But if I had to pick and ‘industry’ or field that I am working in, and that I hope to work in full time some day, I would call it the joy industry.

I believe that we were created for infinite joy. Every single person on earth needs, longs for and has a capacity for infinite joy. Sure this craving can be temporarily satiated by food, sex, family, relationships, entertainment and sure people can get to the point where the desire for infinite joy has been so suppressed and atrophied that people might actually feel satisfied with steak and financial security, but I believe that everyone, deep down, wants joy that will never end.

The Joy That Will Never End is God. Not just some vague, higher, power, but the real God of the Bible. There is only one. He does not go by different names in other cultures like Allah or Budha. There is one God called Yaweh, or “I am”.

This God can be known, we can actually know concrete things about him through scripture. He gave us the Bible in love, so that we might know about his character, what he enjoys and delights in, what grieves and angers him.

This God can be known in the relational sense. I know about Dan Auerbach and The Black Keys. I don’t have a relationship with him. With God, we can actually know him in the way you know your wife or father or best friend.

God is The Joy That Will Never End because he created and designed everything, including joy. Every good thing, like family, safety, food, sex, laughter, friendship, all of these things are his invention. He invented them so that we might delight in his creation and through this delight, know him in both senses factually and relationally, conocer and saber for those of you who paid attention in high school Spanish.

This was in a magazine in Argentina. It says "A walk is the difference between knowing (experientially, relationally) and knowing (factually)

It is indeed an abstract statement to say that the actual relational knowledge of God gives us joy. What does it mean? What does it look like?

Well, what does it look like to take joy for any other relationship? When I am on the porch with some good friends and one of them is being goofy, uniquely himself, or making a great speech about something he is passionate about, I get joy from him. What does it look like for parents to derive joy from their kids? What does it look like for a husband to delight in his wife? This is hard to describe for sure, but hopefully it is an idea that we can all at least tenuously grasp.

So for me, to be in the business of joy means that I am in the business of helping people get more of God.  All service or help that we could offer people is helping them get something. It could be food, self-confidence, housing, jobs, middle class status, etc. All help is pointing people to something that the helper sees as the answer to the problem or will the something that the helper thinks will increase joy. I want to spend my life, in everything I do, pointing people to The Joy That Will Never End. I want to help them leave lesser joys or things that rob them of The Joy That Will Never End. I want to help them run to things that will get more of The Joy That Will Never End.

That’s why I work for The Village Community Church, that’s why I’m starting seminary this semester, that’s why I pray God would bless me with the opportunity to be a pastor someday, that’s why I love talking with the regulars at the coffee shop, that’s why talking to people about God who do not know him sets my heart a flame. Which is perhaps the best part of being in the business of joy: I get more of The Joy That Will Never End by doing all of these things.

A portrait of the artist as an idiot.

I barely escaped all that questioning alive, introspection can be a female dog sometimes, and moved to an A frame in the woods for the summer. I was going to do research and take accelerated physics. The first week I tried to recover. I drank jones strawberry cane soda and read a book on the deck. The book was Blue Like Jazz. It’s a good book, but nothing incredible. I sat there on that deck and read a guy deal with some of the same questions that I had been dealing with in a much more  succinct and articulate way. If I had read that book earlier, I could have saved myself a lot of heart ache. I remember when people told me to read a year earlier but I blew it off because it was too popular and I was too cool. Ever since that week on the deck of the A frame, I’ve resolved to always read everything I can about whatever it is that I’m struggling with. Wiser, smarter men and women have thought longer, written more, and dealt with everything that I will ever deal with. I needed to humble myself and realize that I was not the first guy to go through an existential crisis or to have doubts or confusion. My pride liked to think that I was paving the way into thoughts that no one had had before. I began to enjoy my pity parties and edgy thoughts because there is a certain part of society that thinks it’s cool to be sad and I bought into that temporarily.

One of my friends was recently going through a really, really tough time of doubt. He felt like he didn’t think he could on, he felt destined to die young, he felt like he couldn’t escape the pain he felt. It was really tough. What made it tougher was that he would get insulted if you tried to encourage him by showing him how other people have felt that way and there was hope. I shared from dark times in my life, I pointed to great people in history and their dark night of the soul. I even pointed to the apostle Paul in II Corinthians where he says that he despaired of life itself.

Paul, one of the biggest non-Jesus studs in the bible, planter of many churches, author of 75% of The Bible, a guy who had been bitten by poisonous snakes and lived, had been ship wrecked and floated at sea for a day and a night, was stoned and left for dead and lived, healed people when they touched the hem of his cloak, saw thousands of people saved at once from his preaching, this guy despaired of life itself. Those who despair are in good company.

I like to think of myself as being in the business of joy. I want people to have the most joy and satisfaction they can have in life. That is why I write this. Well it’s one of the reasons. First, I most write to myself. I write things I already know that I need to be reminded of. Secondly, I write that the 3 of you who read this would consider ways that pride keeps us from joy, specifically how a slowness to learn from people about whatever it is that we are dealing with can keep us the proverbial square wheeled bike. So listen to people when they are trying to help, even if you’ve heard the advice before, press into authors over 55 [or better yet, who are dead] on issues you are struggling with – for your joy.

The day we were at the track was a cool 60 degrees and crystal clear. The sun was begging it’s long, desert setting routin

This is my friend, Signori Ferrari 458 Italia. I drove him.

e, the same routine in which cowboys for years would ride off.  I wish I had to words to fully do justice to the experience. I drove a the Nissan Skyline GTR that does 0-60 in 3.2 seconds. It was pretty incredible to accelerate out of turns at 60 mph and hit 120 in the 3 seconds before the next turn. I also drove a Ferrari 458 Italia. It has 650 horsepower and perfectly engineered to do everything perfectly. I could take turns at 70 mph and the car would yawn at me.

So that part was great. It was also great to spend time with my Dad and brother. They got sick and, well, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but once they recovered it we had a good time analyzing things together.

Vegas however is the Anti-Josh Foor city. I would even go so far to say it is the Anti-Everybody city, depending on how you look at it. Sure some people like it, but the whole city is set up to rob you of satisfaction while selling you lies of quick money, sexual fulfillment, and status. Everything about it is designed to incite discontentment and insecurities that make you want to spend money. Benj my brother said on the last night after we had watched the Broncos massacre, that he didn’t even want to leave the room again because there’s no way to walk out there with out losing money – either on over priced food or drink or gaudy show, or gambling.

Everything is pretense there. It’s image, it’s the perception of beauty or wealth or happiness, nothing is actually real. And the marketing is so intense that people almost seem to abdicate their ability to think for themselves. Everything and everyone says that a show is awesome. They go to see it and they saw it is awesome because everyone else said it was awesome. We went and saw a Cirque Du Solei show that had some cool parts but was mostly created so that there was something to do.

This is the most recently in a series of experiences that make me really depressed. Shallowness and examples of our societies bent on robbing us satisfaction really get me down. This past New Year’s, I started a new tradition of ducking out of the party around 11 or so and bringing in the new year with some reflection, prayer, and looking forward. I decided to do this because the year before I brought in the New Year making small talk and watching the Jonas Brothers and other Disney Channel pop stars perform in between Ryan Seacrest and a post-stroke Dick Clark making small talk about nothing. That’s not how I want to bring in another year of my life. I don’t think it makes me a curmudgeon to want meaning and to be around things that have value and meaning.

This was another thought I had standing in line at my grandma’s wake. Meaning is not found just about everything pop culture values. Money, image, beauty, youth, coolness, edginess – all this stuff is shadows and dust. The gospel, family, serving people, death, faithfulness in love over decades, this is diamonds and gold. My grandma didn’t concern herself with coolness or style or whether or not something was edgy or unique. She just loved her Jesus, family, her church, the world. She just enjoyed what she could and served as much as she could and she died with her granddaughter holding her hand and left a massive legacy.  Love is watching someone die, to quote the great philosopher Ben Gibbard.  It’s not some guy coming along and loving how crazy a girl is, Katherine Heigel.

Another DC photo. The artist calls it "Bench full O Family"

I guess this is just a part of growing up. All the things I thought were lame and boring turn out to be the source of meaning. And all the the things I thought were cool and exciting and “cutting” edge turn out to be 100% worthless. Pop music, fashion, coolness, cars – these things are hamster wheels for unimaginative people. Sure some of this stuff can be redeemed and used for better purposes but let’s deal with majorities. For every person who is using something like this for better purposes there are 10,000 that are just chasing the wind.

If I sound ranty or pointed it’s because I am writing mostly to myself. I can often lie to myself in my head, but when I write, I see things more clearly. Even I know alot of this stuff, I still find myself getting depressed because I’m cool or rich or fashionable. Which is exactly what the marketing industry wants. So this is mostly me writing to remind myself of reality. Also, next time you are down or emo, take a moment and see what is behind it. You might find that you are sad because you are not as cool or beautiful or living as glamorous of a life as society tells you should. Fight for contentment in Christ because that is the source of true satisfaction.

I don’t want this to sound bad, but my point is not that my Grandma had any extraordinary circumstances. She had a pretty normal life. But she lived this normal life of hers in a way that when she died we sobbed tears of sorrow and celebration, in a way that during her calling hours, I stood for 5 hours in the line of grandkids and greeted a steady stream of people who had been touched by grandma in such a way that  they wanted to come pay their respects. During her funeral, we reveled and rejoiced in her life. It was a Tuesday afternoon and the service was full of people coming to celebrate her life. The gospel was preached and glorious hymns were sung.

My Grandpa died last May and the experience was very different. I have massive respect for my grandpa. He came from a really tough background. He was orphaned at a young age, raised by an aunt that struggled to raise him, his sisters and her own kids. He joined the navy and did that for a while, then worked for Boeing. He had a pool that he kept up so that we could swim in it all summer long. He gave my dad good examples of both what to do and what not to do. He improved his situation a lot and the foundation he set for my dad was solid and my dad jumped off of that to give me the incredible foundation I have.

However, for the last 25 years of his life he essentially quit living. Mowed his lawn, he waxed his car, and he sat at the kitchen table, looking out the window smoking or in his chair watching the news. Then he moved to Florida and golfed a little the first few years, and quit doing much of anything. He literally watched TV 6-9 hours a day. He ate poorly and smoked a lot. He spent the last year or so in a nursing home getting his diaper changed and trying to figure out if it was morning or night.

When he passed away the calling hours were brief, mostly people from my parents church coming to support us or my Dad’s coworkers. Not a lot of people came to the funeral, not a lot of people knew him.

We are all given a life to spend. There is no way to not spend your life. It is being spent now – the only thing we can control is how it is spent. My grandma spent her life serving and loving God and other people. She worked tireless as a nurse, loving her patients and her coworkers well. She loved her church deeply and served in their inner city outreach and women’s bible studies. Grandma’s spiritual gifts were encouragement and intercession. She had a letter writing ministry that had more effects than any of us know. She endlessly wrote letters of encouragement to whoever God placed on her heart. Every time my Uncle Mike (her son-in-law’s sister’s husband) was overseas with the Army she sent letters and cookies to him and his men. When I was in China she spent $20 to ship a box of her famous homemade party mix from North Hampton, Ohio all the way to Shanghai.

Grandma walking like a champ on a trip to DC after her knee replacement.

Grandma dealt with her family in truth and love. She loved us all so deeply, it’s hard to describe. But she was also very honest with us. She didn’t always tell us what we wanted to hear, she just gave us advice that seemed to me to be almost alway spot on. We listened to her because we knew how much she loved us, because we knew how much fun she was and how much she wanted our best. And even when we didn’t listen to her and our decisions made things hard for us, she was patiently right there with us through the consequences. It wasn’t easy. It’s hard to see people you love do things that hurt them because it hurts you. But no matter what we did, she was there with truth and love.

I was only there for the last 3rd of her life. I am not doing justice to all the ways she served and loved people. She didn’t have a lot, she will not go down in history, but she spent her life so that it touched hundreds, if not thousands of people.

We can either spend or hoard out lives. The thing with hoarding is that it is really just spending it on yourself. You can spend your life for your comfort, for your money and financial security and things, cars, gadgets, you can spend it on hotter, cooler companions. All of these things are spending your life on yourself.

The goal is of course not to have a ballin’ funeral, though that is a perk. The point is your funeral will reflect what you spent your life on.

I’m not making this up. This isn’t my idea!  Jesus said exactly this in Mark 8:35

“For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s sake will save it.”

This means that the point of life is to lose it. Your deepest joy will be in spending it for Jesus. This is not going to be on any commercials during football games. Literally everyone else will say that your deepest joy will be in stuff, career success, sex, comfort and financial security. None of these things are bad, they are just not the source of True Joy.

My grandma spent her life Jesus’ sake and the gospel’s sake. She loved her family by pointing us to Christ, True Joy. She loved her friends by encouraging them and pointing them to Christ. She loved on people and sent all those countless letters because that is the love of Jesus. How are you spending your life? What would people say about you? Are you giving yourself to something bigger than yourself?

This, the bible would say, is not what heaven is like. Heaven is for people who love God. Not people who believe in Him or Jesus or say that Jesus died for their sins or lived decently or went to church. The type of people I’m talking about are people who have deep affection for God. They long for Him, yearn to know Him more, delight when they spend time with Him, etc. This is tricky because you can’t muster affection. It is a result of a new heart that one receives when he becomes a Christian.

Indeed, there are many people who have prayed the prayer or believe in Jesus and are good Christian people that go to church but have no true affection for God, no desire to know Him more. For a lot of us, God is sort of an accessory to our lives, a trump card for when the normal amusements and comforts are spent, fire insurance in case something bad happens, and a way to not have to think much about what happens after death. This type of person generally assumes that he will get into heaven because he was financially wise, didn’t cheat on his wife, didn’t steal anything big, wasn’t an addict of any kind, etc.

Grandma Ray is in heaven right now. Not because of anything she did or said, but because she loved God and deeply longed to be with Him. In a book that she filled out about her life, she answered the question “Where do you go when things are bad?” Her answer was to her kitchen table where her bible would lay open and she would seek God for comfort and strength. We all have something we go to. It might a friend, spouse, food, alcohol, TV, etc. Grandma pressed into God. This desire to seek Him was evidence of her new heart, a regenerated heart that God made new with the death and resurrection of His Son.

Heaven will be about God. It will not be about us or our earthly hobbies. God is So Good, infinitely complex and delightful, that we will spend eternity knowing him more and more. That is why heaven can and will go on for eternity – because it will take eternity to know everything about God! God is so much bigger than I often think of Him. There is no bottom the the joy we can find in Him. Literally for forever we can delve into deeper and better pleasures in Him!

That is what Heaven is! Getting more of God for eternity. This is why some of us probably won’t want to go there. If we want things to be about us and what we want to do and to continue chasing flickering shadows of pleasure, then heaven would not be fun.

CS Lewis describes an interesting take on hell in his book The Great Divorce. In “The Gray City” I think he calls it, you can imagine anything into existence. Any house, any trinket and there is infinite space. The bummer is that the stuff is not fully material. Houses don’t really keep you dry from the perpetual rain. Stuff breaks easily because time goes so fast. The result is that the city is huge and sprawling and empty because eventually everyone’s selfishness causes a fight and people just move and create new places to live. He talks about two guys that wanted to go see Napoleon. They walked for decades to get to where he lived and when they got there, they found him in a massive house, alone, walking back and forth muttering to himself.

The afterlife is merely a continuation of what our trajectory was here on earth. Those that long for God, go to be with him. Those who long for themselves to be praised and to find little selfish pleasures, get it. I mean there are more things involved than that, but that is the gist of it.

I apologize if this seems like a pointed or ranty post. This is a topic that really stirs me and one that has been on my mind constantly since my grandma was in her last week. It is for joy that I write this. O that everyone [of the 3 of you] that reads this would stop and evaluate the affection of his heart! Try to be honest with yourself to see if you really have affection and a desire for God. He is so Good, how awful it would be to be doing the appropriate things in life but miss out on the deepest, truest joy!

Like I said, affection can’t be conjured or mustered up. It has to be a change in your heart. I beg God every day for this affection, for more desire, for the distractions of the world to be turned down. I search, soak in, and memorize scripture to get more of Him while I wait. Beg God and wait. It may not be cool and it’s certainly super humbling, but it’s the path to eternal satisfaction.

*** Photo from a trip to DC. I gave her my sun glasses and told her to look tough.***

On December 30th, my 25th birthday, my grandma Janet Ray died ending a year long struggle with cancer. She died in my parents home where she had been living for the last year, cared for my mother. She was surrounded by her children and 2 of her grandchildren. She was aware but unable to respond as my sister Hannah read Ephesians 1 to her and she opened her eyes, looked up, and died.

It was a good way to go. Ephesians one is an incredible chapter of the glory of the gospel and the promises of salvation. ‘In Christ we have every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places’ it says. How intense it must have been to hear this promise that she had clung to her whole and the go experience it.

When I heard this I cried. I still tear up when I think of it. Grandma had been struggling for a while. It was tough year and she was a trooper. The last week was really hard. She was gasping for breath and unable to communicate. Her passing was a relief. But what stirs me is that scripture was the last thing she heard. Not that words are magic or anything, but the truth that they convey is glorious.

How good God is that he would give us Christ, save us from our sin and give us every spiritual blessing. What hope! O to God be the glory!

I am kicking off a blog series inspired by and in memory of my Grandma. She was a great woman and even more than that, her life gives God a lot of glory.

For as long as I can remember my Grandma drove to Columbus from Springfield to spend Christmas eve and Christmas morning with us. Normally she would arrive in the midst of chaos and be quickly put to work ironing a shirt or finishing preparations for dinner before we would zip off to Christmas eve church service. Her arrival always signaled the beginning of the festivities as was something that all of us kids looked forward to intensely. It was deeply meaningful that she was able to be here for her last Christmas and final days. She is in and out and can’t really communicate very clearly, but she wakes up and sees us sitting there and smiles as she can. We sing hymns and she mouths the words, we read scripture and she soaks it in. But she is slipping little by little and she looks like it. It’s hard to be there with her, remembering the fullness of her life and seeing how weak and feeble death most of us get before we die.

It seems like every year Christmas gains more weight, more significance. I think it’s a process of unlearning all of the silly and pointless traditions that obscure our ability to soak in the season for the right reasons. We I stop singing the Christmas songs on auto pilot and actually soak what they are saying, I pick up on the yearning and longing that is embeded in so many of them. These songs cry out for a savior, they feel the weight of suffering on the world, the need for help that all humans have.  The songs celebrate the birth of our Hope, Jesus Christ. Who was born to pay the penalty for our sins and relieve suffering. This is an already/not yet situation. My sins are forgiven, but there is still suffering as seen in the last year of my Grandma’s life. The not yet part is that one day Christ will indeed eliminate suffering. In the helpless baby in a manger, sin is atoned for and suffering now has an expiration date. This is the truth that I and my family are clinging to this year.

My Grandma is a saint. She loved our family well, was always encouraging, incredibly wise, always seeking to push us towards God. My Grandma is going to go be with Jesus, her savior that she has so steadfastly loved. I want to be clear, my Grandma is not a saint because of what she did. She is not going to heaven because she was a good person and because she loved us all so well. She is going to heaven because Christ died for her and because she loves him. Heaven is not a place for people who are scared of hell and death and want some abstract hope. Heaven is not a place for good people who have tried hard and done right by those around them. Heaven is a place for people who love God and delight in him. The afterlife is a place where we continue the mission we had on earth. For people who love God here on earth – because we have been forgiven and because He is the source of all joy-, heaven will be a place where we get more of that which we love, we get more of God. My Grandma loves God. Soon she will be with Him face to face and instead of hearing the 4 or 5 us vocally challenged Foors singing quietly and poorly God’s praise, she will hear God being worshiped in all His glory by heavenly choirs. Lord haste the day for her and us.

Speaking of bones, Jeremiah a fire in his. On Tuesday I talked about how Jeremiah had a interesting situation where every time he would open his mouth and faithful say what God told him to say, he got beat. He didn’t have many friends.

It’s interesting to see Jeremiah kind of sing this little song of complaining in chapter 20: 7-18 that Jeremiah mentions that he is so sick of getting beat that he decides that he is going to stop talking. The only problem is that he can’t keep it in:

If I say, “I will not mention him,
or speak any more in his name,”
there is in my heart as it were a burning fire
shut up in my bones,
and I am weary with holding it in,
and I cannot.
(Jeremiah 20:9 ESV)

This is a fascinating circumstance to me. I think that I know this feeling a little bit, albeit a bit less cut and dry. Jeremiah gets words from God that he must share otherwise he feels like like there is a fire inside him that he must get out and holding it in wears on him.

Some people can bottle things up. I have never been one of them. I think I’m naturally prone to getting things out there and my time as a debt collector has made me perhaps too comfortable with confrontation. With Jeremiah, the truth that God gives him must be said.

At this point I’m not quite sure what to do with this. I have definitely said things that made people mad. I was sad they were mad but I didn’t have regrets in saying the things I did. Of course there is the factor of my poor wording, my tone, and facial expression (or lack there of) that could make things come across poorly. Questions this passage makes me ask are “How does one speak boldly the thing that is ‘burning’ but do so humbly?” “Should things be kept in for the sake of maintain relationships?” “Is truth always helpful even if it hurts?”

Obviously this doesn’t apply to everything. My offensive opinion doesn’t need to be shared. Somethings aren’t black and white. But when it is clear in scripture, when the intentions are love and betterment, we should be open right?

A part of the problem is that there is very little place in our society, even inside close relationships to share tough words- words that might hurt but need to be heard so that those we love might grow and change. I  crave this kind of feedback and find it hard to come by sometimes. The myth that we have to overcome is that to love someone is not the same as making them feel awesome about themselves. Sure we want to encourage and edify. But love means we will challenge each other to be better, even if that means there needs to be some humbling criticism shared.

Well there are a lot of questions in there. For the 3 of you who read this, I would love feed and to hear your thoughts!

The more I study the bible, the more I am blown away by how different it is from the way that I generally look at life and by how much it contradicts how our culture thinks and expects things to work out.

There are lots of examples of this but the one I read today was from Jeremiah 20. It’s a pretty awesome chapter, thought it’s not for the faint of heart.

He does have great hair.

Before we get to chapter 20, here is a brief rundown of the book of Jeremiah: God calls Jeremiah to be his prophet, to call Israel back to truth and repent of sin. He says that he will give him power to pluck up nations and destroy and overthrow, build and plant. This is a pretty attractive deal for Jeremiah as it would be for just about everyone. If someone said that you would get the power to destroy and build and all this stuff, most of us would take.

So Jeremiah becomes God’s prophet. Back then, the primary way God spoke to His people was through prophets. He would give them a word or warning or encouragement and then the Prophet would share it with the people. It’s similar to what pastors do today  – in the sense that they open scripture and preach it to God’s people to warn, encourage and admonish to deeper joy – only Old Testament prophets were much more intense.

I bet Jeremiah had many a day of sad pondering. Not quite the image of success.

However, at the beginning, things don’t go very well for good ‘ol Jerry. Jeremiah gets totally thrashed. The people he is in charge of informing are doing all kinds of crazy, joy robbing, God’s glory theiving things. Like child sacrifice and all kinds of other messed up stuff. Here’s the thing, worshiping God is the deepest joy people can have. But we always worship other things that only give us a fraction of the full joy we can know. So Jeremiah is constantly saying things like “Come on guys, come drink of cool, deep, clear, fresh water! Stop slurping from festering little pools of slime!”.

However, people don’t respond well to this. This brings us to Jeremiah 20. Pashur the priest heard Jeremiah prophesying about the evil, joy robbing things being destroyed so he “beat Jeremiah the prophet, and put him in the stocks that were in the upper Benjamin Gate of the house of the Lord.”

When Pashur lets him out of the stocks the next day, Jeremiah tells him that God has given him a new name “Terror On Every Side” because Pashur will be a terror to himself and his friends His friends they will all die by the sword of their enemies and Pashur with his family and everyone else will be take captive where he will die and be buried as a slave.

Perhaps now we can understand a bit more why Jeremiah didn’t have many friends. These are not fun messages. Of course I bet it felt good to say that to a guy who had just beat you and put you in stocks to be publicly ridiculed.

Next Jeremiah launches into sort of a prayer of sorrow. He feels like he has been tricked by God. Sure he has the power to destroy and build up and all that, but it’s not like he thought.

O LORD, you have deceived me,
and I was deceived;
you are stronger than I,
and you have prevailed.
I have become a laughingstock all the day;
everyone mocks me.
For whenever I speak, I cry out,
I shout, “Violence and destruction!”
For the word of the LORD has become for me
a reproach and derision all day long.
(Jeremiah 20:7-8 ESV)

He has become a laughing stock. No one likes him. He is doing nothing wrong, he is following God, saying the difficult, hard things that God calls him to proclaim.  He is following not the whims of the masses (which are mostly dumb and destructive; see: Twilight, reality TV, and Disney channel pop stars). But he doesn’t want to be right, he wants people to like him at least enough not to beat him.

I find myself here a lot. For all the effort I make to live how God has made me and do what I feel called to do, when I am faced with people who don’t like me, I shudder and doubt everything and begin flailing to figure out what I need to do make them like me. There are two problems with this. First, when you aren’t trusting God to guide you and show you how where to improve and grow and where you should just keep plugging away, you generally aren’t as close with Him which is lonely and terrifying. Secondly, people can tell when you aren’t being genuine and you are trying to please them and fit in and that normally means they don’t like you. So when this happens to me, I am surrounded by people who like me even less that they first did and God is also like, “Chill out and come be with me, stop being dumb” but I can’t hear him because I am too busy listening Elliot Smith because people say he is cool. ( I just don’t like him that much. There I said it. I am what I am).

Verse 9 in chapter 20 is also awesome, but it is another topic that I will talk about on Thursday.

Let me wrap up with this. Jeremiah was true to his calling and did things he was supposed to do and things went bad for him. My point is this: God’s rubric for success is not like Malcolm Gladwell’s. He is not looking for you to make People’s 100. He is looking for faithfulness, steadfastness, and a dependency on Him no matter what happens. This makes Him look infinitely Worth It. Gladwell is about the praise of Man and human glorifying excellence.  God is about drawing praise to himself because he the most worthy of praise. All the splendor of nature, all the hilarity of humor, all the great things in people are hints of the fullness of good that God is all good is a reflection of God’s goodness.

So a man who year after year follows God faithfully, humbly, and boldly and experiences God in such way that God himself sustains him, this man shows God to be the source for all sufficient, ever-motivating joy and that gives glory where it is due. This is what I beg God that my life would look like.

There are some implicit cultural criticisms in there, but the thing I want to focus on is the manic way that I hold on to my life. I struggle, plan, lose sleep, strategy and live in fear of my life not looking exactly the way I want it to.

I was reading Jeremiah last week and an old idea hit me again. I am the clay in the potter’s hand. God is the potter, I am the clay.

The word that came to Jeremiah from the LORD: “Arise, and go down to the potter’s house, and there I will let you hear my words.” So I went down to the potter’s house, and there he was working at his wheel. And the vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter’s hand, and he reworked it into another vessel, as it seemed good to the potter to do.  Jeremiah 18:1-4

The thing that gets me is the clay’s role in this whole thing. The potter built it up, the broke it down into make it into something else. He didn’t consult the clay. He just did it.

The passage in Jeremiah continues:

Then the word of the LORD came to me: “O house of Israel, can I not do with you as this potter has done? declares the LORD. Behold, like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand… Jeremiah 18: 5-7

It’s convenient when scripture has nice clear analogies for us. God is the potter, we are the clay. This has implications both individually and collectively.

Individually, we should be at peace. I know the inner Ayn Rand we all have lurking deep down inside hates the idea being clay. Our cultures applauds people who “make themselves” and “March to their own beat”. It’s good to be confident and believe things boldly, but we were not meant to be self made people.

Some people will fight tooth and nail for their freedom, and then freak out once they have it. My generation, who had just about any college, any city, any major, any potential marriage partner, any career path open to them, often chokes under the options and live with constant anxiety about whether or not they are with the right person, doing the right things, and being most fulfilled in their lives.

This is not how we were meant to be. We are clay. So we can rejoice to be made into whatever our perfectly good, loving Father would delight to make us into. This takes pressure off and gives us peace. We can work and plan and strive open handed, not putting our identity in our careers. We can change and alter not panicking about whether it’s right or not. For Christians, we have a Perfect Potter molding us and He who doesn’t make mistakes. He might make changes, but never mistakes.

You don’t really debate whether or not a pot is completely satisfied being a pot. A pot is a pot because that’s what it was made to be. There are no begrudging pots.

Individually, we should release our white knuckled fingers off our precious self-determinism and surrender our plans to God. We still  do things and make choices, but we do so with an air of joy, peace, and security because we know that we have the Perfect potter in control.

This should also lend us to humility. Back in the day I was a huge advocate of the mentality that said “I will be awesome and mention God when I am recognized”. This is human effort laced with some after thought props to God. Not cool. We should recognized that all our skills and abilities are gifts.

Collectively, God is the potter of groups of people. This means, families, friend circles and most importantly, churches.

The opened handed idea works here on a bigger scale. At the Village, this is our constant prayer, that the Village would be God’s church and no one else’s. We plead with God to use us for his purposes, we beg him to let us join him in what he is doing. He is the potter, we, collectively are the clay and He is molding us into the Church he wants to be.

The benefits are similar at the Church level as well. There is (or should be) less stress and anxiety about whether or not people are coming. We shouldn’t feel rushed to make it happen yesterday. We are free to work hard, to strive to make connections in the neighborhood and meet people and serve our neighbors knowing that God is spinning the wheel, moistening the clay and gently but firmly shaping.

This post is a call to joyful submission for your peace and satisfaction. This is not a call to quit what you love and find some miserable way to serve God. The best thing to do now is to spend a lot of time with Him and ask him to mold you, to reveal his plan, to give you confidence to make decisions and trust, and to know Him and his heart and desires more.