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“Did God Break My Neck?”

The following is an excerpt from the book, Theology of Luck: Fate, Chaos, and Faith. In the book, authors Rob Fringer and Jeff Lane wrestle with the question of God’s role in the universe.

“Did God break my neck?”

Joshua Prager has struggled with this question for more than half his life. It is the question that has made him stop believing in God. On May 16, 1990, Joshua and his companions were traversing a winding hill in Jerusalem when a runaway truck carrying four tons of ceramic tiles hit them. One person was killed, many sustained serious injuries, and Joshua was paralyzed from the neck down.

Plagued by questions of why, Joshua set out twenty-two years after the crash to find the man who had been driving the runaway truck, seeking answers and some semblance of closure. Yet Joshua’s encounter with Abed, the driver of the runaway truck, left him well short of settled. Instead of showing remorse, Abed spent most of their conversation complaining about his own suffering, taking no responsibility for his part in the tragedy. But the most difficult part for Joshua was Abed’s suggestion that everything that happened that day was maktoob (the Arabic term for “letter,” or “written,” which communicates the idea that events are fated to occur for divine purposes). Abed described how he had lived an unholy life before the crash and how God had ordained this wreck to transform his journey. From where Abed sat, Joshua and all of the victims in the crash were part of a grand scheme that had been written by God to get Abed’s attention.

Overcome by a multitude of emotions, Joshua had to come to terms with the possibility that God might have caused these events. As difficult as this idea was, it actually provided him with some momentary relief. After all, if God had his hands in every activity, then there was likely some purpose behind it all, and at least Joshua had some answers.

Yet it was hard for Joshua to say thank you to this kind of God, especially in his current situation. The words of this reckless truck driver continued to haunt him. How could it be said it was God’s will? Eventually Joshua abandoned that belief. As he began to reflect and research, he realized that what others saw as divine orchestration could simply be a perfect storm of potentialities. Today, when he is asked about the cause of the accident, he describes how his neck snapped because of the lack of a proper headrest in his seat. He speaks about how the driver of the runaway truck had twenty-six driving violations, how the road they traveled was notorious for tragic accidents, with more than 144 reported and many casualties, and how bad the weather conditions were that day.

Joshua’s story may sound outlandish, but it is just one of many similar episodes. The times, places, and events are different, but the basic stories are the same. People faced with disease, death, or loss cry out for answers, and the best this world can give them is either purposeless chance or divine, random purpose.

God must have had a reason for the death of that child.

God must be trying to tell you something through the loss of that job.

That tragedy was meant as a judgment by God.
 God is in control; everything happens for a reason.


These types of phrases and our reactions to them say a lot about our understanding of God. (Or is it a misunderstanding?) Do we really believe God causes events like these as part of some divine plan? Do we really believe our lives, the good and the bad, are already written by God?

Check out the book Theology of Luck HERE.

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Bandersnatch: An Invitation to Explore Your Unconventional Soul

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I find myself recommending this book to everyone these days.

“Have you read Erika Morrison’s book Bandersnatch yet?” I ask, but of you course you haven’t, BECAUSE IT COMES OUT TODAY!!! Here’s an excerpt from one of the best books of 2015. Read it. Love it. Go buy it. Tell all your friends about it.

But first let me say this: She asks dangerous questions, friends, questions about the nature of who we are. Proceed with caution.

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“In July of 2000, when my husband and I got married, I was the ripe old age of nineteen and he was a seasoned twenty-four. Six months later I found out there was a baby in my belly, not on purpose. Then shortly after, another baby got in my belly not on purpose; then even less shortly after another baby got in my belly not on purpose.

Now, I know what you’re probably thinking: somebody needs to check the date on her birth control! But I promise you that nothing short of a medieval chastity belt with a rusted-shut lock could keep this Fertile Myrtle from getting pregnant. I don’t even trust the vasectomy my . . . never mind, I digress.

When our last boy was born in the left leg of my husband’s pajama pants (I should probably mention I was wearing them) while we rode the elevator up to the labor and delivery floor of Yale-New Haven Hospital, I had just birthed my third baby in three years. I’ll go ahead and do the math for you. I was twenty- three years young with a three-year-old wrapped around my thighs, a sixteen-month-old in one arm, a newborn in the other, and a godforsaken look of “Help!” writ across my face.

It was about this time that, as mentioned in the previous chapter, our marriage dove headlong into mess, we lost our income for too long to hang onto our home, and we experienced religious restlessness and a whole heap of other life challenges. Those early years redefined my own terms for what it meant to be drowning in the lifeblood leaking from every pore on my body. My internal equipment just wasn’t mature and qualified enough for my external reality, a reality that was demanding more of me than I could bear

What happened to me is what some psychologists call an identity crisis, a term coined in the early 1950s by Erik Erikson to refer to a state of confusion and unhappiness over one’s sense of self. If anyone had thought to ask me “Who are you?” in my good and lucid moments—which were few and far between—I could’ve answered with just about nothing.

I don’t know if you’ve ever felt the pain of not knowing who you are or if you feel that pain right now, but what can easily happen in that place of ache is that you start looking at other people, extracting the qualities you like about them, and injecting those qualities into your person as a substitute for what you don’t understand about yourself.

This is no bueno and that was what I did. In my naivete, I saw the people around me as more inherently gifted than I was, so I decided that self-fulfillment meant adopting their God-given gifts as my own. I looked at this person’s way of socializing and that person’s version of hospitality and another person’s artistic expression and began mimicking their nuances. Before I knew any better, I had squeezed my shape into several different ill-fitting molds at once, while cramming my own personhood into a tiny, overlooked corner in the nether regions of my body.

What I didn’t realize at the time was how devastated my spirit would become under the influence of everyone else’s borrowed qualities. Other people’s gifts and character traits are designed to enhance, enrich, and complement our own, but never act as substitute for them.

A healthy sense of self-identity seemed to be a luxury I didn’t have the currency for . . .”

(Excerpt from Erika Morrison’s book, Bandersnatch: An Invitation to Explore Your Unconventional Soul.)

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The cardinals make it look so easy. The honeybees make it look so easy. The catfish and the black crow, the dairy cow and the cactus plant, all make being created appear effortless. They arise from the earth, do their beautiful, exclusive thing and die having fulfilled their fate.

None of nature seems to struggle to know who they are or what to do with themselves.

But humanity is the exception to nature’s rule because we’re individualized within our breed. We’re told by our mamas and mentors that–like snowflakes–no two of us are the same and that we each have a special purpose and part to play within the great Body of God.

(If your mama never told you this, consider yourself informed: YOU–your original cells and skin-print, guts and ingenuity–will never ever incarnate again. Do you believe it?)

So we struggle and seek and bald our knees asking variations of discovery-type questions (Who am I? Why am I here?) and if we’re semi-smart and moderately equipped we pay attention just enough to wake up piecemeal over years to the knowledge of our vital, indigenous selves.

And yet . . . even for all our wrestling and wondering, there are certain, abundant factors stacked against our waking up. We feel and fight the low ceiling of man made definitions, systems and institutions; we fight status quo, culture conformity, herd mentalities and more often than not, “The original shimmering self gets buried so deep that most of us end up hardly living out of it at all. Instead we live out of all our other selves, which we are constantly putting on and taking off like coats and hats against the world’s weather.” ~Frederick Buechner

So, let me ask you. Do you know something–anything–of your true, original, shimmering self?

I don’t mean: Coffee Drinker, Jesus Lover, Crossfitter, Writer, Wife, Mama.

Those are your interests and investments.

I do mean: Who are you undressed and naked of the things that tell you who you are?

Who are you before you became a Jesus lover or mother or husband?

Who are you without your church, your hobbies, your performances and projects?

I’m not talking about your confidence in saying, “I am a child of God”, either. What I am asking a quarter-dozen different ways is this: within the framework of being a child of God, what part of God do you represent? Do you know where you begin and where you end? Do you know the here-to-here of your uniqueness? Do you know, as John Duns Scotus puts it, your unusual, individual “thisness”?

I can’t resolve this question for you, I can only ask you if you’re interested.

(Are you interested . . . ?)

Without being formulaic and without offering one-size-fits-all “how-to” steps, Bandersnatch: An Invitation to Explore Your Unconventional Soul is support material for your soul odyssey; a kind of field guide designed to come alongside the moment of your unfurling.

Come with me? And I will go with you and who will care and who will lecture if you wander around a little bit every day to look for your own and only God-given glow

If you’re interested, you can order wherever books and ebooks are sold.

Or, if you’d like to read the first three chapters and just see if Bandersnatch is something for such a time as the hour you’re in, click HERE.

All my love,

Erika

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Do I Provide Hospitality to My Children?

IMG_0214Write an article about providing hospitality to your children: this was the intriguing gauntlet thrown down by Kris Camealy, my friend and fearless leader over at Grace Table, a wonderful website with beautifully written articles about faith and food and all manner of things. Here’s a snippet of what I wrote:

On long afternoons, my boys and I, we go into the back alley behind our house on James Street and throw baseball in the shadow of an old warehouse-turned-apartment building. When cars come through the alley, we step aside and watch them pass. I nod. My sons give small, uncertain waves. When one of us misses the ball, we race towards Prince and wait for the traffic to stop before scurrying between the cars and retrieving it.

The ball thuds into our leather gloves and it sounds exactly like it did thirty years ago, when my dad and I played catch on the candy-green grass. It remains a conversation of sorts, and the red seams still spin like the rings of a planet.

To read the rest of the post, head on over to Grace Table. And while you’re visiting, leave a comment, then have a look around. There are some wonderful pieces of writing there.

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What I Saw When I Didn’t Have a Phone in My Hand

This post is brought to you by my friend and fellow writer, Lisa Bartelt. We’ve been sharing some ideas about what it means to live off line – I think today’s post will give you a few things to think about.

I woke up in Kenya to a stunning view of lush plant life and a dormant volcano. I showered and dressed and went downstairs to breakfast where Kenyan coffee and homemade English muffins greeted me. I chose a mug bearing the image of a cape buffalo and poured the coffee. I slathered peanut butter on the muffin and sat at the dining room table. I had the same view of the plants and the volcano as was in my room, and I was so giddy about my usual breakfast in such unusual circumstances that I reached for my phone to Instagram the moment.

Except my phone was upstairs in the room, on airplane mode, unavailable.

Before we left on this trip, our team of 15 agreed to keep our phone and technology use to a minimum. I fought the policy at first because my kids were still in the States with their grandparents, but for the good of the team, and possibly my soul, I agreed to limit myself.

If Day 1 was any indication, though, it wasn’t going to be easy.

As I ate that first breakfast, I looked at the window and asked myself why I wanted to Instagram this moment. Did I want to humble-brag, hashtag “blessed”? Or keep a record of every single second of the trip? Would sharing a picture on social media have increased my enjoyment of the moment?

We’ve been back from Kenya for more than a month, and I can still remember what I felt that morning. I can taste the English muffin. I never took a picture of it, yet the memory lives in my mind.

Later that day, we were to tour the boarding school campus where we were staying. Phil (my husband) and I decided we wouldn’t even take a camera with us so we could really listen and enjoy.

I didn’t take a single picture in Africa until we’d been there three or four days, not even when we saw seven monkeys in a tree outside our dorm, and I don’t regret it. Seeing a new place with the two eyes God gave me is a rare thing these days. Anytime we’re out exploring as a family, I’m snapping pictures with my phone, preserving memories, or looking up information. (Google, what kind of tree is this?)

Being present is a gift, and I’ve traded it in for a cheap substitute.

Without a phone or camera in my hands that first day, I had to use all of my senses. I looked around, but I also heard. Kenya in the morning is a noisy place. Birds and monkeys and other creatures I couldn’t identify. I felt the equatorial sun on my pale skin, and closed my eyes as the breeze swept across the mountain and circled me.

I noticed people. I looked them in the eye and said the Swahili equivalent of “hello” as we shook hands or waved. I breathed deep of the thin air.

This first day would set the tone for much of our time in Kenya, even when I did take pictures or sent a quick e-mail home.

When we returned to the States, the land of 4G and plentiful WiFi, I struggled to find a new normal. I scanned Facebook notifications and realized I hadn’t missed a whole lot while we were gone. When I might have used my phone as a distraction or because I was bored, I read a book. When I wanted to write a Facebook status about how I was feeling, I journaled instead.

Journaling is how the writer in me survived 10 days in Africa. I wrote and wrote and wrote about what I was feeling and experiencing and some days, I couldn’t get it all down on paper before I had to sleep at the end of the day.

Sharing sounds nice. I try to teach my kids to share with others. But I wonder if what I’m doing on social media is really sharing at all.

When I delayed my urge to post something online, I found that my thoughts turned out richer than if I had instantly shared them. In the same way that instant coffee is a poor stand-in for small-batch roasted pour-over coffee, I’m trying to trade in my instant thoughts for ones that take more time to develop.

I’m not giving up social media altogether, but the more time that passes since my time in Kenya, the harder it is to remember what it was like to limit my technology use. I have easily slipped back into the old habits. So maybe it’s time to enforce a self-imposed technology policy.

I know it doesn’t have to be drastic to make a difference. It can be as simple as putting down my phone. I was recently encouraged by these words from Shauna Niequist in her devotional, Savor:

“But as time went on, I realized that the really major things were happening all around me. I had been missing them because my phone had become an extension of my hand, and what it said to people is that just being with them isn’t enough. … Our phones and blogs and social media connect us in so many ways. Have you noticed any times in your life when they cut you off from what’s going on around you? Today, make a point to put down your phone to see what you’ve been missing.”

I can’t imagine missing our Africa experience because my phone was glued to my hand. The same needs to be true of my life here. What have I been missing? I can’t wait to find out.

Now, head on over to Lisa’s blog and check out some of her other great words.

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Too Early to Think About Christmas?

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Today’s guest post is brought to you by my friend, Erika Morrison. She is an artist, a fellow ragamuffin, and the author of one of my favorite new books, Bandersnatch. If you love creative non-fiction and need “an invitation to explore your unconventional soul,” then please, please, please support an amazing author and preorder her book here. Now, enjoy this incredible post.

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One day in Gubbio, a woman with severely deformed hands ran up to St. Francis. “Just touch them!” she pleaded as she raised her misshapen hands to him. Francis clasped her hands in his, gently moved his fingers over hers, and she was healed. What do you think she did next? What any Italian woman would do. She used her restored hands to cook. She went off and baked a cheesecake for Francis. He ate some of it and sent the rest back to her family.” —From Mystics and Miracles by Bert Ghezzi

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I called my mama’s cell phone on Christmas morning to wish her and my papa love and merry and sweet memories for their celebrations of the Baby’s birthday. She happened to be at the corner store picking up a few grocery items she’d forgotten to purchase for the banquet they were preparing for all their misfit friends, i.e. homeless and mentally ill.

On a day when most people gather with family and other familiars to drink eggnog with good cheer and eat star-shaped sugar cookies next to a warm fire and twinkle lights, my mom and dad had plans and a guest list that left something to be desired…

Or did they? And does it?

The table was set for seven:

Ralph is small in stature, 50-something years old, has hands that incessantly tremor and only one eye due to an accident involving a fork and his brother. Nowhere on earth is his real home, but when the sun goes down he sleeps in an abandoned house where he slides an old refrigerator over the door to bar himself in. A week before Christmas he was severely pistol-whipped for the 20 bucks he’d made panhandling that day and when my mama finds him in the hospital she speaks her sorrow over his aches and agonies. Contrary to how most people would respond in a similar situation, Ralph tells my mom: “I feel so blessed because Jesus made something good out if it!” To him, it was a miracle to spend seven days at St. Josephs Hospital where he could take a shower anytime he wanted (cleanliness matters to him very much; he doesn’t like to smell) and receive three meals a day (no one enjoys being hungry).

He was released just in time to arrive at the Yuletide feast. The next day he left a voice message saying how grateful he was to my parents for the food and t-shirts and socks they bought him and he wanted them to know how often he prayed to Jesus on their behalf.

Stanley has nervous gestures, salt and pepper afro-like hair and a jutting jaw with big buck teeth that add a childlike look to his elderly face. He’s somewhere between the age of 60 and 70…he admits to losing his mind and isn’t specifically sure of his exact birthday. Sometimes he says he’s a 24 year old college student, but his wrinkles tell a different tale. He’s the anxious kind, the sleep-on-a-concrete-slab kind, the eat-and-run kind and he held his head down while muttering to my mom: “Why are you having me over, again?” And my mom responded with a smile that can’t quit and four of the most precious words ever announced in the known universe: “Because you’re my friend.”

Crystal and Josh are in their late 20’s, an unlikely pair just trying to hold onto a shred of dignity in the midst of their mental health battles, in the midst of their extreme lack, in the midst of living on a planet that feels to them like a sucker punch in the face. Crystal is an open book, talked about her depression and pockets full of pills and how she wants to lose weight and quit smoking. Josh is fearful of everything and everyone and barely speaks at all, takes the prescriptions to numb the pain.

Tony is an old guy who got a young Rita pregnant and they didn’t end up making it to dinner.

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My mama isn’t a regular person, she’s a stranger in an increasingly strange land. She doesn’t want what most people want and is uncomfortable with mainstream pursuits and passions. She is the only one I know in my whole sphere of relationship who actually goes to the gutter to invite people into her home for the holidays and proceeds to make a Martha Stewart experience for the dead broke and back busted, like they are the real royalty. You should see her hands and the way they serve, how her arm muscles move when she kneads dough for the hungry.

My mom has a lot of rubber on her road because she doesn’t just talk about good works and good ideas, she goes to the razor edge of her comfort zone and takes a risky headlong dive into the unknown. Kingdom come is her anthem, a full-bodied chorus ringing between her rib bones; making heaven come to earth is the only way for her not to feel like such an exile.

(She has an instantaneous and uncanny capability of looking into a person’s features and detecting an actual image of the Divine.)

A lot of people have hypothesized about the first Christmas, but I’ve never read a single commentary saying that the Bethlehem Baby was born in a clean and sweet smelling barn and it gets me to wondering: Maybe He came dirty and messy and self-humiliating as an invitation for us to follow Him by doing likewise with our own Christmases?

I mean, aren’t those His own words?

“Follow me.”

Not “Follow me when you feel like it or if you feel like it or as your schedule allows”.

It was and is simply “Follow Me” and here I’m preaching to yours truly; trying not to bore myself with the un-truth; fighting the lies and fears that keep me under the low ceiling of comfort and safety…fighting the lies and fears that keep me sane when I should be going off mad like grace or gunpowder.

(If the world is sane, then make me psycho.)

The world is wide open, a yawning chasm waiting to be filled with love like the hands and feet and warm blood of Jesus–that would be us. Losing yourself makes you grow.

What better way to celebrate the Baby than by reproducing the mess into which He was born?

Maybe instead of having the perfect Christmas plans, we go instead to the stable and give birth to a festive occasion that welcomes chaos and unpredictability, odor and dirt and discomfort.The presence of holiness appears to favor inauspicious events.

In the economy of an upside down Kingdom the gutters are the real palaces and the toothless vagabonds are the real princes, while the rich go begging for Bread.

Look up to the “poor”.

Let them touch you instead, maybe we are the ones in need of healing.

And have yourself an imperfect little [next] Christmas.

Kingdom Come.

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Beautiful, right? Now head on over and preorder Erika’s book. I’ve read it. It’s amazing. You won’t be disappointed.

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How I Organize My Books

photo-33Today I have the honor of sharing my bookshelves over at Modern Mrs. Darcy, a blog run by my friend and fellow writer, Anne Bogel. Head over there to see the book I’m proudest to own, the books I keep within reach, and how I organize my books (spoiler: I don’t).

If you like to read books or talk about books or if you just enjoy a well-written blog, then you need to add Modern Mrs. Darcy to your list of must-read blogs. Check it out.