes

    “What will people say if I do an about face?”

    Suffice to say, I don’t think the peanut gallery should have a tremendous amount of sway.

    They can pelt you a bit–call you craven, vacillating, and limp–but, personally, I’d rather be pelted by nuts than go sailing off a cliff.

    (Also, I’ve written here about two-steps I’ve personally found helpful in determining when to take a social hit–feel free to check it out if you want a self-assessment!)

    All that being said, once again, for the sake of argument, let’s say that you’ve taken a bite of humble pie and also determined that being called a chicken is preferable to death.

    And yet…

    You’re still not enthusiastic about changing directions.

    I get it 🙂

    Seriously, I do!

    And I don’t blame you.

    Because even after addressing reasons we double down #1 and #2, reason #3 is like directional super-glue.

    Reason We Double Down #3: 180s Can Be Excruciating

    Alright, friends!

    Nearly finished!

    We’ve got just one reason we double down left to discuss, but it is, arguably, the most challenging one.

    Because while pride and social censure can make us inert, it’s also a simple fact that the act of doing an abrupt 180 can really–reallyhurt.

    In Top Gun: Maverick, there’s a great illustration of how a sudden change of direction can be highly unpleasant–even perilous.

    Here’s a gif of the inverting maneuver Tom Cruise and Crew had to do to keep from basically imploding

    A real Top Gun instructor described the dangers of a sudden shift in this interview with Jocko Willink (go to 19:00-20:30 to hear the whole thing), and laid out why the pilot has to flip the plane in order to avoid bursting her brain.

    Jocko: Why do you have to roll on your back?

    Dave Berke: To go from pointed high to pointed low, meaning nose up to nose down, going 500–600–miles an hour, you wouldn’t black out–it’s called “red out.” You would put so much blood in your brain you physiologically couldn’t do it.

    In laywoman’s terms, improperly executing a sharp reverse can seriously hurt (or worse), and the likelihood of pain makes most people (understandably) 180-averse.

    However…

    There are occasions where no matter how much turning might hurt, not turning will be much, much worse.

    In Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows, Harry, Ron, and Hermione discuss how Harry’s nemesis Voldemort has ripped his soul to ribbons by serial murder and dark magic.

    Isn’t there any way of putting yourself back together?” Ron asked.

    “Yes,” said Hermione with a hollow smile, “but it would be excruciatingly painful.

    “Why? How do you do it?” asked Harry.

    Remorse,” said Hermione. “You’ve got to really feel what you’ve done. There’s a footnote. Apparently the pain of it can destroy you. I can’t see Voldemort attempting it somehow, can you?”

    “No,” said Ron, before Harry could answer.

    Sorry for the spoiler, but Ron’s correct.

    Despite the fact his soul is in ribbons, Voldemort remains remorseless till the bitter end.

    In fact, right in the midst of their final showdown, Harry implores him,

    “It’s your one last chance,” said Harry, “and it’s all you’ve got left… I’ve seen what you’ll be otherwise… Be a man… try… Try for some remorse…”

    Voldemort elects to hold his course.

    And because of that, he ends up not just dead–but fully dandelioned.

    Now, there’s nothing that can justify either Voldemort’s actions or his unwillingness to admit, even just to himself, that what he did was heinous.

    However, I think we can grasp his remorse-reticence.

    After all, Hermione’s correct.

    Remorse is one of the most excruciating emotions human beings can experience.

    In her victim impact statement to serial sexual abuser Larry Nassar, Rachael Denhollander put it this way:

    The Bible you speak carries a final judgment where all of God’s wrath and eternal terror is poured out on men like you. Should you ever reach the point of truly facing what you have done, the guilt will be crushing. And that is what makes the gospel of Christ so sweet. Because it extends grace and hope and mercy where none should be found. And it will be there for you. I pray you experience the soul crushing weight of guilt so you may someday experience true repentance and true forgiveness from God, which you need far more than forgiveness from me – though I extend that to you as well.

    Friends, in a very real sense, remorse–that crushing cocktail of grief, guilt, horror, and shame–is a foretaste of hell.

    It’s that moment of lucidity–that, as Screwtape says, “peculiar kind of clarity which Hell affords”–which alerts us to the fact we chose the wrong course.

    I, for one, chose wrong for twenty years.

    And on February 6, 2019, when I was alerted to that fact, it legitimately felt like I was having a whole body attack.

    My heart was going like a jack-rabbit.

    I was sweating out an oil slick.

    My pulse was electrifying my fingertips.

    And I was sure–very sure–I was about to vomit.

    But then the kindest, most all-encompassing voice I’d ever heard said,

    “Daughter, it’s time.”

    Yours truly burst into tears, turned, grabbed two of my dearest mentors and friends (one of which was playing the keyboard at the time–sorry, Marisa :)), dragged them out of the room and into the hall, and proceeded to confess nearly two decades worth of life misspent.

    My life hasn’t been the same since because that day, I didn’t just experience remorse–I experienced repentance.

    Friends, I think 2 Corinthians 7:10 put it best:

    “There is a godly grief that leads to repentance without regret, and a worldly grief that leads to death.”

    Just as the Top Gun instructor said, there is a right way and a wrong way to do a 180 shift.

    You either invert the plane or send all the blood shooting into your brain.

    In the former, you go belly up to sky, which is a solid position from which to declare,

    “Not my way. Not my will. Not my life–but Thine.”

    In the latter, you “red out” and fall out of the sky.

    10/10 don’t recommend the latter approach, friends!

    What I DO recommend is turning to Jesus, who is, like John 14:6 says, “THE Way, THE Truth, and THE Life.”

    And who does NOT, per Ezekiel 18:32, delight in the death of any of us who have chosen to sprint innumerable wrong ways but says instead,

    “I take no pleasure in the death of anyone! TURN and LIVE!”

    God said it.

    So there’s no better advice I can give 🙂

    That’s all for now, friends!

    Turn and live <3

    Wandering into the night
    Wanting a place to hide
    This weary soul, this bag of bones
    And I tried with all my mind
    And I just can’t win the fight
    I’m slowly drifting, a vagabond
    And just when I ran out of road
    I met a man I didn’t know
    And He told me
    That I was not alone

    He picked me up
    He turned me around
    He placed my feet on solid ground
    I thank the Master
    I thank the Savior
    Because He healed my heart
    He changed my name
    Forever free, I’m not the same
    I thank the Master
    I thank the Savior
    I thank God

    So You Wanna Lead?

    Hi friends!

    Sooooo this piece has sat in my drafts for almost three years.

    I know, I know! I cringe.

    Talk about procrastination.

    However!

    I finally got the inspiration to FINISH it this last weekend because, when I was visiting my sister at her uni, I got to reconnect with a leader I really respect, Lead for America CEO and Infantry Officer Joe Nail.

    I met Joe two years ago when I was interning and he was speaking at a think tank in D.C., and, despite the fact he was easily the youngest invited guest, he seriously impressed me.

    Because, by then, I’d already settled on what I believed were the necessary conditions of great leadership, and he, just a few scant years older than me, already had all three.

    It was kind of astonishing and more than a smidge intimidating because none of the three are easy (though, if you go to Joe’s L4A bio, you’ll see that easy isn’t really his MO–pray for this man’s toes).

    Anyways!

    The conditions are as follows:

    1. A leader sees their mission clearly.
    2. They say, “The buck stops with me.”
    3. And they’re willing to take a hit for the team.

    Today, I’m going to unpack all three.

    Hopefully, this piece will help you assess both your own and others’ fitness for leadership!

    And listen.

    If you’re already thinking,

    “Leading isn’t really my thing…”

    NO worries!

    I consider myself more of a hero-support gal (stay tuned for that blog post), personally 🙂

    Still!

    I hope this helps you consider what qualities are necessary, if not sufficient, for great leadership.

    At the very, very least, this might provide a helpful checklist come next election season!

    And just FYI, if you’re at all interested in combating small-town brain drain and revitalizing communities across the U.S., check out Lead for America forthwith.

    All that said, let’s begin!

    #1: Leaders See Their Mission Clearly

    This one is fairly obvious, but a great leader needs to have a clear mission in mind.

    Because going in murky or, Heaven-forbid, blind, is a surefire way to, at the very least, waste resources and time.

    And, in more serious situations, willinilliness in leadership can cost people their lives.

    Put simply, Monty Python’s King Arthur is not the vibe.

    Otherwise…

    The Beast of Caerbannog will eat everyone alive.

    In all seriousness, though, having a solid grasp of the mission/clear vision for what needs to be done, is, in my opinion, leadership’s foundation.

    Because you can be the most gifted and self-assured person in the room with passion out the wazoo, but if you don’t have a clue about what you’ve actually got to do…

    You and your underlings are basically doomed.

    And you don’t have to take my word for it!

    Personally, I think Octavia E. Butler put it best when she said,

    When vision fails, direction is lost.
    When direction is lost, purpose may be forgotten.
    When purpose is forgotten, emotion rules alone.
    When emotion rules alone, destruction… destruction.

    Again, I’ll speak for myself, but I don’t know of a single laudable leader that’s got “destruction… destruction” as their goal.

    Great leaders tend to have higher hopes.

    In fact, one of the MOST noble and amazing leaders in human history (I am SO excited to meet him in eternity) had not one but TWO extremely lofty goals.

    The leader is William Wilberforce, and in 1787 at the ripe old age of 28, he took out his diary and wrote,

    “God almighty has set before me two great objects: the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners.”

    That was his vision, and it became the mission of his life to see both of those objects realized.

    And they were!

    Granted, it took twenty odd years, but by the time Wilberforce and his compatriots (see the Proclamation Society and Clapham Sect) were through with England, the slave trade was dead and goodness was in fashion once again.

    And!

    Three days before Wilberforce died, The House of Commons voted to emancipate every. single. slave. in the British Empire.

    Talk about seeing your vision realized 🙂

    So again!

    The first thing a great leader needs is to see their mission clearly.

    And after that…

    Well, they gotta be willing to step up to bat.

    #2: They Say, “The Buck Stops with Me”

    There’s a incisive line in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, where the sister of a death-row killer writes,

    “As far as responsibility goes, no one really wants it.”

    By and by, I think she’s right.

    Most people want to hot potato their way through life.

    That is, the moment something unpleasant drops into our laps, our first instinct is usually to throw it back.

    People in positions of leadership are not exempt.

    In fact, I don’t know about you, but I feel like there’s a whole slew of people who sit at the head of very fancy rooms who want all the joys of leadership and none–none–of the dues.

    They just want to play hot potato, too.

    It was theologian and biographer of the great anti-Nazi Dietrich Bonhoeffer (another man I CANNOT wait to meet in heaven) Eberhard Bethge who said,

    “The sin of respectable people reveals itself in flight from responsibility.

    Amen–Amen!

    However, many of these respectable men and women have set upon a wonderful euphemism for their flighty, potato-flinging predilection, and it’s called…

    “Delegation.”

    Now, to be clear, there’s a time and place to delegate.

    But way too many so-called “leaders” fling their rightful potatoes away.

    When I was trying to think of an example for this, what kept coming to mind was the story of David and Goliath.

    Because, here’s the thing:

    It’s a great story, but it’s got the wrong lead.

    Because the man who should’ve fought Goliath was Israel’s regnant king.

    King Saul, actually, who in 1 Samuel 9:2 is described as standing “head and neck” above every other man in the nation.

    So given his stature and station, consider the scene:

    Goliath, the Philistine giant, is fee-fi-fo-fuming, demanding to be met in single-combat like,

    “Who’s it gonna be?!”

    And I bet you MONEY that everyone in Israel was looking at Saul like,

    “Dude, you’re the king and the biggest guy on the team.”

    And, instead of saying,

    “You know, you’re right. I’ll fight.”

    Saul’s like,

    “Actually! You know what? I’m delegating. To… erm… that guy! Shepherd boy with the sling!”

    Saul doesn’t stay king 🙂

    And rightfully so!

    Because if all a person is going to do is sit there like an oyster when they have the capacity and obligation to grasp the hot, hairy, humongo potato and do, they’ve got to be told,

    “Ma’am/Sir, leadership is not for you.”

    And the converse is true!

    It’s not all surprising to me that David, who stood up and said (I’m paraphrasing),

    “Oi! The buck stops with me! I’ll handle the Philistine!” became Israel’s king.

    Because great leaders are buckstoppers willing to face the heat.

    And more than that…

    #3: They’re Willing To Take A Hit For The Team

    Friends, this one is the biggie.

    This is the condition that, in my opinion, separates out the wheat from the chaff of great leadership.

    Because though it can be tough to see one’s mission clearly and say, ‘the buck stops with me,’ being willing to take a full-on hit–not for your own but for others’ benefit–puts you in a whole ‘nother league.

    I think British theosophist Annie Besant put it brilliantly when she said,

    “Plenty of people wish well to any good cause, but very few care to exert themselves to help it, and fewer still are willing to risk anything in its support. ‘Someone ought to do it, but why should I?’ is the ever re-echoed phrase of weak-kneed amiability. But ‘Someone ought to do it, so why not I?’ is the cry of some earnest servant of man, eagerly forward springing to face some perilous duty.

    It’s the perilous bit that makes the biggest difference, in my opinion.

    Because, as Besant notes, quite a few people can see what needs to be done–they’ve got vision.

    And some are even willing to exert themselves and assist–they’ll take on responsibility.

    But only to a point.

    Only as long as there’s no real risk.

    Because when it really comes down to it, the vast majority of people are self-preservationists.

    But.

    And it’s a big but!

    Great leaders aren’t.

    They can’t be.

    Because great–truly great–leadership and cowardice can’t coexist.

    They’re mutually exclusive.

    I think there are several reasons for this, but the MAJOR one is that cowardice–the demonstrated desire to, above ALL else, save your own skin (i.e. be a self-preservationist)–vitiates any and all virtues that might qualify a person to lead to begin with!

    Here, I defer to C.S. Lewis who, in the Screwtape Letters, illustrates the point by elucidating cowardice’s opposite:

    Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality. A chastity or honesty, or mercy, which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions. Pilate was merciful till it became risky.”

    Anything good a leader might bring gets enervated when “me-me-me” becomes (or is revealed to be) their priority.

    Put simply, a person who leads only until things get risky isn’t a leader–they’re an opportunist.

    And praise the Lord it isn’t hard to tell the difference!

    Because when things get perilous,

    An opportunist will opt to save their own skin.

    A leader will take the hit.

    In 2006, Boko Haram terrorists broke into Archbishop (then Bishop) Ben Kwashi’s home in Jos, Nigeria looking for him.

    He was unwilling to shut his mouth, so they were going to shut it for him.

    But, as it happened, Ben was in England.

    His wife Gloria, however, was home, along with their two youngest children.

    The men broke the littlest’s jaw and beat the older until he was unconscious.

    Gloria, though, they sexually brutalized and bashed over the head with bottles, leaving her half-dead and half-blind.

    When Ben got home, he was just grateful she was alive.

    And here’s what gets me.

    In the aftermath of the attack, they didn’t leave.

    They could’ve gotten asylum in the UK, but Gloria–Gloria, assaulted, Gloria, beaten until she lost half her eyesight–insisted they stay.

    And there they have remained, building schools and wells and zoos and orphanages and taking in 400–yes, four-HUNDRED–children personally.

    Millions of lives in Nigeria have been changed because when the hit came, Ben and Gloria didn’t bail.

    They stayed.

    And to be clear, the danger remained.

    Boko Haram didn’t just poof away.

    But Ben and Gloria were convinced that the work they were doing was worth the risk.

    And so they were willing to take the hit–not for their own, but for others’ benefit.

    That’s leadership.

    AND–AND!

    That’s the model we find in Jesus 🙂

    See, it was three years ago that I read John 12:27, where Jesus, anticipating His crucifixion, says this:

    “Now my soul is troubled, and what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? No! For it was for this very reason that I came to this hour. Father, glorify Thy name!”

    And when I read that, three things struck me:

    1. Jesus saw what needed doing. [i.e. He could see His mission, troubling as it was, clearly]
    2. He knew He was the one–the only one–who could get the job done. [i.e. He said, “the buck stops with me.”] And…
    3. He was willing to endure the FULL wrath of God for us and our salvation. [i.e. He was willing to take a hit for the team]

    And here’s the thing:

    Jesus is the “KING OF KINGS AND LORD OF LORDS.”

    Like, that’s legit inscribed on His thigh.

    So if anyone can be trusted to exemplify great leadership, He’s the guy!

    And I can attest, after giving my life to Him soon-to-be five years ago, His leadership is the best–the best–the best.

    10/10 would recommend following Him!

    If you’d like to know more about why, poke around the blog or drop me a line!

    Always, always down to talk about Jesus Christ!

    There was a moment when the lights went out
    When death had claimed its victory
    The King of love had given up His life
    The darkest day in history

    There on a cross they made for sinners
    For every curse His blood atoned
    One final breath and it was finished
    But not the end we could have known

    For the earth began to shake
    And the veil was torn
    What sacrifice was made
    As the heavens roared!

    All hail King Jesus
    All hail the Lord of Heaven and Earth!
    All hail King Jesus
    All hail the Savior of the world!

    Phantom Hands

    Hi friends!

    If you don’t know this about me, I love babies.

    My family can attest that I will spontaneously blurt out, “I just love babies,” and one of my favorite things is serving in children’s ministry.

    However, some Sundays back, I got a bit of a scare because one of my little buddies (he LOVES to read–which, you know, same) arrived with a bruise on his forehead.

    His mama handed him to me and said,

    “He has a concussion.”

    At the look on my face, she quickly added, “He’s fine! But the doctor said to avoid bumping his head.”

    I nodded, reinforcing my grip. “Gotcha! No bumping his head.”

    I thought it would be easy peasy because he’s usually a very chill kid.

    I mean, the week before he’d been totally content to sit on my lap and read about Jesus and Gerald the Giraffe.

    Not so with a concussion.

    Apparently, in under twos, a concussion can cause hyper-activity, and *eh-hem* yes.

    The world = his jungle gym.

    It was as if he was bound and determined to concuss himself all over again, and after I had to dive to keep him from whacking his head rather spectacularly against the kitchen playset when he decided the giraffe tricycle he was riding would be loads more fun if he rode it parallel to the floor, I made the executive decision to just hold him.

    We sang and read.

    He ate his snack.

    And I thought we’d made it.

    Service dismissed, and parents started coming to pick up their kids.

    I put him down to airlift another adorable little one to her parents, when,

    THUNK!

    Friends…

    When I tell you I just knew.

    I turned around, and sure enough, in the melee of littles trying to storm the barricade to get to their parents, he’d fallen back and bonked his head against the wall.

    Y’all.

    I was like Yao:

    PTL, he was okay, but when I say the last thing I want is for anything like that to ever happen again (lest I have a heart attack), I mean it.

    And yet, I can’t guarantee it won’t.

    In fact, I can pretty much guarantee it will.

    It stinks, friends!

    But it’s been my studied observation that at some point (or many) we all let someone, be it a friend, a family member, and/or a toddler, slip through our fingertips.

    And if you haven’t yet been the Yao who lost your grip, you’ve almost definitely been the one someone else let slip.

    Hopefully not off a Mongolian cliff or when you already had a concussion, but if dropping someone else is a cringingly common feat, being dropped–i.e. expecting a steadying hand only to fall through a whole lot of nothingness (maybe some hot air)–is an even more universal experience.

    And I want to talk about it.

    Specifically, I want to talk about why it is that our hands, despite our very best intentions, are notoriously unreliable instruments when it comes to supporting others and/or being supported.

    As best I see it, their limitations are threefold:

    1. They’re not omnipresent
    2. They’re not omnipotent
    3. They’re not permanent

    That’s what we’re gonna talk about today.

    Let’s roll 🙂

    Hand Limitation #1: Not Omnipresent

    This is the most obvious one!

    Because as much as we may wish otherwise, our hands can’t be everywhere at once.

    In fact, there are frequently times (e.g. when corralling babies) when our hands are in both totally legitimate and mutually exclusive demand.

    To support one party, another has to be left unattended.

    There’s a great example of this in the opening scene of the 2009 Star Trek movie when Captain George Kirk’s wife is giving birth and he’s not there to hold her hand because the ship’s autopilot was destroyed and he’s gotta personally kamikaze it.

    He couldn’t be on board the escape shuttle with his laboring wife and stop the bad guys.

    He had to pick.

    And as a result, his wife became a widow and his child grew up fatherless.

    🙁

    Here’s the thing, friends.

    He couldn’t be there for them–not because he didn’t want to be–but because while the mind might’ve been willing, the flesh had a finite and localized reach.

    As far as I can see, that’s a perennial problem when it comes to offering and receiving support in times of need.

    We can’t be there for everybody, nor can we expect that we are always going to be the priority when someone else has to make a plan about whether or not they can lend us a hand.

    However!

    Let’s say the wanted hands are on the scene.

    We’ve still got to face the fact that willing AND present hands can get fatigued.

    Hand Limitation #2: Not Omnipotent

    This second limitation is one I feel in my bones.

    Literally.

    Because between a family history of osteoporosis and maxing out at 5’3″, I’m not a very robust human being, and while I know that some girls are into lifting heavy, I prefer to stick with bags of half-priced books and groceries.

    As such, I frequently find myself in the position of thinking

    “The mind is willing, but the flesh is weak.

    E.g. if a jar ever needs opening, nine times at of ten, my attempt will be followed by

    “Daaaaaad, I’m having a weaker vessel moment!”

    Hands present?

    Check!

    Hands able?

    Eh…

    That being said!

    I would contend that even the most formidable people don’t have all-powerful hands.

    Take this scene from Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

    It’s right in the beginning (so no spoilers!) when Harry’s awful Aunt Marge comes to visit.

    The general gist is she viciously insults Harry’s late parents, and he, in turn, turns her into a human blimp.

    Fortunately for Aunt Marge, her brother, Harry’s Uncle Vernon is there to grab her hands.

    Here, it’s relevant to stress that Uncle Vernon is a seriously husky (i.e. not 5 foot 3 with brittle bone disease).

    AND YET.

    Despite his prodigious amount of mass, his hands weren’t up to the task of hauling Marge back.

    And presented with the options of either holding on and getting aerially towed or letting go, Uncle Vernon elects to let his sister fly solo.

    Now, I think that’s a fascinating and very typical shift.

    Actually, it’s probably the only time in the whole series apart from when Uncle Vernon says, “FINE day Sunday” where I relate to him.

    Because, like Uncle Vernon, I–and I suspect most people–have been in situations where we start out genuinely wanting to lend a hand to whoever’s in need, but when we see that we’ve *eh-hem* overestimated our abilities, we just…

    Release.

    In such instances, the mind becomes unwilling because the flesh (both ours and theirs) is weak.

    In John Green’s The Fault In Our Stars, there’s a scene where a friend of the protagonist laments how his girlfriend dumped him right before a surgery that would remove his cancerous (and only remaining) eyeball.

    “She said she couldn’t handle it,” he told me. “I’m about to lose my eyesight and she can’t handle it… I kept saying ‘always’ to her today, ‘always always always,’ and she just kept talking over me and not saying it back. It was like I was already gone, you know? ‘Always’ was a promise! How can you just break the promise?'”

    ‘Sometimes people don’t understand the promises they’re making when they make them,’ I said.”

    Amen. Amen.

    It stinks, friends, but I think we often don’t understand how fatigued our promised hands can get.

    Or (and maybe this is more likely) we don’t want to admit that we’re limited and can’t always (or often) handle whatever “it” is–no matter our intentions.

    And I get it.

    Impotence is not a pleasant consideration.

    Less still is death.

    And yet!

    We’ve gots to talk about it.

    Hand Limitation #3: Not Permanent

    Alright, friends!

    We’ve come to the third and final limitation that must be addressed.

    And it’s our hands’ impermanence.

    Because, even if you’ve got willing, present, and powerful hands, the support they’ll be able to provide is NOT going to be permanent.

    A great illustration of this occurs at the close of James Cameron’s Titanic when star-crossed lovers Rose and Jack find themselves floating on a door in the freezing sea, hoping to be rescued ASAP.

    Now, neither Rose nor Jack are weaklings. Hitherto, both demonstrated a commendable amount of chutzpah and grit, even wielding an ax when the situation called for it.

    But they are now contending with water that is 28 degrees, and the only thing left for them to do is hold hands and freeze.

    To her credit, Rose holds on until the end.

    But when she realizes that Jack has become a personcicle, she fully breaks his frozen hand off her wrist.

    In that instance, “I’ll never let go” had a fairly conspicuous time limit.

    Thus, in the end, neither Rose nor Jack’s hands are permanent.

    But that motif is 100% not confined to the Titanic.

    In fact!

    The best artistic representation of it that I’ve ever seen or heard is Johnny Cash’s rendition of the Nine Inch Nails’ song “Hurt.

    For starters, the music video is absolutely steeped in vanitas imagery, which, fun fact, I learned about in middle school art history.

    Suffice to say, it stuck with me 🙂

    But if you just google it, the style is described as portraying “the transience of life, the futility of pleasure, and the certainty of death,” which is usually accomplished by juxtaposing objects of luxury and decay while interspersing plenty of memento moris.

    Skulls and rotting food feature heavily.

    Now, while Mr. Cash left the skulls aside, a person would be hard-pressed to miss his emphasis on life’s transience, pleasure’s futility, and death’s certainty when watching “Hurt.”

    However!

    Even if those don’t come through visually, all you’ve got to do is listen to the words!

    What have I become?
    My sweetest friend
    Everyone I know goes away
    In the end

    And you could have it all
    My empire of dirt
    I will let you down
    I will make you hurt

    Those lines get me every time.

    Because I feel like they so perfectly capture my life!

    I will let you down. I will make you hurt.

    As far as I’m concerned, those are universal words.

    Because nobody I’ve ever met–myself very much included–is all-present, all-powerful, and permanent.

    Well.

    None but One, that is 🙂

    His name is Jesus.

    He is the best–the best–the best.

    Because unlike even the MOST supportive family and friends whose helping hands are hindered by proximity, weakness, and death, Jesus actually does go with us always, He never faints or grows weary, and He exists from eternity to eternity.

    He is the Alpha and the Omega.

    The beginning and the End.

    Omnipresent. Omnipotent. Permanent.

    That’s Him.

    And if you don’t know Jesus, it would be my JOY to introduce you to Him.

    Because, and I speak from personal experience, no matter how tenuous your grip, He’s never, ever going to let you slip.

    When I fear my faith will fail
    Christ will hold me fast
    When the tempter would prevail
    He will hold me fast

    I could never keep my hold
    Through life’s fearful path
    For my love is often cold
    He must hold me fast

    He will hold me fast
    He will hold me fast
    For my Savior loves me so
    He will hold me fast

    A Finger In The Door

    When it comes to being a kid, I feel there are certain rites of passage.

    Semi-serious biking accidents (I still have a quarter-sized scar from where a metal mailbox took a chunk out of my leg).

    Touching something that either bubbles or full-on sears off your skin (a lightbulb in the dressing room preceding a big ballet recital and melted chocolate right before a Tae Kwon Do lesson. I tell you I had *chef’s kiss* timing as a kid).

    Destroying electronics (I had a fondness for sticking crayons in VHS players, USB ports, and electrical sockets).

    Picasso-ing the wall with every writing instrument available (excepting, of course, those that are erasable).

    And, perhaps most commonly, cutting chunks of your (or your sibling’s hair) clean off.

    Now!

    I’ve done all of the above, but there is one fairly common rite I skipped:

    Getting an appendage slammed in a doorjamb is an experience I missed.

    I was thinking about that recently because I watched Steve Martin’s The Pink Panther over Christmas, and beyond noticing how much PG-13+ innuendo went not only over my head but right past my face, one scene brought up a latent memory wherein I was not the slam-ee but the slam-er (The Nicole to my cousin’s Clouseau) of a finger.

    Now, unlike what happened in that scene, my cousin wasn’t running her finger along the door.

    Actually, a group of us cousins were running helter skelter away from her.

    See, we were playing a very serious game of tag.

    She was “it” (and long-legged).

    And it just so happened that as she was closing in, the back bedroom came into our line of sight.

    It was big enough we would all fit and the door–the blessed door–had a lock on it.

    Decision made, we bolted towards it and poured inside, slamming the door shut and locking it with her on the outside.

    Most of her, that is.

    Unaccountably, her fingertip had made its way in.

    As you can probably imagine, a bit of hysteria ensued, and when all was said and done, she had what one might conservatively call a pretty serious boo-boo.

    Adults poured into the room, and after it was established her finger was miraculously still intact, said digit was iced and wrapped (the tip a rather alarming shade of purple-red).

    It was then that the parental inquisition began, and, like any self-respecting troupe of adolescents will do, a veritable cornucopia of excuses were produced.

    And tactless as it may have been given the finger-centric circumstances, finger-pointing was, in our minds, the obvious thing to do.

    “She did it!”

    “It wasn’t me!”

    “It was him!”

    “Kids.”

    “No, you!”

    “Kids!”

    “It was an accident! We were just playi–”

    “KIDS!”

    “What about her? If she hadn’t stuck her hand in–”

    Et cetera et cetera ad infinitum.

    Now, we were all little kids, but something I’ve found in adulthood is that the propensity to finger point persists!

    In fact, it’s been my studied observation that when fecal matter hits the fan or someone gets stepped on or an appendage gets slammed, very often our (or at least my) first impulse is to do this:

    While I adore The Office, I feel it must be said that finger-pointing at everyone else in the room is not, shall we say, the most mature approach to dealing with minor and/or major interpersonal boo boos.

    AND SO!

    Today I’d like to discuss it 🙂

    Specifically, I’d like to discuss the three approaches I think we most often take when placing blame and illustrate how they’re all…

    Not great.

    They are as follows!

    1. Blame The Door
    2. Blame The Bystanders
    3. Blame The Person Who Stuck Their Finger In The Way

    Again, I hope to show how each of these are deficient by virtue of the fact they make the person pointing (e.g. you and me) impotent, primitive, and/or vicious, but worry not!

    I also hope to offer an alternative 🙂

    Let’s begin!

    Option #1: You Can Blame “The Door”

    Of the typical finger pointing recipients, this one is probably the least likely to cause offense.

    Because when we blame “the door” that got slammed–i.e. the ambient, inanimate, and/or abstract circumstances surrounding the incident–what we’re saying, in essence, is this:

    What happened is no one’s fault, per se.

    It’s just that a nexus formed, like, say, a game of tag and an eminently slammable door, and in that perfect storm, a finger became more rubicund than it had ever been before.

    In Tennessee Williams’ play A Streetcar Named Desire, there’s actually a scene where this happens!

    It occurs early on right after the protagonist Blanche’s pregnant sister Stella gets full-on smacked by her husband Stanley for interrupting his and his friends’ poker match.

    Stanley’s friends manage to pull him off her, though not without effort, and it’s then that his friend Mitch says this:

    “Poker should not be played in a house with women.”

    Put another way:

    “Slammable doors should not be in a house with children.”

    In either instance, the character and/or behavior of the smackers and slammers are never addressed.

    In truth, it verges on ridiculous to consider what you would need to do to attenuate such circumstances.

    I mean, I guess you could remove all the doors in your house whenever children come over and ban women from Atlantic City and Las Vegas (I’m not totally opposed to that 🙂 ), but in a practical sense, blaming the circumstances often ends with a shrug and some iteration of

    “Welp. That’s too bad. Hope it doesn’t happen again.”

    i.e. “Nothin’ I can do about it.”

    Moreover!

    There’s no limit to the circumstances you can point fingers at.

    I mean, the refrain of the murderer and thief Tom Chaney whenever he’s confronted in Charles Portis’ True Grit is

    “Everything is against me!”

    Like, sir. You are a murderer, and you think everything else is to blame?

    Belle = my not impressed face.

    And yet!

    If we want to, and often we (or at least I) do want to find anything and anyone else to take the rap, there’s no shortage of places or people for us to point at.

    Which brings me to finger pointing option #2!

    Option #2: You Can Blame The Bystanders

    Honestly, this one is probably the most frequent and frankly intuitive type of finger-pointing there is.

    Certainly in the aforementioned tag/finger incident, it was the method we slamm-ers saw as the most expedient, and from being a childcare volunteer, I can attest that kids as young as 15 months know how to do this:

    And it makes a lot of sense!

    Because even little ones can grasp that some things (e.g. a door being slammed and bolted, a rocket shooting out of a carriage, or, say, a cat being petrified) cannot be attributed to mere happenstance.

    In such instances, there has to be a guilty party attached.

    And given the chance, you can bet said party is going to try and redirect because he/she know what’s incoming from the average plaintiff:

    “My cat has been petrified! I want to see some punishment!

    Faced with the prospect of being hung by the thumbs in a dungeon or whatever form of reprisal one might expect (spanking, sacking, public humiliation, toy confiscation, etc.), the self-preserving, discomfort averse person is going to find someone else, potentially anyone else, to point fingers at.

    And while it’s most often going to be the other people at the scene, it doesn’t have to be.

    One of my absolute favorite West Side Story songs “Dear Officer Krupke” illustrates the near infinite reach of option #2 finger-pointing beautifully.

    The song begins with said Officer Krupke telling Riff,

    “Gimme one good reason for not draggin’ you down to the station house, ya punk!”

    Riff’s reason is immediate:

    “Dear kindly Sergeant Krupke,
    Ya gotta understand
    It’s just our bringin’ upke
    That gets us outta hand!
    Our mothers all are junkies!
    Our fathers all are drunks!
    Golly Moses, natcherly we’re punks!”

    Forget pointing at the other people on the scene, it’s really mom and dad’s fault their behavior isn’t what it ought to be.

    Now, don’t get me wrong.

    I 100% agree with Proverbs 13:24: “Those who spare the rod hate their children, but those who love them are diligent to discipline them.”

    From what I’ve seen, a lot of parents sow their own heartache by being derelict and letting their kids run wild and “free.”

    However.

    When I think about the people who are quick to point fingers when Officer Krupkes come calling, whether at the other people at the scene or stretching back into their family tree, I invariably think of the infamous duo Leopold and Loeb.

    Two well-to-do UChicago students who murdered and mutilated a child in 1924 because…

    They wanted to.

    In coming to their defense, famed attorney Clarence Darrow offered an option #2 finger point par excellence:

    “This terrible crime was inherent in his organism, and it came from some ancestor. Is any blame attached because somebody took Nietzsche’s philosophy seriously and fashioned his life upon it? It is hardly fair to hang a 19-year-old boy for the philosophy that was taught him at the university.”

    Blame an ancestor? Check.

    Blame Nietzsche? Check.

    Blame UChicago? Also check.

    It’s worth-noting that Leopold and Loeb each said the other had done the actual killing when questioned.

    Basically, they were using their whole hand to point in every direction that wasn’t at them.

    Hardly the Übermenschen they’d cast themselves as.

    In fact!

    I’m no Darwinian, but there’s a real irony to the fact that these “superior men” resorted to flinging their fecal matter in every direction like chimps when some of it hit the fan.

    And that’s what option #2 finger pointing ultimately is.

    Throwing your s*** around like a chimp.

    It’s not a good look, to say the least.

    And yet…

    Option #3 is the one that turns you into a beast.

    Option #3: You Can Blame The Person Who Stuck Their Finger In The Way

    This one is the most pernicious of the three.

    Because while blaming “the door” makes you impotent and blaming the bystanders makes you an immature chimpanzee, blaming the slamm-ee sets you on the path to monstrosity.

    How?

    Well, if #1 and #2 say, “No one’s to blame! Bad things just happen, Okay?” and “Everyone even tangentially related to me–but not me–is to blame,” respectively, what #3 says is:

    “You know who’s to blame? The cry baby who stuck their finger in the way.”

    The real problem is that they’re raising a racket in my face and whining to everyone that they’re in pain.

    Everything would be fixed if they’d just shut up and

    Go.

    Away.

    That, my friends, will put you on the path to Claude Frollo-ness posthaste!

    If you aren’t familiar, Claude Frollo is the villain in Hunchback of Notre Dame, and his song “Hellfire” gives my Tim Burton-loving sister the heebie-jeebies to this day.

    The portion most relevant for our purposes occurs midway:

    It’s not my fault!
    I’m not to blame!
    It is the gypsy girl–the witch who set this flame
    !
    It’s not my fault!
    If in God’s plan
    He made the Devil so much stronger than a man!”

    First of all, per James 4:7, that last bit is theologically incorrect.

    All we have to do is resist, and the devil does a full on SPRINT in the other direction.

    Honestly, his walk-on song should be Mooski’s “Track Star.”

    He’s a runner/ he’s a track star/ He gon’ run away when it gets hard/ He can’t take the pain, he can’t get scarred [But he CAN be crushed beneath our feet–see Romans 16:20]/ he hurt anyone that gets involved.

    Anyways!

    Back to Claude Frollo’s serenade.

    He ends it with an emphatic

    “Choose me or your pyre! Be mine or you will BUUUURRRNNN!”

    Which is… not the best way to conclude a love letter.

    That being said, the victim-blaming Frollo does is 100% what we should expect given that he’s a “righteous man” who now can’t stop himself from wanting in a gypsy’s pants.

    I think this description from Shusaku Endo’s Silence captures Frollo’s situation best:

    “A defeated man will use any form of self-deception in order to defend himself.”

    And for Claude Frollo, self-defense means taking Esmerelda–the woman he’s both persecuting and lusting after–out.

    Which, TBH, is very on brand for him because in the opening scene of the movie he’s described like this:

    “He sought to rid the world of vice and sin and he saw corruption everywhere except within.”

    That’s a real problem for him.

    And for most people, I suspect.

    I’m certainly prone to seeing fault everywhere without and not within.

    And that tendency is ultimately, I believe, responsible for the vast majority of issues we experience relationally, particularly when dealing with post-slam injuries, because what it does, in the end, is keep us from taking any responsibility for the situation.

    After all, we’re perfect so we couldn’t possibly have contributed to something injurious.

    Friends.

    1 John 1:8 says,

    “If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.”

    Thus, according to The Big Man Himself, acknowledging our own faults is a must.

    And listen, I totally get that the absolute last thing we want to do when a door gets slammed on a hapless hand or an argument devolves into ad hominems is take even an iota of responsibility for the situation we suddenly find ourselves in.

    But to our reluctance, God, in 1 John 1:9, offers a promise:

    “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.”

    I think that’s pretty amazing.

    That doing as T-Swift recently did–pointing the finger not out, but in:

    Triggers a promise given by The One who holds THE WHOLE UNIVERSE in His hands to forgive us and get rid of all our unrighteousness.

    Pretty incredible.

    And, at least for me, it puts a whole ‘nother spin on taking responsibility in unpleasant situations 🙂

    So that’s my recommendation, friends!

    The next time you find yourself tempted to point fingers at “the door,” the bystanders, and/or the person who stuck their finger in the way, own up to the part you played–don’t equivocate–and watch and wait because God will be on the move, forgiving your sin and making you brand spanking new!

    If you want to know what that’s looked like in my life, please feel free to drop me a line!

    Always down to talk about Jesus Christ!

    No list of sins I have not done
    No list of virtues I pursue
    No list of those I am not like
    Can earn myself a place with You
    O God, be merciful to me
    I am a sinner through and through
    My only hope of righteousness
    Is not in me, but only You

    Raisin-Hearted Grinches

    Hi friends!

    Apologies for long absence–Law school apps plus trying to finish novel #3 has not left much time for CC.

    HOWEVER!

    I recently went to my dentist, and on top of the wonderful news that I do NOT have tongue cancer, gum disease, or cavities (thank You LORD and Orawellness team), I got inspo for a blog piece!

    See, as I was lying there in the dentist chair, a song from one of my favorite Christmas movies EVER came through the office speakers.

    T’was “You’re A Mean One, Mr. Grinch”, and, feeling nostalgic, I went home and immediately deep-dived into film clips, lyrics, and Dr. Seuss book tidbits.

    Full disclaimer: While I know the song and film reasonably well, the narrative proper is a bit murkier to me, so when I came upon this description of why the Grinch hated Christmas, I was intrigued!

    The Grinch hated Christmas! The whole Christmas season!
    Now, please don’t ask why. No one quite knows the reason.
    It could be his head wasn’t screwed on just right.
    It could be, perhaps his shoes were too tight.
    But I think that the most likely reason of all
    May have been that his heart was two sizes too small.

    I thought that last explanation was interesting!

    So I googled some more and found this gif:

    And upon examination, the Grinch’s heart reminded me of a raisin–a shrunken, shriveled, dried-up husk that might’ve once been plump but now was… not.

    As you can probably guess, I don’t like raisins.

    Never have.

    Probably never will.

    They’re just not my preferred flavor or texture profile.

    Not to mention the fact I grew up with Alvin & The Chipmunks, and anyone who’s seen this scene:

    Looks at raisins and thinks,

    Could be chipmunk feces.

    ANYWAYS!

    As I was kicking around the imagery of the Grinch’s shrunken, shriveled, dried up raisin heart in my head, I started to think about how #relatable that is.

    Because I don’t know about you, but LORD knows, my heart is super prone to raisin-ness.

    And so today, I’d love to chat about what I think are a couple causes, a couple consequences, and, ultimately, THE cure to raisin-heartedness.

    Because I strongly suspect that no one wants to be a Grinch–least of all during Christmas 🙂

    So let’s get to it!

    Causes of Raisin-Heartedness

    When it comes to what causes raisin hearts, I think there are two main things:

    1. Where you’ve been AND
    2. What you’ve been doing

    With respect to the first, I’ve written before about how sun exposure is turning us all into wrinkled up craisins, and similarly, certain environments can cause significant heart dehydration.

    A prime example of this can be found in Dashiel Hammett’s novel Red Harvest wherein the protagonist, a PI known only as The Continental Op, arrives in the town of Personville (known by the locals as “Poisonville”) to clean it up.

    Now, admittedly, The Continental Op was already rough around the edges when he arrived on the scene, but by the novel’s summit, his methods of clean up have become notably extreme to the point that even he’s like, “This town has done something to me.”

    His love interest, Dinah Brand, tries to reassure him,

    “It’s not your fault, darling. You said yourself that there was nothing else you could do. Finish your drink and we’ll have another.”

    “There was plenty else I could do,” I contradicted her… “But it’s easier to have them killed off, easier and surer, and, now that I’m feeling this way, more satisfying. I don’t know how I’m going to come out with the Agency. The Old Man will boil me in oil if he ever finds out what I’ve been doing. It’s this damned town. Poisonville is right. It’s poisoned me.

    Dinah demurs, but The Op is insistent:

    “Look. I sat at Willsson’s table tonight and played them like you’d play trout, and got just as much fun out of it. I looked at Noonan and knew he hadn’t a chance in a thousand of living another day because of what I had done to him, and I laughed, and felt warm and happy inside. That’s not me. I’ve got hard skin all over what’s left of my soul, and after twenty years of messing around with crime I can look at any sort of a murder without seeing anything in it but my bread and butter, the day’s work. But this getting a rear out of planning deaths is not natural to me. It’s what this place has done to me.

    I’ve yet to plan any sadistic homicides, but there have 100% been times where the places I’ve been/the people I’ve surrounded myself with made me much more selfish, short-tempered, and mean.

    I suspect my experience is not unique.

    I mean, it’s pretty commonly said that you become like the places you frequent and the people you surround yourself with.

    So when it comes to raisin-heartedness, it’s a good idea to be mindful of your posse and environment!

    HOWEVER!

    Lest you think I’m offloading all raisin heart culpability to one’s circle and setting, think again!

    Yo girl was baptized Baptist 🙂

    We sing songs like this.

    Regardless!

    From where I sit, the fact of the matter is while our surroundings can certainly dry us out, we also do a heck of a lot to dehydrate ourselves.

    Examples of this tendency abound, but a particularly poignant one I found comes from a poem by famous “Liverpool Poet” Roger McGough.

    The poem is called “The Act of Love,” and in it, McGough describes how the narrator, through his actions, wrung his own heart dry:

    The Act of love lies somewhere
    Between the belly and the mind
    I lost the love sometime ago
    Now I’ve only the act to grind

    Brought her home from a party
    Don’t bother swapping names
    Identities don’t matter
    When you’re only playing games

    High on that bedroom darkness
    As we endure the pantomime
    Ships that go bang in the night
    Run aground on the sands of time

    Saved in the nick of time
    It’s cornflakes and then goodbye
    Another notch on the headboard
    Another day wondering why

    The act of love lies somewhere
    Between the belly and the mind
    I lost the love sometime ago
    Now I’ve only the act to grind

    I’ll be honest.

    Reading that poem is like waving cut onions under my eyes.

    And it’s not because I’m a prude.

    Anyone who’s been here for any length of time knows that isn’t true.

    It’s just I find it super sad to think about someone made for love becoming a person only capable of sex.

    Just as I find it depressing how people (myself SO included) made for kindness and generosity so easily become raisin-hearted Grinches when given the chance.

    I could go on, but the point I want to press is how could it be anything other than tragic for someone to make themselves less?

    To simplify this argument:

    Human Being Capable of Love > Raisin-Hearted Grinch/Lech/Etc.

    Human Being Capable of Love -> Raisin-Hearted Grinch/Lech/Etc. = 🙁

    However, if you don’t think this change in itself is sad, ’tis time to consider the consequences.

    Consequences of Raisin-Heartedness

    While the downstream effects of raisin-heartedness are many, the two biggies I see (and experience) most frequently are:

    1. Shrunken Love Capacity
    2. Zippo Empathy

    Concerning the first, there is no better quotation/illustration than the one penned by Solomon Northup in his seminal autobiography Twelve Years A Slave wherein he describes his sicko master Edwin Epps this way:

    He respected and loved his wife as much as a coarse nature like his is capable of loving, but supreme selfishness always overmastered conjugal affection. He loved as well as baser natures can, but a mean heart and soul were in that man.

    Edwin Epps loved his wife to an extent, but being a slaver/rapist/sadist meant his capacity to love was seriously diminished.

    And here’s the thing.

    Ostensibly, Edwin Epps wanted and tried to love his wife just like we want and try to love the closest people in our lives.

    But it’s like Northup says,

    “We love them as well as we can.”

    And if we’re working with a shrunken, shriveled up raisin heart, supreme selfishness is always going to win out in the end.

    That is, a major consequence of raisin-heartedness is that the people we want to love the best will be loved less.

    Not an ideal circumstance.

    But there is another consequence!

    And it is this:

    While the people we want to love will get loved less, the people we already don’t love will get treated like–

    Because if your capacity to love is maxed out at the size of a chipmunk turd, your ability to empathize with and care for someone you’re indifferent to or hostile towards is going to be pretty close to zip.

    In Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dorian, observing his former lover weeping after he jilts her unexpectedly, thinks this:

    There is something always ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love. Sybil Vane seemed to him to be absurdly melodramatic. Her tears and sobs annoyed him.

    Another, more extreme, example of raisin-heartedness can be found within Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived In The Castle wherein the narrator Mary Catherine “Merricat” Blackwood observes her fellow townspeople at the grocery store and thinks,

    I wished they were dead. I would have liked to come into the grocery some morning and see them all, even the Elberts and the children, lying there crying with the pain and dying. I would then help myself to groceries, I thought, stepping over their bodies, taking whatever I fancied from the shelves, and go home, with perhaps a kick for Mrs. Donell while she lay there. I was never sorry when I had thoughts like this; I only wished they would come true. “It’s wrong to hate them,” Constance [her older sister] said, “it only weakens you,” but I hated them anyway, and wondered why it had been worthwhile creating them in the first place.

    Clearly, in both Dorian’s and Merricat’s case, some pretty serious heart shrinkage had taken place!

    And unless we want to turn out like them, I strongly suggest rehydration.

    Cure to Raisin-Heartedness

    Alright, friends!

    At this point, I hope I’ve made at least a somewhat convincing pitch for why one should avoid raisin-heartedness, and if you, like me, recognize in yourself certain grinchy, raisin-hearted tendencies, I hope this final section offers some helpful tips.

    Actually, I only have one tip 🙂

    Because, in my experience, only one thing has made a dent in making my heart look less like a raisin, and that one thing, friends, is supernatural rehydration.

    In John 7:37-38, Jesus stood up and cried out,

    “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to Me and drink. The one who believes in Me, as the Scripture has said, will have streams of living water flow from deep within.”

    Against streams of living water, dried up raisin hearts don’t stand a chance 🙂

    And if you think the places you’ve been and the things you’ve done have turned your heart into not only a raisin but a fossilized one, in Ezekiel 36:26, we’re told,

    “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.”

    Take THAT, raisins 🙂

    AND!

    If you think a whole new heart might still be too small, Psalm 119:32 says,

    “I will run in the way of Your commandment when You enlarge my heart.”

    With God, heart enlargement isn’t an “if” but a “when!”

    I think that’s pretty amazing 🙂

    And truly, friends, I can personally attest that my heart is much less raisin-like since giving my life to Christ.

    10/10 recommend!

    Please do drop me a line if you’re at all interested in knowing more about Jesus or even just hearing about the coocoobananapants ways He’s worked in my life!

    Always, always down to talk about Jesus Christ.

    And to bring it back to the Grinch, in the film, his heart enlarged after listening to the Whos sing.

    SO!

    Here’s one of my favorite songs to end this piece 🙂

    God, I’m on my knees again
    God, I’m begging please again
    I need you
    Oh, I need you

    Walking down these desert roads
    Water for my thirsty soul
    I need You
    Oh, I need You

    Your forgiveness
    Is like sweet, sweet honey on my lips
    Like the sound of a symphony to my ears
    Like Holy water on my skin

    “Holy Water” – We The Kingdom

    Where Yo Clothes At?

    Friends, with Georgetown starting back last week, I still can’t quite believe I’m done with university.

    I mean, I vividly remember opening my acceptance letter senior year of high school and full on shrieking in the post office,

    “I GOT IN!”

    My sister, who’d accompanied me, promptly took the letter, gave it a glance, and said,

    “Well. I guess they let anyone in.”

    🙂

    Love you, soph.

    Anyways!

    With the school year starting afresh, I’ve been reflecting on my time on the Hilltop, and there’s this one incident that happened my very first week of freshman year that still makes me wince.

    It was a total Dorothy “You’re not in Kansas anymore” moment.

    Full disclosure: my memories of the exact exchange are somewhat hazy (after effects of adrenaline and shock maybe), but I’ve done my best to recapitulate it faithfully 🙂

    Allow me to set the scene:

    I was walking back from class, sun shining, wind blowing, feeling very much at ease, when, up ahead, I noticed something that literally stopped me in my tracks.

    Another girl, walking maybe 20 feet in front of me, was wearing a long, flowy skirt/dress, and when the sun hit, you could see straight—and I mean straight—through it.

    Friends, I went from stationary to full on sprint in like two seconds.

    I didn’t even have to think about it.

    Because I’ve had my fair share of wardrobe malfunctions and were it not for, as Blanche says in A Streetcar Named Desire, “the kindness of strangers” who intervened, I’d probably have both many more and much more mortifying stories.

    And thus, I wasn’t about to let another girl waltz towards public humiliation, though, in retrospect, there is every chance I drew more attention to the situation with my Usain Bolt impersonation.

    Regardless!

    I full on charged, and, when I reached her, I (somewhat) gently grabbed her arm.

    She stopped walking and turned towards me.

    “Sorry–” I wheezed. “But your dress–it’s see through.”

    She blinked, seemingly confused, so I continued, trying to keep my voice low,

    “I can see your underwear.” [t’was a thong]

    I gestured urgently below.

    She sort of cocked her head, brow furrowed, and said, “Yeah. I know.”

    Friends.

    Freshman Sarah was too stunned to speak.

    I could not–for the life of me–comprehend being so blasé about having uncovered buttcheeks.

    I mean, we were at university!

    Prior to that, there’d only been one time in my life when backsides and academics had coincided, which was when I read Candide in AP European History and Candide’s lady love Cunegonde has a single buttock cut off to feed “very pious and humane men” who otherwise would’ve eaten her in aggregate!

    All that to say, I was pretty taken aback.

    Caught somewhere between wanting to do the Homer Simpson retreat

    And having a heart attack.

    I think I said something super intelligent like, “Oh. Okay.”

    She turned and continued on her cheeky way.

    I walked back to my dorm looking like a paintball gun loaded with a ripe tomato had shot me in the face.

    Now, let me be very clear.

    I’m no saint when it comes to clothing.

    Even in middle school, my fits were known to be… eyebrow raising to say the least.

    HOWEVER!

    This last year, I read Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of The Day, wherein the very refined and restrained British butler/narrator Stevens said something about clothing that has stuck like hubba bubba inside my brain:

    “Dignity comes down to not removing one’s clothes in public.”

    That, my friends, is a paradigm I haven’t been able to shake.

    Dignity comes down to not removing your clothes in public.

    Put another way: dignity is about not baring yourself for all to see.

    i.e. no cheeky.

    Now, intuitively, that makes a lot of sense to me, but it makes even more sense when you consider the etymology of dignity’s opposite:

    See, the word shame is believed to be derived from the Germanic skem-/kem– which means “to cover.”

    Think Genesis 3 when Adam and Eve, having eaten fruit from the forbidden tree of knowledge of good and evil, hurriedly strap on some fig leaves.

    Their shame was on display, and they had to cover up for their sense of dignity to be regained.

    Now, things have changed since Adam and Eve’s day.

    Telling people they should not take their clothes off in public is actually something of a hot take.

    Indeed, the spirit of the age seems to be very much in line with a line from Saint Augustine’s Confessions wherein, referring to his misspent youth, he says,

    “I was ashamed not to be shameless.”

    It is a simple fact that popular standards of dress have become, in a word, minimalistic.

    The task du jour is to be maximally naked.

    It’s like a game of clothing limbo.

    How low can you go?

    What exactly is the required minimum amount of clothes/what is the maximum amount of skin you can show?

    And as I was trying to think about how this change came to be, I was reminded of the portion of the Jewish Book of Legends where it describes Abraham saddling his own ass in preparation for going up the mountain with Isaac and says, “Love disregards dignity!”

    Love disregards dignity.

    Now, that is interesting.

    And helpful!

    Because, if we grant that Ishiguro is correct–that dignity is about keeping your clothes on–disregarding dignity ostensibly means taking your clothes off.

    i.e. it means removing the fig leaves.

    And the only instances where that would be necessary would be if you needed to use the facilities OR if you were wanting to… you know.

    Yodel in the canyon.

    Not to be weird, friends, but we all know there comes a point where taking your clothes off, literally or figuratively, is actually pretty critical for relational intimacy.

    I’ve written about this before, but, in brief, to truly love and be loved by somebody, the fig leaves will have to go.

    You’re going to have to risk baring yourself because, as C.S. Lewis said,

    “To love at all is to be vulnerable.”

    However!

    Granting that love disregards dignity is correct, when people walk around in all manner of things sheer, short, and suctioned, I have a niggling sense that it is not the Book of Legends/C.S. Lewis love that’s operative.

    After all, in both of those cases, the love that disregards dignity is an expression of care for someone else.

    As far as I can tell, playing clothing limbo is mainly a celebration of self.

    Indeed, nowadays “self-love” is all the rage, and one way it is frequently displayed is by getting maximally naked and having a one-woman/man public parade.

    I could write a whole ‘nother blog post about why I’m not a huge fan of that.

    But for now, I’ll just say that 1) real love requires two and 2) real love is about honoring the other people in the room.

    If you want to still argue that the person you love is, well, you, there’s a great bit of Greek mythology which might help illustrate why self-love is not the move.

    Clue:

    However!

    At the end of the day, if you really want to have a nudist parade, there’s not much I or anyone else can do to stop you.

    We’re just going to have to agree to disagree on whether or not everyone should see yo buttcheeks.

    BUT!

    And it’s a big but!

    While we may disagree on when/where it’s a good idea to remove your fig leaves, I think we would all agree that having them ripped off against your will is pretty much always a bad thing.

    Even Friedrich Nietzsche (who is not someone I usually agree with) said,

    “WHOM DO YOU CALL BAD? Those who always want to put others to shame.”

    Put another way, bad guys are the folks who want to forcibly rip other people’s clothes away.

    All agree?

    Yes!

    Great 🙂

    However, Nietzsche also claims,

    “WHAT IS MOST HUMANE? To spare someone shame.”

    That’s a bit more of a nuanced take.

    And yet!

    If we revisit Adam and Eve in the aftermath of Genesis 3, I think he’s correct!

    Because while Adam and Eve had haphazardly patched together some fig leaves to hide their shame, God swoops in and, after chastising them, actually gives them proper clothing.

    That is, God did what Nietzsche (who was really not a God-fan) himself said was most humane.

    He covered up their shame.

    And fun fact!

    The animal whose skin God used to clothe Adam and Eve experiences the Bible’s first recorded death.

    I think it’s pretty interesting that the first death in Scripture occurred to spare people shame.

    But what’s more interesting (and IMO much more important) is that, according to Christianity, the first death in the Bible wasn’t the only one undertaken to achieve that end.

    In fact, the most significant death in the Bible–Jesus’–occurred for the same reason!

    Friends 🙂

    The central claim of the Christian faith is that Jesus Christ–God incarnate–the most humane human to ever live–bore our sin and shame, died, and rose from the grave in order to offer us the free gift of grace.

    1 Peter 2:24 states,

    “He Himself bore our sins in His body on the cross, so that we might die to sin and live to righteousness; for by His wounds we were healed.”

    In light of that, those who (like me!) have put their faith in Jesus get to say as Isaiah 61:10 says,

    “I will greatly rejoice in the Lord; my soul shall exult in my God, for He has clothed me with the garments of salvation; He has covered me with the robe of righteousness.”

    And make no mistake, friends.

    That robe was hecka expensive.

    It cost Jesus everything.

    His majesty. His might. His life.

    His dignity.

    I’ve never seen it depicted, but Jesus was actually crucified naked.

    His clothes were ripped off, split amongst the men crucifying Him, and He was nailed into place.

    God incarnate, forcibly stripped, shamed, and displayed for our sake.

    And it wasn’t a mistake.

    Revelation 13:8 makes it plain that

    “Before the foundation of the world was lain, the Lamb was slain.”

    Jesus knew the price of our robe of righteousness from the get, and He was still willing to pay it because as has already been said,

    Love disregards dignity.

    Or as Hebrews 12:2 says,

    “For the joy set before him Jesus endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.

    I think that’s pretty neat 🙂

    That the King of all creation endured the cross to clothe you and me, erase our sin, and set us free.

    That’s all for this week!

    If you want to know more about what life with Jesus is like/how He SUPER changed my life, you can poke around here on CC or drop me a line!

    Always, always down to talk about Jesus Christ 🙂

    I was buried beneath my shame
    Who could carry that kind of weight?
    It was my tomb
    ‘Til I met You

    I was breathing, but not alive
    All my failures I tried to hide
    It was my tomb
    ‘Til I met You

    You called my name
    Then I ran out of that grave
    Out of the darkness
    Into Your glorious day

    What You Need To Succeed!

    Long time, no blog, friends.

    So sorry about that!

    I’ve been studying for the LSAT and trying to complete novel #3 before I head off to the John Jay Fellowship in Philly.

    Suffice to say, it’s been pretty busy 🙂

    However!

    I’ve really missed CC, and I’m so glad I got inspiration for this piece because I needed a mental break from LSAT prep and chasing the you-need-to-write-on-average-five-novels-before-getting-published statistic.

    See, whilst the LSAT and novel-writing both involve things I LOVE (reading and writing), they both also come with an existential sense of

    “I am spending so much–so much–time, energy, brain cells, etc. on this, and I have no guarantee of success.”

    Like, studying for the LSAT does not mean I’m going to score in the 170s (learned this from multiple friends) and completing a novel (or three) does not equal open arms in traditional publishing (learned this from personal experience).

    And a couple of times–like a few weeks back when an LSAT logic game on the topic of CDs had me wanting to FULL ON break things (namely CDs) and the movie adaptation of NYT-bestselling Where The Crawdads Sing left me simply IN AWE of the storytelling–I’ve felt like there’s no way I could possibly succeed in either thing.

    My goals seemed far beyond my abilities.

    And I started to think…

    What exactly does one need to succeed?

    Like, is there any way I can get a guarantee?

    And friends, I am happy to report that after a bit of a think, I’m pretty sure I figured the thing!

    And so today, I’d like to debunk three things that are commonly mistaken as being sufficient for success before offering my perspective on the one thing that will guarantee it.

    The three insufficient things are as follows:

    1. Expertise
    2. Authenticity
    3. Tenacity

    And the one thing you need, well for that, you’ve gotta read 🙂

    Insufficient Thing #1: Expertise

    Back in April, I got to be a part of a reading group through the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) on Shakespeare’s play Coriolanus.

    *Side note: If you’re an undergraduate, I HIGHLY recommend checking out AEI’s student programming. For me, participating in their Summer Honors Program in 2019 was truly life-altering, blessing me with mentors and friends and opening doors freshman Sarah could NEVER have imagined.

    Anyways, the eponymous Coriolanus was an… interesting man [MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD!].

    He’s a phenomenal soldier–an expert, in fact–conquering the city of Corioles [from which he got his name] as basically a one-man-band and positioning himself as the obvious choice for consul–the pinnacle of success in the republic.

    And yet…

    While it was certainly the case that when it came to his war-making abilities, no one had any complaints, when it came to the rest of him…

    Well, they had a lot to say.

    I think one of his main detractors, Brutus, put it best when he said,

    “Caius Martius [Coriolanus] was a worthy officer in the war, but insolent, overcome with pride, ambitious, past all thinking, self loving.”

    In other words, Coriolanus was not a very nice man.

    Honestly, he was kind of a butthead.

    Or!

    As his somewhat friend/advisor Menenius would say,

    “One that converses more with the buttock of the night than with the forehead of the morning.”

    Anyways!

    The point is that while Coriolanus may have been an expert in fighting, there were other considerations besides his expertise that carried weight when it came to adjudicating whether or not he would be made consul of Rome.

    Put simply, expertise was not enough to guarantee that Coriolanus would achieve his goal.

    Indeed, in the end, for all his worthiness in war, he not only failed to get the consul-ship, he also failed to keep a knife out of his back (or neck–the text isn’t super clear. But he is dead!).

    So!

    If you’ve been operating under the belief that expertise is all you need and are striving for expert-status assuming it will get you where you want to be, it might be time to reassess.

    Because a major lesson of Coriolanus is that you can be the best–head, neck, and shoulders above the rest–but when it comes to achieving success, if you are butthead, people are going to put you in a hole.

    So can expertise guarantee that you’ll succeed?

    No.

    Insufficient Thing #2: Authenticity

    As I’ve been looking into how to write law school personal statements and prepare for interviews, one piece of advice that is seemingly universal is

    “Just be yourself!”

    *sigh*

    I can’t be the only one that doesn’t find that to be particularly helpful advice.

    Now, don’t get me wrong.

    I’ve written about how to avoid being hypocritamus and how to check if you have 3D integrity, both of which are closely related to assessing whether or not you are a genuine, authentic human being.

    So suffice to say, I don’t think being authentic is inherently a bad thing.

    I just don’t think authenticity–“just being yourself”–will guarantee that you (or me!) will succeed.

    For a proof, I offer as evidence “the pirates all pirates fear”:

    Blackbeard.

    If you’ve not seen the fourth (and, in my opinion, LAST Pirates of The Caribbean film–the fifth one was so cringe we do not count it), fix that PLEASE [also spoilers incoming!]!

    All of it is great, but of particular note for this discussion on authenticity is the mutiny scene where the captured priest (Sam Claflin AKA Finnick Odair and Will Traynor) roasts Blackbeard for his miscreant ways, saying,

    “You are not bewildered. You are afraid. You dare not walk the path of righteousness. The way of the light.”

    To which Blackbeard replies,

    “No, sir. The truth is much simpler than that. I’m a bad man.”

    How is that for being authentic!

    “Just be yourself!” they say.

    And Blackbeard’s like “OKAY! Lemme just literally roast the cook since he was on guard duty during the mutiny!”

    He even tells his daughter Angelica (Penelope Cruz) when she pleads with him to spare the priest,

    “If I don’t kill a man every now and then, they forget who I am.

    A bad man.

    Indeed, in the end, not even she is safe from him.

    If we fast-forward to the end of the film, both Blackbeard and Angelica have been mortally wounded.

    They’ll both be dead soon.

    EXCEPT!

    Captain Jack Sparrow pops up with two chalices full of water from the fountain of youth.

    Whoever drinks the chalice with the mermaid’s tear will get all the years of the other drinker who will die a terrible, nasty, awful death by having their flesh melted off in a vortex.

    Blackbeard, faced with saving his daughter by sacrificing himself or saving his own skin by making her die in his stead, is true to his authentic self and grabs the life-giving chalice, throwing it back before Angelica or Jack can stop him.

    Again!

    Let it not be said that Blackbeard is inauthentic.

    I’m a bad man.

    Only…

    Jack knew that.

    Indeed, anyone who was paying attention could see that Blackbeard would take the life-giving tear for himself, damning his daughter to melt.

    And so Jack lied.

    He swapped the cups, counting on Mr. I’m A Bad Man to willingly take his own daughter’s life.

    And he was right!

    Blackbeard gets totally skeletonized.

    So much for the “pirates all pirates fear.”

    The man no longer has a face–let alone a beard.

    So!

    If you’re tempted to think “just being yourself” will guarantee that you’ll succeed, remember dear, dead, authentic Edward Teach.

    Insufficient Thing #3: Tenacity

    This summer and last, I’ve been doing re-reads of my favorite childhood book series.

    The Ranger’s Apprentice.

    The Sisters Grimm.

    Harry Potter.

    Percy Jackson and the Olympians.

    And you know what they all have in common?

    Tenacious villains.

    Seriously.

    The bad guys just will. Not. Quit.

    I’d be willing to bet they all have posters in their lairs that say,

    IF AT FIRST YOU DON’T SUCCEED, TRY, TRY, AGAIN!

    Voldemort in particular is a great example of this because he’s foiled on a yearly basis.

    It’s honestly a bit embarrassing.

    I would be embarrassed.

    Frankly, I’d probably start asking if the enterprise was a good use of my time (Currently asking myself that about the possibility of taking the LSAT twice and realizing, with horror, that some people take it seven–SEVEN–times).

    At a certain point, I suspect it’s better to choose a different goal and get on with life.

    And don’t get me wrong!

    I don’t think perseverance is a bad thing.

    Certainly not!

    I’ve written previously about how my odyssey with chronic sickness has taught me a heck of a lot about gritting your teeth and hanging on.

    But notably, I’m still dealing with issues two years since writing that piece.

    Persistence hasn’t translated into me being the picture of health anymore than Voldemort’s determined drive to see Harry Potter die!die!die! translated into Harry’s head on a pike.

    Indeed, it is Voldemort–not Harry–who ends the series with the short end of the stick.

    More specifically, he ends up being blown to bits.

    He’s like the world’s most diabolical dandelion.

    And this was, I submit, because he lacked a certain something (Potterheads will guess where I’m going with this–hint: think prophecy and Goblet of Fire) that would have not only guaranteed success, but would have definitely led to different and better choices from the get.

    As it stands, for all Voldy’s try, try agains, he meets with what even the most generous soul would have to call an unsuccessful end.

    So if you’ve fallen into the trap that says,

    “If I just keep trying, I will succeed.”

    Remember good old Lord Voldemort–the diabolical weed.

    What You Need To Succeed!

    Alright!

    We’ve covered expertise, authenticity, and tenacity, respectively, and I hope I’ve alerted you to the fact that none of those will guarantee success.

    So if you’ve been counting on any one of those to get you where you want to be, it would be a good idea to reassess!

    However!

    It’s also very much worth noting that while I highlighted one particular trait in Coriolanus, Blackbeard, and Voldemort, all of them actually had all three of those things (go read/watch their stories if you don’t believe me!).

    And EVEN HAVING ALL THREE they were unable to succeed!

    That should tell us something.

    It certainly tells me something.

    Namely, that with respect to the LSAT, my publishing dreams, and life generally, I can be as experienced, authentic, and tenacious as anyone could ever hope to be, and all of that still won’t guarantee success.

    But there is one thing that will.

    Hold on to your hats, friends.

    This is about to get slightly complicated.

    See, back in April (around the same time as they did Coriolanus), AEI hosted a weekend program for graduating college seniors to help prepare us for post-grad life.

    It was all excellent, but the very first night provided particular (and very relevant) insight because the speakers were two seriously successful men.

    Their names are Michael Wear and Luke Frans, and both of them said things that have stuck with me on the topic of achieving post-grad success.

    I’ll start with Michael Wear who gave us this tip:

    “Be ambitious about the type of person you’re becoming.”

    Now, that is not the type of career advice you usually get in DC.

    Actually, I don’t think that’s the type of career advice given out to people generally.

    However!

    Luke Frans’ tip was even more esoteric, which was for us to keep in mind that not only should we strive to be virtuous and kind but also that

    “The object of virtue doesn’t change.”

    That is, there’s a specific thing, over and above all our goals, at which we’re meant to aim.

    And I gotta say, I think Michael Wear and Luke Frans are onto something.

    Because if we flash back to Coriolanus, Blackbeard, and Voldemort, we can easily see that besides expertise, authenticity, and tenacity, they all have another thing in common:

    They are all awful human beings.

    Seriously.

    None of them will be winning awards for service to humanity.

    Why is that?

    Well, I submit it had something to do with what they were aiming at.

    Coriolanus wanted power, prestige, and revenge.

    Blackbeard and Voldemort wanted to cheat death.

    Friends.

    It has been my observation that goals like that–self-centered and selfish–put you (or at least definitely me) in a Machiavellian mindset where the one thing which is actually critical for success is supposedly not requisite.

    Have you guessed what it is yet, Potterheads?

    “It was love,” Voldemort tells his gathered Death Eaters in The Goblet of Fire.

    Love was what Harry had that enabled him to be victorious.

    It was also “the power Voldemort knew not.”

    Also the thing Machiavelli said you can toss if you’re in a tight spot.

    And they’re not alone because when it comes to love, neither Coriolanus nor Blackbeard look so hot.

    “That’s a brave fellow [Coriolanus], but he’s vengeance proud and loves not the common people.”

    “Angelica,” said Blackbeard. “My beloved daughter, the one true good thing I have done in this life [who I am evidently willing to full on melt in order to save my own life].”

    Love is thin on the ground amongst these guys.

    And I, for one, don’t think it’s a coincidence that they were failures and loveless at the same time.

    In fact, I think those things are tightly intertwined because if we revisit MW and LF’s advice (“be ambitious about the type of person you’re becoming” and keep in mind “the object of virtue does not change”) the heart of both pieces of advice is actually the same.

    Because the most ambitious “type” of person is a loving one.

    Think about it.

    Consider what type of person could be better than that?

    A smart one?

    A rich one?

    A powerful one?

    A beautiful one?

    I’ve met all of the above, and I suspect you have too.

    But even if they’re all of that, if they are also a loveless person, are they the type of person you look up to?

    The type of person you have ambitions to be?

    1 Corinthians 13:1-3 says,

    “If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.  If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.”

    Being nothing isn’t very ambitious, is it?

    Or take Luke Frans’ point that the object of virtue does not change.

    2 Peter 1:5-7 states,

    “Make every effort to add to your faith, virtue; and to virtue, knowledge; and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; and to godliness, brotherly affection; and to brotherly affection, love.” 

    Love is the final link in that progressive chain.

    That’s the thing we’re meant to aim at and ultimately attain.

    Now you might say,

    “Hey, wait a second!”

    “How can the thing we’re meant to have (love) and the thing we’re meant to attain (also love) be the same? That doesn’t make any sense!”

    And it wouldn’t, but for the fact that when the Bible talks about love, it isn’t talking about a warm fuzzy feeling you get.

    It’s talking about a Person.

    1 John 4:8 says, “God IS Love,” and John 1:14 tells us that that same God became flesh and dwelt among us in The Person of Jesus who died for our sins and rose again so that all those who believe in Him will have the indwelling of His Holy Spirit and, ultimately, eternity with Him.

    That is, they’ll have a third of the Godhead inside them now and full consummation in Heaven.

    Love now.

    Love then.

    Friends, from what I’ve seen and experienced, Jesus is the only One who can guarantee success, both in the now and the not yet.

    I mean, we’ve already seen that you can have expertise, authenticity, and tenacity and those guarantee you nothing.

    And, more to the point, even if you do manage to “succeed” presently, any measure of success you achieve will be fleeting.

    I’ve written about our ongoing craisin-ness before, but suffice to say, the most “successful” person in the world still ends up in a hole.

    Death is inevitable, and I think the priest in James Joyce’s A Portrait of The Artist As A Young Man put it best when he said,

    “And remember, my dear boys, that we have been sent into this world for one thing alone… All else is worthless. One thing alone is needful, the salvation of one’s soul.”

    I’ll grant that you can have and even momentarily achieve a whole host of goals, but Matthew 16:26 asks,

    “What will it profit you to gain the whole world and lose your soul?”

    Indeed, it was C.S. Lewis who noted in his book Mere Christianity that gaining the world, absent your soul, isn’t even possible:

    “Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.

    If Christianity is true–if Jesus is Who He says–ultimate success is all or nothing, friends.

    I happen to believe that Christianity is true and that Love found in the Person of Jesus is the only thing sufficient for success.

    If you’ve got Him, Romans 8:28 promises that everything else is going to work out for the absolute best.

    Granted, we may not always understand the plan (@me with respect to LSAT 2x maybe and my hitherto unrealized dreams of having my books at Walmart and Target).

    HOwEveR!

    I believe 100% that God is a Man of His Word, and Psalm 37:4-5 says,

    “Delight yourself in the Lord, and He WILL give you the desires of your heart. Commit your way to Him. Trust Him, and He WILL act.”

    Thank you as always for reading, friends!

    As ever, if you want to hear more about Jesus, just drop me a line 🙂

    Whate’er my God ordains is right:
    Here shall my stand be taken;
    Though sorrow, need, or death be mine,
    Yet I am not forsaken.
    My Father’s care is round me there;
    He holds me that I shall not fall:
    And so to Him I leave it all.

    And so to Him I leave it all.

    One Degree To The Next!

    It’s still coo-coo bananapants to me that I graduated from Georgetown last week. Sixteen-year-old Sarah probably would’ve wet herself and choked on a Trader Joe’s potsticker simultaneously if someone told her that would be a thing. Seriously. Georgetown was my dream school since I was 8 years old and the only college I applied to when the average number for my high school was 15-20 (the college advising team full-on wanted to throttle me). And yet! Even with Georgetown being my goal for almost a decade, I had zippo idea how significant my time on the Hilltop would be. 

    I won’t go into all that occurred over the last five years here (I’m trying to be concise 😅!), but if you’re interested, I’ve written about some of the major shifts like my deliverance from 15 years of pornography addiction (“You Can Be Free”), the end of my period of political idolatry/being an intellectual bully (“Toilet Paper Advice” & “A Nail That Sticks Out”), and my experience wrestling with vanity-induced chronic sickness and suicidality (“A One-Two Punch Lights Out,” “A Day of Drought,” & “Spit That Out Right Now!”) on here before!

    I pray those more seismic shifts are an encouragement to you that if God can turn around a whole mess like me, He who is able to do exceedingly, abundantly, more than we ask or think, can do the same for you—easy peasy. 

    That being said! I am still VERY much a work in progress. 2 Corinthians 3:18 says that, in Christ, we are being transformed from one degree of glory to the next, and as long as God still has me on this side of eternity, that transformation isn’t complete yet. 

    While the shifts might be subtler, they’re no less significant, and this last year at Georgetown was full of little lessons with truly life-altering consequences, five of which I’d like to share today in the hopes that what it took me twenty-three years to learn might be helpful for you presently 🙂

    They are as follows:

    1. Words Create Reality 

    Proverbs 18:21 says, “Life and death are in power of the tongue,” and I feel like this year, I really came to see what it is to speak life (or death) to somebody. I actually had some of the hardest conversations I’ve had in my life over the last nine months and got to experience first-hand how words can be used as weapons and/or given as gifts, both of which have (I think) taught me to be much more linguistically conscientious. As an external processor and consummate word-vomiter, this was a significant and much-needed shift, though I admittedly did go through a season where I basically went mute for fear of speaking death. Helpfully, though! I also started going to Biblical Counseling (talk about speaking LIFE) and one of the sessions critically clarified for me that when Jesus says in Matthew 12:36, “I tell you, for every careless word a man speaks, he will give an account for it on the Day of Judgment,” the key word there is careless. Jesus didn’t say for every misunderstood word we will give an account on the D of J. Even He was misunderstood–frequently. But what Jesus never was was careless in His speech. I mean, He not only spoke the universe into existence with the Godhead in the beginning (Genesis 1) but He IS “The Word made flesh” (John 1:14) who became incarnate in order that all who believe in Him will never die but LIVE. If ever there was a reality-creating, care-filled Word, it’d be Him. Well-worth considering and emulating, in my opinion.

    2. It Is More Blessed to Give Than To Receive

    2 Corinthians 12:15 says, “I would gladly spend and be expended for your souls,” and this year, having that mindset was my goal. I actually put that verse on my door as a daily reminder of what kind of person I wanted to be, someone who gave their time, money, resources, attention, etc. generously (I’m naturally very possessive and stingy) and Holy cannoli! do I feel like I was hit with a dump truck of blessings in the form of getting to rejoice in seeing what I gave be multiplied and magnified in so many incredible ways 🙂 Matthew 6:21 says, “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also,” and I cannot recommend enough extending your treasure, and thereby extending your heart to more and more people/communities.

    3. Love Is Key

    1 Corinthians 13:2 says, “If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.” This year was very weird in that the combo of putting off required intro courses and taking a year off meant I had a number of classes where the majority of students were freshmen. I 100% felt like a dinosaur, but my old-woman-ness also came with a fair bit of pride and self-conceit–like “I obviously know SO much more than these kiddos–some of them aren’t even eighteen! They’re collegiate neophytes while I can fathom all the paper-writing mysteries.” Early on, though, the Lord really convicted me that my extra years and “knowledge,” apart from Him, meant nothing because as Johnny Cash says, “What have I become, my dearest friend? Everyone I know goes away in the end. And you can have it all, my empire of dirt. I will let you down. I will make you hurt.” Five extra years or fifty wouldn’t change the fact that I’ve got nothing–nothing–nothing to offer anyone, apart from Jesus, that isn’t going to turn to dirt in the end. 1 Corinthians 13:13 says, “Three things will last forever: faith, hope, and love, but the greatest of these is love,” and 1 John 4:8 says, “God IS love.” and what this year made very clear to me was that whatever worldly advantages I possess, the only thing I really have to offer anybody is knowledge of Jesus. 

    4. Pray Without Ceasing

    Romans 12:12 says, “Rejoice in hope, be steadfast in trial, be constant in prayer.” I feel like I really learned how to talk to God this year. Whether in praying Psalm 55:22 whenever I wore heels or would rollerskate, asking God please not to let me fall on my face, or praying, praying, praying Psalm 119: 97-100 that He would make my papers make sense when I was pretty sure I couldn’t even English, bringing small or big things to the One in whom we live and move and have our being changed everything for me. And it wasn’t even just that prayer “worked” (I did not break my face/all papers turned out okay)–it was the fact that Matthew 4:4 says, “Man does not live on bread alone but on every word that proceeds from the mouth of God” and Hebrews 7:25 says, “Jesus LIVES to make intercession for us” which just one day clicked in my head, like, I am ALWAYS on Jesus’ lips and always on His mind, so why should He not be on mine? That realization opened up whole new kinds of prayer like thanksgiving and confession because I just wanted fellowship with Him, and it not only deepened my understanding of God, but also my understanding of me. Like, I am so finite, fallible, and weak, and Jesus isn’t kidding when he says in John 15:5, “Apart from Me, you can do nothing,” but He also isn’t kidding when He says, right after that in John 15:7, “If you abide in Me and My words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it WILL be done for you.” Prayer is a gamechanger, friends. I recommend it. 

    5. Jesus Is All You Need

    Over the last five years, God has put His hand on a lot of things I would have once felt (even said) were essential for my existence, or at least my flourishing. He claimed my sexuality, my health, and my career ambitions between sophomore and junior year, but this last year, He claimed the hardest thing for me to cede: my relationships with people extremely important to me. I’ve always been possessive of people. I’m like the Nemo seagulls “MINE MINE MINE!” when it comes to those I love. I do not do well when circumstances require they be partially or wholly given up. And this year, two relational changes I fully did not expect broke my heart–just shattered it. The first had me weeping at 1am on the Darnell steps. The second had me blowing through a box of tissues in the front row of my Religion and Science class. After the first, Jesus set me back on my feet with the knowledge that while people and my relationships with them might change/fade, as Hebrews 13:8 says, “Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever.” He’ll never let me down. And after the second, it was the realization that if I want any hope in this life or the next, relational or otherwise, He’s the only game in town. Proof text is John 6:67-68 where Jesus’ listeners are peeling off like paint from a barn door because they don’t like what He’s saying, and He turns and asks the twelve, “You don’t want to go away too, do you?” and Simon Peter answers, “Where else shall we go, Lord? You have the words of eternal life.” This last year of uni, Jesus finally asked me, “if I take it all—not just your sexuality, health, ambitions, etc. but the relationships you hold most dear—am I enough? Will you be content if I am all you get?” Answer (after copious tears): yes. He really is, and while it was a bumpy road to get there, I’m so grateful I know the answer to that. If you don’t, I pray you consider what answer you would give? What are the things you need—aside from or not even including eternal life—to be content? If you were to lose them, what would your response be? Just something to think about. 

    Alright! So much for being concise!

    In summary, five lessons learned this year:

    1. Words Create Reality
    2. It Is More Blessed to Give Than to Receive
    3. Love Is Key
    4. Pray Without Ceasing
    5. Jesus Is All You Need

    My time on the Hilltop was a ride. In the last five years, I’ve become someone high-school Sarah would not recognize. Through it all, God has been so exceedingly kind–more than I deserve for sure–and I 100% relate to what John Newton, the writer of the hymn “Amazing Grace”, once said, “I am not what I ought to be. I am not what I want to be. I am not what I hope to be, but I am not what I used to be. By the grace of God I am what I am.” Amen. 

    Next up for me is a residential fellowship with the John Jay Institute in Philly (very, very excited about this), studying for the LSAT, and finishing a major writing project 🙂

    Penultimately, I do have three prayer requests! 

    Firstly, that I would love others in my life as Christ, especially my family and friends 🙂

    Secondly, that I would use to the utmost the gifts God has given me for the good of others and for His glory. 

    Thirdly, and most importantly–and I MEAN this with all sincerity–please, please pray that if I would even inch towards loving Jesus less, God would hit me with a semi-truck or tractor trailer (I am, after all, in Indiana for the summer) before I could move in that direction. I would 10/10 prefer to be an earthly pancake than separated from Jesus–my Savior, my King, my unfailing Friend–for a moment, let alone forever. Don’t want. Don’t like. Don’t recommend.

    Finally, this post would be ridiculously long if I were to thank everyone who has poured into/helped me over the years (and I would doubtless forget to mention someone and feel absolutely crummy), but please know that I am so, so very grateful to you and that God who sees absolutely everything promises to bless those who bless those that are His (Genesis 12:3), and I can tell you, with total confidence, that God keeps His promises 🙂

    Spectacularly Special Specks: Recovering A Sense of Human Significance

    When it comes to dinner party conversations, there’s an old trick which can turn an ordinarily nescient question into one of supreme profundity and significance. It’s called the “really?” trick, and it can be mustered to great effect when topics of conversation shift to an area that an attendee is partially or even wholly unfamiliar with. It’s an easy trick. You simply tack on “really?” to a query that would otherwise reveal the depths of your ignorance: Who was Michael Jackson, really? What is particle physics, really? When did the Arab Spring begin, really? And every other guest suddenly feels like a dilettante and supercilious pinhead in the presence of a sagacious and evidently superior intellect. It’s a nifty trick, but more than simply demonstrating canny and wit, it reveals that with respect to the essence of famous figures, ultimate reality, history, and a myriad of other subjects, scholars and sages throughout the ages have barely scratched the surface. A real and comprehensive understanding of these things has not been achieved and the idea of a consensus on any of them, even the most puerile, seems utterly out of reach. After all, different disciplines emphasize different things, and what might seem like a comprehensive account of Michael Jackson to a pop music enthusiast will differ wildly from the account given by an expert in plastic surgery. They will not tell the same story. And that’s fine. When it comes to a full account of Michael Jackson, or even of particle physics or the Arab Spring, differences of opinion are unlikely to upset things because while MJ, physics, and Middle East happenings may be interesting, they are irrelevant to most people’s everyday lives. In discussing them, there’s very little on the line. However, there is at least one topic of conversation that, should the “really?” trick be applied, it will doubtlessly enliven and very likely ruin the night because everyone is going to have an opinion, and they’ll probably be ready to fight. That topic of conversation is the nature of humanity, and the construction of the night-ruining query would be: what are human beings, really? If a scientific materialist and a committed religious adherent are amongst the guests, that question is going to result in thrown fists because, as Duke University Professor of Philosophy and Neurobiology Owen Flanagan has noted, “Conflict between the spaces of science and spirituality is one of the most familiar zones of conflict among the spaces of meaning that constitute the Space of Meaning.” And that conflict, in the words of Cornell University co-founder Andrew Dickson White, has been “a war continued longer—with battles fiercer, with sieges more persistent, with strategy more vigorous than in any of the comparatively petty warfare of Alexander, or Caesar, or Napoleon.” In other words, hold onto your napkins because cutlery will be going for carotids. And yet, even as the other guests do their best to separate the scientific materialist and religious adherent from corporal exsanguination or premature entry into Heaven (depending on who you ask), they’ll be listening intently to the shouting match, because they’ll grasp that an answer to that question is of ultimate and personal importance to them. After all, The Dalai Lama himself has well said, “How we view ourselves and the world around us cannot help but affect our attitude and our relations with our fellow beings and the world we live in.” So, what are human beings, really? To that question, there are various and sundry responses, many of them competing if not wholly contradictory, and the task of this paper will be to survey those offered by the scientific and religious, specifically Buddhist and Christian, communities, in the hopes that through their comparison, it might be easier to see which offers the most satisfying, comprehensive, and real account of human beings. 

    We Are Beasts

    In his 1871 book The Descent of Man, famed evolutionary biologist Charles Darwin wrote this: “Man is descended from a hairy quadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in its habits.” In the century and a half since, Darwin’s conception of man as simply the latest phase in the evolutionary chain has become an article of “secular faith,” and, in light of this, per University of Chicago Paleontologist Neil Shubin, it is widely believed that “We [humans] are not exceptional to any great degree. We’re just a twig on a giant evolutionary tree that includes everything.” Agreeing with Shubin, yet another UChicago professor, evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, has said that thanks to Darwin, human beings have been “dethroned” from nature’s pinnacle. Far from being its crowning achievement, we are simply another mammalian beast, cousin and kin to every other creeping, crawling thing, differing from other critters not in kind but merely in degree. As Nazi Adolf Eichmann put it in Operation Finale: “We’re all animals fighting for scraps on the Serengeti. Some of us just have bigger teeth.” This conception of human beings, while seemingly coherent and in line with evolutionary biology, presents a difficulty, not just for dentists but for any appeal to ethics or morality because the animal kingdom is governed by one principle: survival. And that puts pretty much anything, from rape to murder to cannibalism, on the table. Crudely, if human beings, in the words of The Bloodhound Gang, “ain’t nothin’ but mammals,” why then should we not “do it like they do on the Discovery Channel?” For one reason, most people find such a position untenable. Moreover, and perhaps more tellingly, most people do not want to live as animals, slaves to nature, red in tooth and claw. However, others claim our behavior isn’t even up to us at all. 

    We Are Meat Machines

    In Richard Dawkins’ book River Out of Eden, he contends that human beings are basically, to use the words of MIT professor Marvin Minsky, “meat machines.” We are at the mercy of a “universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication” within which we are beholden to the music being played by our DNA. That is, when it comes to what we think and do, we essentially have no say. We simply follow the predetermined firing of the neurons in our brain. Dr. Jerry Coyne, fellow atheist, has put it this way:

    The notion of ‘free will’—a linchpin of many faiths—now looks increasingly dubious as scientists not only untangle the influence of our genes and environments on our behavior, but also show that some ‘decisions’ can be predicted from brain scans several seconds before people are conscious of having made them. In other words, the notion of pure ‘free will,’ the idea that in any situation we can choose to behave in different ways, is vanishing. Most scientists and philosophers are now physical ‘determinists’ who see our genetic makeup and environmental history as the only factors that, acting through the laws of physics, determine which decisions we make. 

    Historically, this has been a dangerous take. Reflecting on the fruit such a conception of human beings bore in Nazi Germany, Holocaust survivor Dr. Viktor Frankl had this to say:

    If we present a man with a concept of man which is not true, we may well corrupt him. When we present man as an automaton of reflexes, as a mind-machine, as a bundle of instincts, as a pawn of drives and reactions, as a mere product of instinct, heredity, and environment, we feed the nihilism to which modern man is, in any case, prone. I became acquainted with the last stage of that corruption in my second concentration camp, Auschwitz. The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity and environment; or as the Nazi liked to say, ‘of Blood and Soil.’ I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some Ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers.

    It behooves us to take Dr. Frankl’s warning seriously. After all, the belief that human beings are essentially meat machines has not only led to Nazism, but has historically removed all grounds for moral responsibility. 

    In 1924, during the infamous trial of Leopold and Loeb which covered the case of two University of Chicago students who murdered and mutilated a young boy simply because they thought it was in keeping with Nietzschean philosophy, their defense attorney, Clarence Darrow, made the case that they weren’t responsible for what took place, rather, it was their genes and multi-million dollar upbringing that were to blame:

    I know that one of two things happened to this boy [Loeb]; that this terrible crime was inherent in his organism, and came from some ancestor, or that it came through his education and his training after he was born.

    Darrow’s appeal to evolutionary biology and environmental psychology kept Leopold and Loeb alive, but their survival came at a tremendous price, requiring that they be conceived not as moral agents, possessing the ability to choose whether to be good or bad, but as the predetermined product of their genes and environment. In C.S. Lewis’ essay, “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment,” he notes that this conceptual move, seemingly humane, turns a “person, a subject of rights” into “a mere object, a patient, a case.” If human beings are nothing but meat machines, mere products of upbringing and ancestry, moral agency and responsibility lose all significance. They become figments lost to an infinite regress while human beings themselves become genetically and environmentally pre-determined gag reflexes, needing to be force-fed a suppressant or antacid. It’s a harsh position to take and the genocidal/megalomaniacal tendencies it engenders, seem, to some, to indicate that an error, either in first principles or reasoning, has been made. At the very least, hardcore scientific materialists have not laid out a particularly winsome or compelling case. 

    “But so what?” snaps the committed scientific materialist. “Those are the facts.”

    “Are they, though?” The Dalai Lama asks. “Because last I checked, reality, including our own existence, is so much more complex.”

    We Are Illusory

    The Buddhist account of human beings offers an alternative to both materialists’ conceits that we are either beasts or meat machines. With respect to the first, Buddhists say that whilst humans and animals are both sentient, we possess a unique (or at the very least, a much greater) capacity to consciously control our thoughts, feelings, and actions. That consciousness, for Buddhists, is the primary feature of life, and, in the words of Professor, Buddhist, and Neurobiologist Owen Flanagan, “Come what may, no nasty reductionist or materialist will be in any position to say that consciousness is an illusion or that you don’t make choices.” The Buddhist conception of human beings thereby restores a belief in moral agency and responsibility (understandable, given their corresponding doctrine of karmic causality). However, while consciousness and agency are not illusions on the Buddhist account, Buddhism completely denies that human beings, or anything, has a unique, essential self. 

    This doctrine, called “the theory of emptiness,” holds that “from the perspective of the ultimate truth, things and events do not possess discrete, independent realities. Their ultimate ontological status is ‘empty’ in that nothing possesses any kind of essence or intrinsic being.” The Dalai Lama has expanded on this, writing,

    In our day to day experience, we tend to relate to the world and to ourselves as if these entities possess self-enclosed, definable, discrete, and enduring reality. For instance, if we examine our own conception of selfhood, we will find that we tend to believe in the presence of an essential core to our being, which characterizes our individuality and identity as a discrete ego, independent of the physical and mental elements that constitute our existence. The philosophy of emptiness reveals that this is not only a fundamental error but also the basis for attachment, clinging, and the development of our numerous prejudices.

    Put simply, Buddhists believe that the root of human suffering is bound up in our mistaken belief that we have an essential self. For Buddhists, the self is an illusion, but once we get past that idea, all will be well. 

    In Margaret Atwood’s Booker Prize-winning novel, The Blind Assassin, the narrator, Iris, asks the reader,

    Why is it we want so badly to memorialize ourselves? Even while we’re still alive. We wish to assert our existence, like dogs peeing on a fire hydrant… What do we hope from it? Applause, envy, respect? Or simply attention, of any kind we can get? At the very least we want a witness. We can’t stand the idea of our own voices falling silent finally, like a radio running down. 

    It’s as if we can’t help ourselves. The desire to assert our own discrete existence is powerful. We do not want to be a radio running down, crackles subsumed in and absorbed by all other sounds. And yet, the Buddhist says, accepting that we do not individually exist, that our sense of intrinsic self is an illusion, is the first step towards freedom from suffering and enlightenment. 

    Is it? 

    In Netflix’s 2021 film The Unforgivable, Ruth Slater (played by Sandra Bullock), convicted cop killer, is released on parole and finds society to be, in a word, hostile. Beaten, refused jobs, abandoned by someone she was coming to love, she nevertheless persists with a relatively stiff upper lip. However, it’s when she’s treated as if she does not exist by her little sister’s guardians that she finally loses it, crying, “What gives you the reason to treat me like I don’t exist? Because I exist! I exist!” It’s being treated like she does not that causes her anguish. 

    “But don’t you see?” The Buddhist persists. “If she’d made peace with the reality of her inexistence and let go of all attachments, she’d be enlightened. She’d be free.” 

    In the film adaptation of Stephen King’s novella Shawshank Redemption, Brooks Haten, a man who has spent fifty years in prison, is finally released. He’s given a place to stay, a job at the grocery, and of course, his liberty. And yet, he doesn’t like it. In correspondence to his friends, he describes himself as constantly afraid and out of place, writing, “I don’t like it here… I’ve decided not to stay.” He hangs himself the same day, letting go of all attachments—his friends, his place, his job, his very life—but what he does not let go of, even at the end, is his sense of discrete existence. Indeed, his penultimate act is to take out a switchblade and carve above his makeshift gallows, “BROOKS WAS HERE.” A Buddhist would say he’s mistaken. Brooks wasn’t there. “Brooks” wasn’t at all. Brooks was an illusion, and like all illusions, with time, they have to fall. 

    If that makes us uncomfortable, it’s worthwhile to ask whether the Buddhist conception of human beings is wholly accurate because while it may offer a rosier view than the hardcore materialist position which says human beings are just animals or meat machines, it also requires that we deny something we know intuitively. Namely, that there exists a discrete me and a discrete you. However, for others, the issue of whether there is a me or you, or even whether we’re animals or just meat machines, is by and large moot. For them, the most defining characteristic of human beings is our awareness that we’re all going to die soon.

    We Are Fleeting

    In the 2008 documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, Cornell Professor Will Provine, a committed materialist and atheist, recounted how he came to this view: 

    [Evolution] starts by giving up an active deity. Then it gives up the hope that there is any life after death. When you give those two up, the rest of it follows fairly easily. You give up the hope that there is an eminent morality. And finally there is no human free will. If you believe in evolution, you can’t hope for there being any free will. There’s no hope whatsoever of there being any deep meaning in human life. We live. We die. And we’re gone! We’re absolutely gone when we die!

    For Dr. Provine, the belief that human beings are just passing through is the culmination and capstone of his worldview. From a materialist perspective, die [THE END] is what all human beings are going to do. In the words of evolutionary biologist Dr. Jerry Coyne, “There is, of course, no empirical evidence for either a soul or its unique presence in humans. It’s a superfluous religious add on.” We live. We die. And we’re gone. 

    Strangely, this conception of human beings has not caught on. Perhaps this is because, as Hazel Grace Lancaster points out in The Fault in Our Stars, oblivion’s inevitability discomforts us, impelling many to focus their attention on other things or plead ignorance. But it could also be that some part of us is unconvinced that we’re hurtling towards nothingness. Indeed, our continued desire for life is an interesting, even telling, quirk, given that, on the materialist view, human beings are only guaranteed a return to dirt. Frankly, it is incredibly strange that we should so desire and strive to maintain something we are assuredly going to lose. In fact, the dissonance between our desire for life and reality of death has caused some like Georgetown University Theology Professor John F. Haught to raise the question “Does time lead inevitably to nothingness or does it flow into an eternity where all events can be remembered and reordered into an unfathomable beauty?” If the former, Jean-Paul Sarte was correct: “One dies one’s life. One lives one’s death.” If the former, what it means to be human is to live with the persistent awareness of impending nothingness. If the former, all our labors and efforts will be, as Saint Augustine said, simply an outpouring of ourselves upon the sand as we watch the tide come in. But. If the latter, then all that we do and all that we are, has real, even ultimate, significance. 

    This second position has historically been found solely amongst religious adherents. However, during the last century, “enlightened secularism” and secular humanists have been endeavoring to construct an equivalent. 

    We Are The Measure of All Things

    In his book Straw Dogs, Professor Emeritus of The London School of Economics John Gray, describes the ascent and aim of secular humanism this way:

    Over the past few hundred years, at least in Europe, religion has waned, but we have not become less obsessed with imprinting a human meaning on things. A thin secular idealism has become the dominant attitude of life. The world has come to be seen as something to be remade in our own image. 

    For the secular humanist, no divine being exists. Human beings are not made in any Creator’s image—we remain highly evolved chimps. However, breaking with the hardcore materialists, secular humanists claim that we can make a real difference. Though, how this can be when they still believe we don’t ultimately have any real free will is just one of those charming inconsistencies. Not a divine, but an intellectual mystery. Regardless, to hear them tell it, human beings are the kings and queens of evolutionary history. The apotheosis of nature, red in tooth in claw, with the power and ability to make the world better for all involved, and riffing off the inimitable words of Hannah Montana, they say, “Life’s what [we] make it/ So let’s make it rock!” Or, to put it more soberly, according to Dr. Coyne, “‘Meaning and purpose’ are human constructs.” It’s up to us to make sure the world doesn’t go belly up. Furthermore, per Carl Coon (former US Ambassador to Nepal and winner of the American Humanist Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award), “We’re in charge. The future of life on this planet is in our hands.” That’s a heady and heavy position to be in because while we supposedly have the power to make the world over any which way, if it slips through our hands or we fumble the play, no deus ex machina is swooping in to save the day. In point of fact, at the end of the day, the secular humanist has to say, whatever happens, we’ve got no one but ourselves to thank, and as it turns out, that is actually worse than having no one but ourselves to blame.

    In Shakespeare’s play Coriolanus, the Third Citizen makes the observation: 

    Ingratitude is monstrous, and for the multitude to be ungrateful were to make a monster of the multitude, of which, we being members, should bring ourselves to be monstrous members. 

    On this understanding of what turns human beings into monstrosities, the chief difficulty with secular humanism’s conception of human beings is that it is inherently and ineluctably ungrateful and self-congratulatory, creating, per citizen number three, a pipeline of monstrosity. In her seminal work, Regarding the Pain of Others, humanist Susan Sontag, interpreting Virginia Woolf, demurred on this, saying: “We are not monsters. We are members of the educated class. Our failure is one of imagination.” Granting the fact that a secular humanist living today would be hard pressed to imagine the gas chambers of Auschwitz, that does not likewise excuse them from being historically illiterate. They are, after all, members of the educated class. Reading should be a habit.

    And yet, to assert as humanist thinkers like Steven Pinker do, that humanity is on an upwards trajectory is to admit one has not read, was soundly asleep during the whole of the twentieth century, or else laboring under the effects of hallucinogens. In fact, in the 1997 film Devil’s Advocate, Al Pacino, playing Satan of all people, tells Keanu Reeves, “I’m a fan of man! I’m a humanist. Maybe the last humanist. Who in their right mind could possibly deny that the twentieth century was mine? All of it!” Yuval Harari, himself a secular humanist, surveying the state of humanity in the twenty-first century, asks at the close of his best-selling book Sapiens, “Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods [us] who don’t know what they want?” To that, there is conspicuously little secular humanist response, and Philip Kitcher, author of Life After Faith: The Case for Secular Humanism, himself admits that “Enlightened secularism has not yet succeeded in finding surrogates for institutions and ideas that religious traditions have honed over centuries or millennia.” As English philosopher Iris Murdoch noted over fifty years ago, “Our vision of ourselves has become too grand. We have isolated and identified ourselves with an unrealistic conception of the will, and we have no adequate conception of original sin.” Ultimately, the secular humanist conception of what a human being really is utterly deficient. Beyond being logically incoherent, monstrously ungrateful, and historically illiterate, it also—by its own admission—fails to account for the undeniable fact that as often as human beings have the opportunity to do good, we choose—we choose—to do bad.  

    Helpfully, there is one conception of human beings that accounts for this.

    We Are God’s Masterpiece 

    At bottom, the Christian conception of what it means to be a human being comes down to two things. Firstly, we are made in God’s image—we are His masterpiece. Secondly, we are born in sin and shaped in iniquity. Together, these two realities form the basis for the Christian belief that, as Protestant Pope-equivalent Timothy Keller has well said, “We’re far worse than we ever imagined, and far more loved than we could ever dream.” For some, this understanding of humanity is everything. It binds up their wounds, gives them real hope, and sets them free. However, for others, assenting to the Christian account of what it means to be a human being brings undue difficulty. 

    Towards the end of George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion (later made into the movie-musical My Fair Lady), Eliza’s father, Alfie Doolittle bemoans the fact that through no fault of his own and without his consent, he was lifted from the streets and turned into a middle class man: “It’s making a gentleman of me that I object to. Who asked him to make a gentleman of me? I was happy. I was free.” For Alfie, being made into a gentleman curtailed his liberties, and there are many who look at Christianity and feel it to be similarly encumbering. Who asked you to make a masterpiece of me? I was happy. I was free. If we are, in fact, God’s masterpiece—shaped by and made in the image of the one and only Deity—that means we have to take ourselves seriously. We can treat neither our lives nor our actions, however small, with any form of flippancy. In a word, we have responsibilities. 

    In a letter to jailbird Perry Smith reprinted in Truman Capote’s true crime novel In Cold Blood, Perry’s sister tells him, “As far as responsibility goes, no one really wants it.” She’s entirely correct. Responsibility is exhausting, and the idea that it would be foisted upon us from the get, without God even asking us whether or not we wanted it, makes many upset. This is especially true when discussions of ultimate judgment are brought in because, in the words of Dr. Jerry Coyne,  “The combination of certainty, morality, and universal punishment is toxic.” To him, the assertion that human beings not only have inescapable responsibilities but that we are also under divine accounting and authority is revolting. And he isn’t alone.

    Writing on what he terms the “cosmic authority problem,” something he personally sees as directly  “responsible for much of the scientism and reduction of our time,” NYU Professor Emeritus Thomas Nagel said this about his own anti-theistic (particularly anti-Christian) proclivities:

    I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.

    For Nagel, Coyne, and countless others besides, the Christian conception of human beings (alongside its broader cosmic scheme) is supremely unappealing. They do not want to be God’s masterpiece. Better to be beasts, meat machines, illusory, fleeting, or the measure of all things than to be subject to the commands and castigations of some deadweight Deity. He’s a party-pooper, really. And life is short. Better to live it with “all of the joys and none of the dues” and any discussion of divine judgment far, FAR off in another room. However, there are others who object to Christianity’s view, not because they feel God’s expectations are onerous or else several orders too tall but because they feel that they, themselves, are far too small. 

    Speaking at a gathering of the American Humanist Association, Bill Nye the Science Guy informed his tittering audience,

    I’m insignificant… I am just another speck of sand. And the Earth, in the cosmic scheme of things, is another speck. And the sun is an unremarkable star. Nothing special about the sun. The sun is another speck. And the galaxy is a speck. I’m a speck, on a speck, orbiting a speck, among other specks, among still other specks in the middle of specklessness! I suck!

    Writing about how astronomical observations have informed his perception of the world and humanity at large, the late particle physicist Victor Stenger asserted, “The earth is no more significant than a single grain of sand on the beach.” Ironically, in affirming their own (and everyone else’s) speckiness, Nye and Stegner are in good and faithful company. In Psalm 8:3-4, King David, widely regarded as one of the godliest men in the Bible, marvels at the relative smallness of humanity: “When I consider the Heavens, the moon and the stars, the works which Thy hand hath made, what is man that Thou art mindful of him?” 

    What is man that Thou art mindful of him? 

    In an excerpt from his book The Body: A Guide for Occupants, science writer Bill Bryson describes man, not by looking towards the heavens but by looking within:

    If you laid all the DNA in your body end to end it would stretch ten billion miles, beyond the orbit of Pluto: ‘Think of it: there is enough of you to leave the solar system. You are, in the most literal sense, cosmic.’ 

    In their book God and Galileo: What a 400-Year-Old Letter Teaches Us about Faith and Science, astronomers (and committed Christians) David Block and Kenneth C. Freeman encourage their readers to not only look up but to look back. Two-thousand years ago to be exact:

    The incarnation resounds with a central message of purpose. Mankind is special enough that the Creator of this universe visited this world in person out of His love for fallen mankind and died for us. 

    That may seem fanciful or fantastic, but as Christian and author of the global phenomenon, A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L’Engle has well said, that does not mean it isn’t accurate:

    The whole idea of the Incarnation is hilarious! That God should so love us? We are weird! But that God should so love this weird part of this whoopsie creation that God Himself would come and be part of us to show us what it’s like to be human—what being human is meant to be.

    On the Christian understanding, Jesus Christ’s incarnation—His life and death—said two things: This is who I am. This is what you mean to Me.

    Commenting on the split between the focus of scientific and religious inquiry, atheist and anthropologist Scott Atran has said, “Science treats humans and intentions only as incidental elements in the universe, whereas for religion they are central.” Indeed, according to Christianity, it was for human beings—God’s masterpiece—that God, Himself, gave up everything.

    So what is a human being, really? A beast, a meat machine, illusory, fleeting, the measure of all things? I’ve done my best to offer a survey of the most prevalent perspectives and have given, when I feel it due, a “Christian kicking” to some of the more pernicious views, but ultimately, the question of what it really means to be a human being is still under review. I personally think the claim of Christianity, that we are God’s masterpiece, is true, and for me, it is far and away the most satisfying, comprehensive, and real worldview. 

    “So how can you tell what your life is worth or where your value lies? You can never see through the eyes of man. You must look at your life. Look at your life through Heaven’s eyes.”

    Religion & Science Spring 2022