Running With Plan B

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 00:00:00 GMT

A special report on This American Life follows the lives of several people currently living what they unequivocally call "Plan B." Host Ira Glass expounds his thoughts on an informal poll and a seemingly universal human reality. He asked a room of hundred people to think back to the beginning of adulthood when they were first formulating a plan for their lives. He called it Plan A, "the fate you were sure fate had in store." He then asked those who were still following this plan to raise their hands. Only one person confessed she was still living Plan A; she was 23 years old.

It seems a trend among us: There is the thing we plan on doing with our lives, and then there's the thing we end up doing, which becomes our life. Here, Christians often have a nuanced view of Plan A: it is God's plan they are trying to follow. But there is still very much an initial picture of what this plan, and subsequently our lives, will—or should—look like. God's best becomes something like a divine Plan A, while any other plan leads the follower to something else.

But akin to the statistics in the room with Mr. Glass, it is likely that the number of Christians who find themselves living the plan they first imagined are also few and far between. For some, this is seen as good news. Many discover along their carefully laid out plans that they are doing far more leading than being led, and God seems to mercifully redirect them. "Many are the plans in a human heart," the proverb reads, "but it is the Lord's purpose that prevails." Others find the journey with God from Plan A to B to C to D an interesting part of the pilgrimage itself, maybe even the gift of following an unfathomable creator, a creator who we discover is far more creative than we! Yet there are still many others who walk away from Plan A thoroughly defeated. Regretful turns and drastic detours may now be behind us, but the deviation from the journey is writ large before us. We have failed at Plan A, the plan we believed divinely inspired; God's best is now merely God's backup. Wrestling with the guilt or disappointment of such a deviation can be found with or without the Christian spin.

When life turns out to be something you didn't plan on, when missteps and unplanned detours loom with guilt, a life of alternative routes and broken roads seems certain. It is easy to wonder in despair what it means to have missed God's best, and to believe that somehow God must now step back into the picture, disappointed, and find a secondary plan for your life. I find it equally despairing to encounter those who maintain they are living God's Plan A and smugly insist it was their own virtue that accomplished it. How significant, then, are Christ's words to his despairing disciples after an evening of mistakes, both to those of us who have ever felt the sting of falling off track and to those of us who want a pat on the back for getting it right. To these men who repeatedly failed to follow his instructions, Jesus simply said, "Rise, let us be going."

A wise friend of mine says that following God is something like following the directions on a GPS system. At the beginning of the journey, the plan for arriving at the desired destination is before you. But when you accidentally turn left or are forced to take an unforeseen detour, the computer doesn't scold you. It doesn't force you to start over or announce that you can no longer make it to your final destination because you have ruined the route. In fact, it doesn't even make you feel guilty. The end still in mind, it simply adjusts the plan from that point onward, as if the "wrong" turn was a part of the journey all along. The destination has not changed. Plan A may have switched to Plan B in your mind, but the outcome remains the goal, not self-invented praise for the journey.

Although Blaise Pascal was a mathematician who saw the created world as one of equations and precision, he saw the God who created this world as one who is innately personal, guiding, and accommodating. "[T]he God of the Christians is a God of love and consolation," Pascal wrote in his Pensees, "a God who fills the soul and heart of those whom he possesses, a God who makes them inwardly aware of their wretchedness and his infinite mercy, who united himself with them in the depths of their soul...who makes them incapable of having any other end but him."(1)

What if the God you followed is well aware that there are turns in life we can never undo, choices we cannot erase, and detours we were never expecting? Some of these turns God no doubt laments with us. But God is never deterred by our position. Plan B may be a phrase you use to punish yourself or others, but the God of Christianity is not any farther away in what you are calling Plan A than Plan A or C or D. In fact, God sees only one plan: "For I know the plans I have for you," declares the LORD to a struggling people, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future." In this, God is ever at work redirecting your steps, while the end—God alone—remains the same. Despite broken roads and secondary paths, God is forever showing that the destination is unchanging, and in the end, "God's best" comes into our lives not because of our own careful steps toward the divine but because of divine steps toward us. The God of the Christian is one whose plans are all-encompassing, whose arm is not too short to save, who goes the extra mile, and who takes every detour without mention, that even one will not remain lost.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity writer at Ravi ZachariasInternational Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Blaise Pascal, Pensees (London: Peguin Books, 1993), 141-142, emphasis mine.

An Evangelist's Journey

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Having turned thirty-five this year, I am now the age that my parents were when they became Christians. I was a baby and we lived in Australia. My father, a university lecturer, had been asking deep questions about purpose and meaning for a while when God dramatically broke into his life. Up late one night, marking some of his students' papers, he had an overwhelming vision in which he saw his own life, including all of his regrets, from the perspective of Jesus. At the end of this, he saw Christ on the cross and found himself on his knees. Having been raised by an atheist father, he did not know much about the Bible. The only phrase he could remember was "Lord I believe, help my unbelief," and so after saying this, he got up off the floor a changed man. My mother made her own decision to follow Christ six months later after a lot of questioning and searching. My sister and I were now members of a Christian family.

A couple of years later we moved back to the UK for my father to study theology and prepare for church leadership. He is a gifted and passionate evangelist. Some of my earliest childhood memories are around people discovering Christ for themselves in our home. I still frequently meet people who came to know the Lord through my parents. Sharing what we had discovered as such good news was a completely natural part of our lives. It was something that happened in the course of mundane tasks and daily friendships. It wasn't something I saw anybody worrying about.

When I started school, I remember meeting children and asking them if they wanted to become Christians. Through a couple of them, their whole families ended up coming to know the Lord and we are still in touch on Facebook now! It wasn't until secondary school that I really thought about being an evangelist myself. I remember feeling very nervous on my first day at this new school; I didn't know anyone in my class and I prayed with my family for a Christian friend. On the bus on the way home, I chatted to a friend I had made that day and we started talking about God. She was very open and the next day at school she announced that she was now a Christian. This girl became my closest friend over the next years; God had answered my prayer.

As the teenage years kicked in I became involved with a ministry of YWAM, which was called Kings Kids. We went all over the world doing performing arts and evangelism in the summer holidays. The leaders were absolutely phenomenal Christians who believed that children and young people could minister in the power of the Holy Spirit. In 1991, shortly after the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, a team of us went to the Czech Republic. Thousands were on the streets of Prague and we were performing on Charles Bridge and Wensceslas Square. As a fifteen year old I was given the opportunity to share testimonies and preach the gospel in the open air to these crowds. The leaders seemed to think this was absolutely natural and normal; age was no barrier to seeing the Kingdom of God come. Amazing miracles happened on that trip; we saw God at work first hand. In 1994 a team of us were in Uzbekistan and the national television crew came to film what we are doing. I was to preach in this closed country, God again opening such an amazing door.

Kings Kids laid a foundation of mission in my life and at university quite a few of my friends became Christians. It was at Oxford that I discovered the need for apologetics in evangelism. I remember spending eight hours one day talking to a Jewish friend about the Christian faith. He was terrifyingly intelligent and kept on asking me questions; he had only popped around to my room to borrow something but as we fell into conversation I faced a barrage of questions and objections with no let up. Another friend had grown up in a Christian family but was now studying biology and had become a born-again atheist under the influence of his hero Richard Dawkins. After many late night conversations he confided his despair at the prospect of a godless, hopeless universe but I was unable to convince him otherwise. The need for equipping in apologetics was very real to me. Meanwhile, forty of my friends came to hear Michael Green preach at a mission event and one of the most hardened anti-Christians of the lot secretly signed up for the follow-up course. "Don't tell anyone—but will you come with me?" was the message slid under my door. What an incredible joy to pray with her only three weeks later.

Discovering a passion for evangelism and preaching was a slow process for me; there wasn't really a moment when I suddenly knew this was what I was called to be. But from childhood into my teens and then at university, many encouraged me and gave me opportunities to share the gospel I had so grown to love. For all of those people—and for the power of Christ to change lives—I am incredibly thankful.

Amy Orr-Ewing is director of programmes for the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics and UK director for Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Oxford, England.

Christianity Without Christ?

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Paul Tillich, the noted existentialist theologian, traveled to Asia to hold conferences with various Buddhist thinkers. He was studying the significance of religious leaders to the movements they had engendered. Tillich asked a simple question. "What if by some fluke, the Buddha had never lived and turned out to be some sort of fabrication? What would be the implications for Buddhism?" Mind you, Tillich was concerned with the indispensability of the Buddha—not his authenticity.

The scholars did not hesitate to answer. If the Buddha was a myth, they said, it did not matter at all. Why? Because Buddhism should be judged as an abstract philosophy—as a system of living. Whether its concepts originated with the Buddha is irrelevant. As an aside, I think the Buddha himself would have concurred. Knowing that his death was imminent, he beseeched his followers not to focus on him but to remember his teachings. Not his life but his way of life was to be attended to and propagated.

So, what of other world religions? Hinduism, as a conglomeration of thinkers and philosophies and gods, can certainly do without many of its deities. Some other major religions face the same predicament.

Is Christianity similar? Could God the Father have sent another instead of Jesus? May I say to you, and please hear me, that the answer is most categorically No. Jesus did not merely claim to be a prophet in a continuum of prophets. He is the unique Son of God, part of the very godhead that Christianity calls the Trinity. The apostle Paul says it this way:

"[Christ] is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible... He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together... For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross."(1)

Moreover, Jesus himself prayed, "[Father] you have given [me] authority over all people to give eternal life to all whom you have given [me]. And this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent."(2)

As many have observed, Christianity is Christ. Indeed, Englishman John Stott writes, "If Jesus was not God in human flesh, Christianity is exploded. We are left with just another religion with some beautiful ideas and noble ethics; its unique distinction has gone."(3) At the very heart of Christianity, Jesus is the word and the incarnation. And it changes everything.

Ravi Zacharias is founder and chairman of the board of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries.

(1) Colossians 1:15-20.
(2) John 17:2-3
(3) John Stott, Basic Christianity (London: Intervarsity Press, 1971), 8.

Leaving the Ninety-Nine

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 00:00:00 GMT

"You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. I did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious thing; the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms. The Prodigal Son at least walked home on his own feet. But who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape?"(1)

C.S. Lewis, the self-named most reluctant and dejected convert in all England, penned this now famous and oft-quoted account of his conversion. Unlike some who decided to follow Jesus with urgency and willingness of heart, Lewis came kicking and screaming! While some may resonate with Lewis's dogged reluctance, others gladly pursue the path home.

Lewis's reluctant conversion fascinates me, but I am even more moved by the glimpse into God's character his story affords. For Lewis reminds us of the love of God that relentlessly pursues even the reluctant prodigal who would turn and run in the opposite direction in order to try and escape God's gracious embrace. The God revealed in Lewis's account is a God in pursuit. Perhaps this God is even particularly enamored with the reluctant prodigal, leaving the ninety-nine sheep, as Jesus insists in Luke's gospel, to pursue the one lost sheep.

The apostle Paul, who described himself as "the chief of sinners," often talked about this God in pursuit. In what is perhaps the apex of his letter to the Romans, Paul writes: "For while we were still helpless, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will hardly die for a righteous person; though perhaps for the good someone would dare even to die. But God demonstrates God's own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, having now been justified by his blood, we shall be saved from the wrath of God through him. For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of the Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by his life" (Romans 5:1-11).

Paul's progressive description of our condition before God reveals the depths of God's love. First, Paul notes that God's love pursues humanity "while we were still helpless." Then, Paul states that God loves "while we were yet sinners," and finally, God loves and reconciles humanity even "while we were enemies." Indeed, Paul insists on God's great love towards even the vilest offender through the life and death of Jesus. He doesn't make this claim as one who stands removed from the vilest offender. He makes it as a part of his own testimony. "It is a trustworthy statement, deserving full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, among whom I am foremost of all."(2)

But Paul's recognition of God's grace didn't end with himself. As Paul grasped the depths of God's reconciling love in his own life, it led him to proclaim that same reconciliation for others. To the Corinthian church he wrote, "Now all these things are from God, who reconciled us through Christ, and gave us the ministry of reconciliation, namely, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and he has committed to us the word of reconciliation" (2 Corinthians 5:18-19).

In reflecting on the reconciling work of God in Christ, scholar Miroslav Volf draws a pointed application: "God does not abandon the godless to their evil but gives the divine self for them in order to receive them into divine communion through atonement, so also should we-whoever our enemies and whoever we may be."(3) For the Christian who recognizes her own inclusion into God's gracious love, she cannot help but include others in the good news of God's reconciling love in Jesus—even with those she might deem her enemies.

We may struggle as reluctant converts, or we may not fully grasp the depths of God's great reconciliation. But perhaps as we are moved to see a common inheritance as those in need of saving, we might be drawn deeper into the embrace of this God in pursuit.

Margaret Manning is a member of the speaking and writing team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Seattle, Washington.

(1) C.S. Lewis in Surprised by Joy as cited in James Loder, The Logic of the Spirit (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998), 311.
(2) See 1 Timothy 1:12-17.
(3) Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996), 23.

For the Weak

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 00:00:00 GMT

After fifteen years and nearly 17,000 miles, an unlikely fleet was set to make port on the beaches of Britain. On January 29, 1992, three massive containers on a cargo ship from Hong Kong crashed into the Pacific Ocean during a storm. The containers were filled with brightly colored bathtub toys bound for the United States. Instead, 29,000 little plastic ducks, frogs, beavers, and turtles began a journey that would be carefully monitored by children, oceanographers, and newscasters alike.

After a decade and a half, the tiny bobbing friends have traveled past Japan and back to Alaska, drifted deliberately down the Bering Strait and past the length of Greenland, and carefully floated down the eastern coastline of the United States. They have persevered through storms that would have left boats and crews in dire straits. They patiently endured four years frozen in ice as they crossed the Arctic Ocean. They have arrived at various intervals on various shores, faded and tattered by sun and surf, some with animal bites and barnacles to show for the journey. But each smiling plastic face seems to return with an ironic confession: the smallest vessels on tumultuous seas are not necessarily the most vulnerable.

Life is far more than an attempt to keep our heads above water, and yet at times it feels a suited metaphor. Like tiny rubber ducks in an oceanic bathtub, we are tossed about the rocks of fear and anger, pulled under by currents of despair and disappointment, and broken at times by the journey. Human fragility is often as startlingly obvious as the image of a bath toy in the Bering Strait. We are at times almost averse to this fragility, whether seen in ourselves or in others. Fighting to keep afloat in an unpredictable sea, we take on distracting cargo and build defensive walls—anything that makes us feel less like tiny vessels lost at sea and more like giant ships passing in the night.

But metaphors of strength can be misleading, and vulnerability is often misunderstood. Though we may be reluctant to hear it, there is one tradition that clearly puts forth the story of a fragile and fleeting humanity. Jesus spoke readily of his own death and wept at the grave of a friend. The apostle Paul wrote of our bodies as "jars of clay," words hastening back the image of David who lamented that he had become like "broken pottery." Yet even well beyond the fragile images of humanity given in Scripture, the vulnerability of a God-man comes into focus and redefines all of our terms. The image of Jesus on the cross further turns our understanding of fragility on its head, challenges every discomfort with brokenness, and redirects our associations of weak and strong. In these images of Christ we discover a vulnerability of God that makes our greatest images of strength seem somehow childish. In his cruciform journey, God uses the weak to shame the strong, a suffering Son to meet the wounds of creation, and the vulnerable image of a broken savior who comes near.

The Christian profession is that it is by the Cross which we live, by a seemingly weak vessel that we are brought home. Christ is not an escape raft for the hard realities of this world. On the contrary, he calls to us in our weakness and reminds us that it is not unfamiliar to him. Through tumultuous waters, he beckons us to see there is potential in fragility, mercy in affliction, and life beyond and within the journey that currently consumes us. Something like the image of tiny ducks arriving after an unlikely voyage, the journey of a soul to the cross is one in which Christ redirects our thoughts on vulnerability, the weak and the strong. And along the way, God is aware of every last and fragile vessel, going after even one that is lost, longing to gather us unto himself like a hen bringing together thousands of chicks under her wings.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

Dark Though It Is

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 00:00:00 GMT

"My soul is too cramped for you to enter it," lamented Augustine. Later he would find this cry itself something of an answer from God in the first place. But how familiar these initial attempts to approach God with a dreaded sense of failure seem to be... Is it God who first approaches? Or we who have to first clear the way? Might God approach even in our restless longing, even as our souls are cramped with baggage and the journey at times seems more a fight with self than a means of meeting the Other?

Anne Lamott begins her story with borrowed words of W.S. Merwin: "We are saying thank you and waving, dark though it is."(1) She describes darkness in a broken world and an unpredictable childhood, the dimming affects of self-loathing, addiction, fear, guilt, and grief. And she somehow describes the presence of one to thank regardless, one whose light gradually appeared through a world that slowly cracked into a thousand pieces—maybe even cracking mercifully?

Whether the journey of faith is a miracle or it is more like a gift that requires some assembly, I'm not sure. "Man is born broken," quotes Lamott. "He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue." How else does one come to know the Father of Light in the house of a father who despised Christianity, their family codes solemnly holding everyone to unbelief? "It was like we all signed some sort of loyalty oath early on," she writes, "agreeing not to believe in God in deference to the pain of my father's cold Christian childhood." Mercifully or ironically, there was also a sense of moral obligation preached in her household, a clear (even disheartening) scale of good and bad, acceptable and insufficient. Thus, "I bowed my head in bed and prayed, because I believed—not in Jesus—but in someone listening, someone who heard." Apparently, the cosmic umpire so many know and fear lurches even in atheist households.

Yet from the beginning, there were clues that this someone was relational—in the differences she saw in the social structures of her and her friends' houses, in the Catholic family who offered images of God both compelling and odd, in her need to please the one who listened, like one might a foreign, unpredictable king. "This God could be loving and reassuring one minute, sure that you had potential, and then fiercely disappointed the next, noticing every little mistake and just in general what a fraud you really were."

And yet maybe even broken even images of God somehow matter, as God approaches to shatter even these. Lamott describes a life of encounters with God in places of desperation—in a drunken haze, in a broken vehicle, on the bathroom floor, in deaths and in birth and in dying, in her own vehement denials. When the English teacher she loved became a born-again Christian, she wept at the betrayal and challenged this teacher on everything—"every assertion, even when she was right." She willed not to believe, even as her own rebellion held the sneaking suspicion that God might be near.

So perhaps faith really is, as John Calvin insists, more a gift than a discovery. If so, I like her image of it better than most—like a sloppily wrapped package that repulses with absurdity yet somehow compels you to claim it for its beauty nonetheless. Wholly unable and unwilling to see or to seek God, a reluctant Lamott would yet claim the gift of faith. "I knew beyond any doubt that it was Jesus," she said at the one who came so near she eventually stopped denying it. "And I was appalled."

Dark and difficult, holy and absurd though it is, Lamott is right: It's funny where we look for salvation, and where we actually find it.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Quotes taken from Anne Lamott's, Traveling Mercies (New York: random House, 1999).

Hopeful Sojourns or Uncertain Journeys

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Three years ago, I traveled to Malaysia for work with our friends Josie and Alan. I was pregnant at the time, and Josie, a warm and generous person, was offering us all kinds of advice, as she herself had recently become a mother to Evan. Less than a week later, we received news that Josie had been diagnosed with lymphoblastic leukemia. I remember Alan weeping as he broke the news to us. Overnight the life and future of this young family had taken a tragic turn. Soon afterwards, Alan lost his wife, and Evan his mom, to cancer.

This is not an isolated incident. It is not an exaggeration to say that none of us knows what life will bring us. Regardless of who we are, whom we know, what worldview we hold, or how rich or powerful we are, we are not privy to the next second of our lives. We all have gasped at the unexpected outcomes of the lives of people we know, and we ourselves have also not been spared the unexpected turns of life—both for better and for worse.

The uncertainties of life can naturally leave us feeling anxious and insecure. When life serves us suffering, is there an anchor? And how certain is this hope, if we hold any at all?

A story is told of a widow who had lost her only son. First she lost her husband and then her child. How devastating it must have been for her. In a society where male relatives offered the only stability and status a woman could have, her son would have been her only source of support, hope, and strength. Being the only son, she probably invested all of herself into him. He was quite literally her hope and her future.

Now that he was dead, her only hope was gone. She faced an uncertain future. As she followed his body to its place of burial, she was no doubt weeping and overwhelmed with grief and pain. Life held nothing for her anymore, she likely thought. We are told that when Jesus saw her, his heart went out to her. Unlike many situations in the gospels, this widow did not ask or request for help. Yet Jesus reached out to her. "Do not weep," he said in an attempt to comfort, seeing her pain, her situation, and feeling along with her. "Don't cry."

He then did something that no right-minded Jew would do. He touched the casket and said to the dead man, "Arise." He risked being ritually unclean according to Jewish law by touching the casket and his unfathomable words to a dead man no doubt seemed insane to those around him. But the young man immediately got up and spoke. Nothing was recorded about the mother's reaction, but we can imagine that she was both shocked and overjoyed. One moment she was completely hopeless, and the next, her entire world was returned to her.

What an ending to a sorrowful story. Perhaps her life circumstance somehow reflects the situation you are in. Is there someone in your life, a relationship, a situation in which you have given up hope? Have you wondered if life can be a hopeful journey or if it is simply a collection of uncertain events?

In this story, Jesus touched death and reversed it; bringing life out of what was dead, making pure what was impure. He did this throughout his ministry again and again, touching those who were dead to touch—whether corpses or lepers or women without voice or means—and bringing healing and new meaning into life. He not only offered hope, but embodied that hope for lives in need of knowing what is real.

In encountering the uncertainties of life and death, Jesus's promise can remain comforting today, though perhaps not always with the result we desire or expect. "Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid." This is both a personal and real promise—that Christ is somehow present as we journey through life. And many have come to know this as a hope unlike any other. For the widow, his presence in the midst of her pain was the first spark of life.

Knowing that Jesus is with me in the struggles and darkness of life keeps me from surrendering completely to my fears and insecurities when uncertainty or tragedy is near. The hope that a Christian clings to is a promise that is affirmed by the God who came near: "Do not be afraid, for I am with you." God may not revive our deceased loved ones like he did for the widow, but we are assured that despite all life serves us we will not walk through any earthly sojourn alone.

I'Ching Thomas is associate director of training at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Singapore.

Of Truth and Trees

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 00:00:00 GMT

India is the largest movie-producing nation in the world, and to grow up in India is to grow up in a culture where anything on the screen brings a crowd. Romance on the screen was, at the time I was growing up, very typical. Yet since kissing was not permitted, romantic encounters routinely consisted of a "boy meets girl" scenario that ended with starry-eyed expressions, each chasing the other around trees, with melodramatic music playing. It is best described as grownups playing peek-a-book in a jungle. Just as the long-awaited moments of embrace came, the scene would change and the audience would applaud.

An Indian comedian who wrote a question-and-answer column in a national film magazine was once asked, "What is the difference between love on the Western screen and love on the Indian screen?" His answer was one word: "Trees."

In the existential questions of our lives and in the struggles of our minds, the trees that separate the worlds of cultures are numerous. Behind all of our superficial distinctives lie the weighty differences—those of values, religion, and worldview. In my work of offering a defense of the Christian faith, God has given me the privilege of speaking on every continent and in dozens of cities, often to those holding a radically different outlook on spiritual matters than my own. I know first-hand that religious issues can be discussed without compromise, yet without animosity, with gentleness and with respect. While specific beliefs may offend, it is possible to present them without being personally offensive.

I once stayed in Southeast Asia, where I met a wonderful Muslim man. He was the room attendant at my hotel. Every day when he came in to make my room, he would also make some tea, and we would talk. On his day off, he took me sightseeing, and we visited many places of worship. I will never forget him. I wish more people showed the kindness that he did. And that is the point I wish to make: We can be worldviews apart without anger or offense. What I believe, I believe very seriously. Indeed the foundation of my entire life's work is the conviction that Jesus Christ alone is the way, the truth, and the life. Being myself persuaded of this, I am compelled to persuade others. Yet far more than persuasion of tenets or dogma, my hope is to present a life of gentleness and respect, undergirded with love for fellow souls and the God who made us.

In a world where the trees that separate us are large and discussions of ultimate truth often generate more heat than light, I hope that we can together consider truth in the open.

Ravi Zacharias is founder and chairman of the board of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries.

The First Shall Be Last

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 00:00:00 GMT

"Instead of giving a firm foundation for setting the conscience of man at rest forever, Thou didst choose all that is exceptional, vague and enigmatic" rails Ivan Karamazov against God in Dostoyevsky's classic work The Brothers Karamazov.(1) Those who encounter—or are encountered by—the parables and stories of Jesus often feel a similar sentiment. For the parables of Jesus are often exceptional in upsetting religious sensibilities, are sometimes vague, and are many times enigmatic in their detail and content.

The parable of the laborers in Matthew 20 serves as a case in point. A landowner hires laborers to work in his vineyard. They are hired throughout the work day and all the workers agreed to the wage of a denarius for a day's work. The enigmatic and exceptional punch line to this story occurs when those who are hired at the very end of the day—in the last hour—are paid the same wage as those who worked all day long. The long-suffering laborers cry out, "These last men have worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden and the scorching heat of the day." Those workers that were hired first are not paid any additional wage. The first are not first, in this story. Instead, the landowner replies with a radical reversal: The last shall be first, and the first last.

Not only is the conclusion to this story exceptional and enigmatic, it also seems wholly unfair. For how could those who worked so little be paid the full day's wage? Yet, this upending of any sense of fairness is a recurring theme in other parables of Jesus as well. Indeed, the parable of the prodigal son in Luke 15, while a familiar story for many, functions in a similar manner and upsets our sense of what is fair and right, just as in the parable of the laborers. A careful reading presents an extravagant display of grace towards all wayward sons and daughters, even as it illuminates a human frugality with grace.

Jesus presented this story as a crowd of tax-collectors, sinners, and religious leaders gathered around him. All who listened had a vested interest in what Jesus might say. Some hoped for grace, while others clamored for judgment. "A certain man had two sons," Jesus begins. The younger of the man's two sons insists on having his share of the inheritance, which the father grants though the request violated the Jewish custom that allotted a third of the inheritance to the youngest son upon the death of the father.(1) With wasteful extravagance, the son squanders this inheritance and finds himself desperately poor, living among pigs, ravenous for the pods on which they feed. "But when he came to his senses" the text tells us, he reasons that even his father's hired men have plenty to eat. Hoping to be accepted as a mere slave, he makes his way home. And while he was still a long way off, his father saw him, and felt compassion for him, and ran and embraced him.

The Pharisees in the crowd might have gasped at this statement. How could the father extend such grace towards a son so wasteful and wanton? Yet, this father is the true prodigal, extending grace in an extravagant way. His prodigal heart compels him to keep looking for his son—he saw him while he was still a long way off. And despite being disowned by his son, the father feels compassion for him. With wasteful abandon, he runs to his son to embrace him and welcome him home. The father orders a grand party for this son who has been found, "who was dead and has begun to live."

The older brother in Jesus's story provocatively gives voice to a deep sense of outrage.(2) In many ways, his complaint intones the same complaint of the laborers in the vineyard. "For so many years, I have been serving you and I have never neglected a command of yours... But when this son of yours came, who has devoured your wealth with harlots; you killed the fattened calf for him." We can hear the implicit cry, "It's not fair!" The text then tells us that the older son was not willing to join the celebration. He will not hear the entreaty of his gracious father both to come into the celebration and to recognize that "all that is mine is yours." Thus again, the last shall be first, and the first last.

While not vague in their detail or content, these two parables of Jesus are both exceptional and enigmatic. If we are honest, they disrupt our sense of righteousness and our sense of fairness. Both portraits of the prodigal father and of the landowner present the radical fairness of God. God lavishes grace freely on those we often deem the least deserving. But perhaps we feel the exceptional and enigmatic aspects of these parables most keenly when it is we who are seeing ourselves beyond the need of grace.

Margaret Manning is a member of the writing and speaking team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Seattle, Washington.

(1) Cited in Mary Gordon, Reading Jesus: A Writer's Encounter with the Gospels (New York: Pantheon, 2009), x.
(2) Fred Craddock, Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching (Louisville: John Knox Press, 1990), 187.

Heaven's Ladders

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 00:00:00 GMT

I am not sure what it is as children that makes us readily picture God as seated high above us. But from childhood, we seem to nurture pictures of heaven and all its wonderment as that which spatially exists "above," while we and all of our worries exist on earth "below." While this may simply illustrate our need for metaphors as we learn to relate to the world around us, there is also biblical imagery that seems to authenticate the portrayal. Depicting the God who exists beyond all we know, the Scripture writers describe the divine throne as "high and lofty," the name of the LORD as existing above all names. Yet even metaphors can be misleading when they cease to point beyond themselves. Though the Scriptures use the language and imagery of loftiness, they also pronounce that God's existence is far more than something "above" us. The startling image of the Incarnation radically erases the likeness of a distant God. The message that comes again and again from the mouth of God on earth is equally startling: The kingdom of God is among you!

Of the many objections to Christianity, there is one in particular that stands out in my mind as troubling. That is, the argument that to be Christian is to withdraw from the world around you, to follow fairy tales with wishful hearts and myths that insist you stop thinking and believe that all will be right in the end because God says so. It was in such a vein that Karl Marx depicted Christianity as a kind of drug that anesthetizes its consumers to the suffering in the world and the wretchedness of life. Sigmund Freud argued similarly that belief in God functions as an infantile dream that helps us evade the pain and helplessness we both feel and see around us. I don't find these critiques and others like them troubling because I find them an accurate picture of the kingdom Jesus described. I find them troubling because so many seem to live as if Freud and Marx are quite right in their analyses.

In impervious boxes and minimalist depictions of the Christian story, many of us live comfortably as if in our own worlds, intent to tell our feel-good stories while withdrawing from the harder scenes of life, content to view the kingdom of God as a world far away from the present and the rooms of heaven as mere futuristic promises. The kingdom is seen as the place we are journeying toward, the better country the writer of Hebrews describes. In contrast, our place on earth is viewed as temporary, and therefore somehow less vital; like Abraham, we are merely passing through. As a result, we build chasms that stand between kingdom and earth, today and tomorrow, the physical and the spiritual, the believing world and its world of neighbors. Whether articulated or subconscious, the earth itself even becomes something fleeting and irrelevant—one more commodity here for our use, like shampoo bottles in hotel bathrooms—while Christ is away preparing our permanent rooms.

Yet these chasms we allow not only belie a posture irresponsible for those called to abundant life and love of neighbors, they betray the identity and decree of the good creator Christianity professes. The stories Jesus left the world with are so much more than wishful thinking; his proclamations of a kingdom here and now are far from permissions of escapism. Furthermore, to view the world around us as a temporary place negates the words of the Christian's most sacred prayer. Jesus taught his followers to pray: God's kingdom come, God's will be done—on earth as it is in heaven. What does it mean that Christ repeatedly declared the kingdom of God as here and now among us? What does it mean that for lack of human praise the very rocks will cry out at the glory of their creator while the trees will clap their hands? Far from being a non-spiritual, kingdom-irrelevant commodity, the earth is filled with rooms of faith, staircases and ladders that assure a constant traffic between heaven and earth, rooms of a good kingdom now seen in part and one day to be seen in full. Surely the Lord is in this place; how often is it simply we who are not aware of it? If Christ's proclamations of the kingdom are taken seriously, then we live our lives in none other than the house of God.

The Christian worldview is one that believes at the deepest level in eternal dwellings, in the day when tears will be no more, and in the one who is preparing a house of many rooms. And yet, we very much live with the distinct experience of these promises here and now. Neither Christ nor the kingdom he came to make known is a static entity, something that mattered long ago and might matter once again but not today amidst the world as we know it. On the contrary, all of history, the stories of salvation, and the Incarnation itself, declare that the Christian God is far more hands-on than this. Christ is not merely the one who will be near in all eternity. He is among the world today, reigning in a kingdom that is both present and approaching, going out into the depths of cities and neighborhoods that his house may be filled (cf. Luke 14:23). Precisely because the faith Christians proclaim is not a drug that anesthetizes or a dream that deludes, I must live as one aware of the house I live in, ready for the ladders that extend between heaven and earth, and anxious to invite the world inside.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.