We Want to Make Sense of This

Like most of you, I have read the array of opinions about the shocking massacre in Newtown, CT, last Friday. People blaming mental illness, people blaming gun laws, people chalking it up to free will, people saying its because we've taken God out of the schools (which is impossible to do!), even a certain religious group blaming the sexual morals of the country. While writing this article, I received an email suggesting that if we just put prayer back in the schools, we can avoid future tragedies.

We want answers - we want to know why. We can accept it just a little bit more if there's some sense to it. But this particular incident is more senseless, more disconcerting than previous tragedies. This one seems to have gotten under our skin more, grieved us more, and worried us more than just about every other.

An acquaintance of mine posted the idea that those who say "everything happens for a reason" are cruel, simplistic liars, and that some things happen for no reason at all. It certainly does feel that way. How can something like this make sense? How can this have happened for a reason under the auspices of a sovereign Being?

Others have posted words of comfort. On top of wanting reasons, we want comfort. We don't want to walk around scared, constantly worried about the welfare of our children going to school every day. We want some assurance that this could never happen to us, and yet we know that the surviving parents in Newtown thought the exact same thing less than a week ago.

I don't know about you, but out of all of this, nothing I've read has been satisfying. (This article won't be satisfying, either.) Most articles oversimplify the problem - but to be honest, the simplicity is appealing. Wouldn't it be nice and manageable if the problem were actually that simple?

My question, though, is not "How could this happen?", but "Why hasn't this happened more?" All the probable culprits, from mental illness to secularization of society to saturating ourselves with first-person-shooter video games, are traceable back to the fallenness of man. This is not to oversimplify the problem - it is complex journey back to the Fall. But since fallenness is the root cause, and all are fallen, why hasn't this happened more?

The answer is Grace. By God's grace, the destructive ferocity of our fallenness has not been allowed to rage unchecked. That is what Hell is - a completely grace-free zone where man’s fallenness is left unrestrained. Although this world is not Heaven (which is a completely grace-filled zone with no fallenness at all to restrain), this world has some measure of God's grace, and that grace protects us from ourselves.

This grace allows us the chance to know and receive Christ. It is the same grace that expelled Adam and Eve from the garden and prevented them from returning to seal their fallen state forever. Without this grace, we would not have the opportunity to repent. When that grace is removed, there will remain no chance at all to repent. This kind of horrible incident is not more frequent precisely because God's grace presently protects us from the depths of how far we've fallen.

I don't know why this happened or how to prevent it from happening again. I can't say the words to ease our fears. But I am grateful for the grace that prevents our fallenness from wreaking the havoc it is capable of.

"Can I join your secret club?"

"Can I join your secret men's club?"

I have heard this question a few times in the last month or so. On the one hand, I love the question, because it means that men are interested in a quiet experiment that we've been conducting. On the other had, I reel back at the question, because our quiet experiment was never intended to be a "secret club" that makes men feel left out.

In the words of Inigo Montoya, "Let me 'splain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up."

The speaker at the 2011 men's retreat, Ron Bennett, has co-authored a series of studies geared for men called HighQuest (http://www.highquest.info/overview.html). The idea intrigued us, primarily because the format of this series is unlike any men's study we've seen before.

The series is designed for men to disciple one another. The studies are not fill-in-the-blank workbooks, but guides that slowly introduce spiritual disciplines, and keep men in the same passage, but gives them enough freedom to focus on different parts of that passage. So, when the men come together, they have individually wrestled with God's Word without anyone guiding their answers to a foregone conclusion. But, since the men are all in the same passage, they can compare thoughts and learn from one another.

We decided that instead of having a big, church-wide big splash launch of Yet Another Program that Will Revolutionize Your Church But Will Last Only 6 Weeks Before the Enthusiasm Wanes, we decided to start small and without fanfare.

Four of us asked up to three other men to consider forming a HighQuest group. Then we just started meeting, each group at their own pace. In my group, we are four men who didn't really know each other that well coming into it. We have different church backgrounds, different experiences and habits, but the same desire to grow as men in Christ. I get every impression that all the groups are similar.

The feedback has been very positive across the board! I could list dozens of positive comments, but I think the most powerful statement is that after finishing book 1, we had a 100% return rate from all the groups for men wanting to do book 2. (There are 9 books total, about 10 to 12 weeks each.)

Starting in January, we are going to explain more about HighQuest and then invite more men to start more groups. Not a big program, not a big splash, and not the only good way to do men's groups. Just a lot of good experiences with a "quiet experiment."

My thanks to Chad Krizan for being our coordinator - he will be the one to organize the groups and get people started. But once the groups are started, they pretty much run at their own pace, take care of ordering their own books, and so on. This is one part of our continuing drive to realize our vision, which includes intentionally cultivating relationships in order to disciple our world for God's glory.

So, it's not a secret men's group. But we're about to go from "Beta testing" to production for those men who want to join in. And I have both personally experienced and observed in others real spiritual growth and an improving set of spiritual disciplines.

We don't like normal killers

Have you ever noticed how the bad guys in movies are often portrayed to have particularly abnormal attributes? They are scarred or have been through some horrible, traumatic event or were abused. They look different, they talk differently, and their thinking is radically different than "normal." They've got to be psychopaths. Being albino is a repeated excuse - apparently that affects your moral compass somehow. In movies, we make the bad guys really abnormal. The truth is: we don't like normal killers.

We like killers who are scary because they are different than we are - we don't like killers who are scary because they are the same as we are. We want them removed from us. We want to think that we are very different from people who would do such things. We don't want to entertain the possibility that someone like me could do such a thing given the same moral make up that I have ... or that I could do such a thing given the moral make up that I have. We're better than that, aren't we? So, we make killers in movies categorically worse than we are so that we can be better than they are.

In my opinion, the scariest killers in movies are the ones who are more like us.

Consider the tragic events of last weekend with Jovan Belcher killing Kasandra Perkins, the mother of his daughter, and then taking his own life. I'm not commenting on Belcher - I'm commenting on society and its reaction to Belcher. There has been a lot of talk about what kind of person he was - heated debate, in some cases. In some of those discussions, people want him to be monstrous so that we can demonize him, distance ourselves from him, and not face the scarier kind of killer - someone who is like us.

No one is all good or all bad. We all have redeeming qualities, and we all have horrid ugliness in our hearts (that may or may not be on display for others to see). Without passing judgment on what kind of person Belcher was overall, we are more like him than we want to admit. We get angry. We have arguments. We sometimes feel like hurting someone, or hurting ourselves. We share the heart sin that was manifested in his life as action sin.

I don't have a $1.9 million contract, I'm not a public figure, and I didn't claw my way into pro sports through the unlikely path of going undrafted. And yet, I am more like Belcher than makes me comfortable. I don't need to demonize Belcher in order to feel better about myself. What I need is Jesus, pure and simple ... and only. I need Jesus, but not to make me different than Belcher - I need Jesus to make me different than me.