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Some excerpts from my favorite blog posts from the last week(ish):

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The crowd has become unwieldy, people stumble about, knocking into furniture and each other. Sometimes, they assist one another, smiling with understanding. Sometimes, they grumble and create distance. Some leave.

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My nose is fine, thanks, better every day, but the reminder was a worthwhile one.

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Tomorrow marks seven years of blogging. In seven years, I’ve learned a couple of things about this process.

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Every other Saturday morning, I see them lined up at the top of the hill when I drive by on my way to get coffee or hit the dollar store.  People waiting to get food from what I can only assume is the local food pantry.  They are in the parking lot of the Catholic Church, and sometimes I see them leaving with big, brown paper bags.  I have never stopped.

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We talked about what cool means, and how growing up is hard. And how there is always a new growing up to do. She worried she was running out of time. She said, “I only have five more years.”

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So let’s dig in. Let’s open our eyes and engage critically. Let’s wrestle together with what it looks like to be not conformed to the world but transformed.

It’s so easy to rant and rave about politics, to make fun of the other side, to make bold claims about the improved world your candidate will usher in.

But when you drive past that forlorn young woman walking in the opposite direction on the road’s shoulder, and your kids are screaming in the back seat, and you’re already running late, will you turn your car around and give her a ride?

It’s so easy to look up socio-political facts on Google, to find books about Stigler or Keynes, to put together an argument on the benefits of national health care or the drawbacks of increasing taxes on the wealthy.

But when that guy at church who loves to talk (and you know he lives alone) sees you through the crowd, do you pretend not to see him, or do you cut through your hurry and find him, offer him your time?

It’s so easy to mail in a check to your local community center or to put $20 in the plate at church during Christmas.

But when you ask that person you gave a ride to how you can help, and they look at you through blurry eyes and don’t say “diapers” or “food” or “money for utilities,” but instead say, “I could really just use a friend – would you hang out with me sometime?” then what will you do?

We are so comfortable remaining among the easy arguments, learning things that make us sound intelligent, doing things that require so little. But there’s another level, a deeper level that we are called to. Another plane of engagement.

What will you do?

I would have preferred that all of the election hubbub would have died down by now. Alas. There are a lot of Christians still in mourning regarding the next four years in the United States, and there are also many swimming in a sense of euphoria. Apparently the winner of the recent election will either solidify the implosion of our nation or cause the Kingdom of the Heavens to drop down among us, unhindered, in its full glory.

Let me reiterate: all of this passion and certainty exhibited by many of my fellow Christians is based on an election. This is very interesting to me, that so much of who we think we will become seems to have already been decided by a show of hands last Tuesday. Disappointment or encouragement based on democratic outcomes, I can understand. Devastation or elation, however, strike me as naive responses. Do we really believe that the best or the worst is now destined to happen? That we can now sit back and let the dominoes fall as they will?

Having written quite a bit about hope recently, I’m especially disheartened (read: dumbfounded) by how some people (mostly white, evangelical Christians) have allowed their hope to be stolen by an election that didn’t go the way they wanted it to go. Literally. I’m talking despair and dire prophecies about the future. Warnings of impending doom. Cries that they have lost their liberty.

The end is near.

Apparently.

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Remember how those guys in the book of Matthew tried to stick Jesus in a difficult spot by asking him about paying the imperial tax to Caeser?

“Teacher, we know that you are a man of integrity. You aren’t swayed by others, because you pay no attention to who they are; but you teach the way of God in accordance with the truth. Is it right to pay the imperial tax to Caesar or not? Should we pay or shouldn’t we?”

Tough one. If Jesus says yes, then he’s endorsing the brutal, Roman occupation. If he says no, then these guys can report him to the local government for fomenting resistance and he’ll be imprisoned or executed.

But Jesus knew their hypocrisy. “Why are you trying to trap me?” he asked. “Bring me a denarius and let me look at it.” They brought the coin, and he asked them, “Whose image is this? And whose inscription?”

“Caesar’s,” they replied.

Then Jesus said to them, “Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.”

I love that.

“Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.”

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Consider the following verse:

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His great mercy has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the winner of the recent election resurrection of Jesus Christ (1 Peter 1:3) (emphasis and strike-through mine).

Christians, stop belly-aching (or partying) about the recent election results. Get busy doing what God has called you to do. Maybe the election result will make your current mission easier. Maybe it will make it more challenging. Whatever.

“Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.”

Christians, regardless of your political leanings, can we somehow remember that it’s because of his great mercy that we’ve been born again to a living hope? There are probably a few things you should be giving back to Caesar. I’m fairly certain that hope isn’t one of them.

Have you ever approached a difficult time in your life only for God to sort of step back and say, “Good luck!” You enter the darkness and you wonder what the heck you’re doing there and you start to have serious discussions with yourself in your own head about turning back or moving forward. Giving up or going on.

If so, you know how Bilbo feels in The Hobbit when Gandalf leaves him and the dwarfs to walk the dark path through Mirkwood alone. They run out of food. They run out of energy. They run out of ideas. At one point, the dwarfs convince Bilbo to climb a tree just to see if there’s any sight of the forest’s edge. Are they close? Are they almost through?

Bilbo climbs up among the tree tops. He feels a beautiful breeze. He smiles at the dancing butterflies. But all that he can see, stretching for mile after mile, is the endless forest. He returns to the forest floor, depressed. And because he had seen nothing good to report, the entire company lost their hope.

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This is the problem we face, isn’t it? Year after year, we feed our hope with such meager things. But the time eventually comes when we want to SEE the goal – not just sense it. Not just believe it’s getting close. So we stop hiking, we climb a tree, and we look around.

And we see nothing but an endless path through a dark and tangled wood.

But this is the problem with depending on our sight, the problem with limiting our hope to what we can see with our own eyes. Bilbo couldn’t recognize the fact that the tree he climbed was in a massive hollow surrounded by swells and that, in fact, just beyond the next small hill was the end of the forest road. He lost his hope, and very soon after, because he had no hope, he lost his way.

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Too often we allow the level of our hope to hinge on that which we can see.

Faith is the confidence that what we hope for will actually happen… Hebrews 11:1

Which I guess is why the best thing to do when the time comes to give up is to keep going.

We’ll give her back to you in about an hour and a half.

I sit in the hospital cafe, drinking Starbucks-in-a-glass-jar. I glance at the window to see if this winter storm has arrived but it gets dark early these days, and all I see is my own reflection against the premature night. The cafe is mostly empty, save a few nurses who talk in hushed tones and laugh to themselves. I imagine it must feel good, having a chance to laugh after hours of trying not to seem too carefree in the face of patients’ uncertainty.

Strange that it takes a visit to the hospital to remember how blessed I am. How we have a wonderful place to live, even if it is subterranean, and how those four kids will swarm us when we walk through the door. How the older two will sit and listen to me read The Hobbit, marveling at a world of goblins and wizards and adventure that leads to a dragon, then home again. How the younger two, since the time change has their sleep confused, climb into bed with us each morning, coaxing and squirming and cuddling.

Such blessed confusion.

There really is so much good in my life. So many reasons to hope, in spite of difficult circumstances. So many reasons to trust, even when I can’t see very far on a cold, almost-winter’s night.

Mr. Smucker? You can come back to see her now.