Saturday, May 24, 2014

A Time to Quit Searching

by Justin Dillehay

"It's about the journey, not the destination."

This statement is one of the hallmarks of a certain type of religious person (though they would likely prefer to be called "spiritual"). This person is always searching, always asking, always roaming. If he hears you claim that you've found the truth--that you actually have the right answer--he will regard you as intolerant, closed-minded, and arrogant.

You can find an excellent depiction of this never-ending searcher in chapter 5 of C.S. Lewis's The Great Divorce. In this imaginative novel, people in heaven take a bus trip to hell in order to persuade their damned ghostly friends to repent and return with them to heaven. In the end, almost none of the ghosts choose to leave, but instead persist in the sins that brought them there. Listening to their self-justifications is both fascinating and disturbing.

Lewis casts our never-ending searcher in the form of an apostate Episcopal minister, whose friend "Dick" tries to show him the error of his ways. When Dick invites him to return with him to heaven, the ghost agrees to come, if--and only if--heaven is a place where he can continue his spiritual journey with an open mind. Only if heaven is a place of "free inquiry."

"No," Dick responds. "I can promise you none of those things...For I will bring you to the land not of questions but of answers, and you shall see the face of God."

The ghost objects: "Ah, but we must all interpret those beautiful words in our own way! For me there is no such thing as a final answer...I am not aware of a thirst for some ready-made truth which puts an end to intellectual activity."

Seeing hope begin to slip away, Dick reasons with him. "Listen...Once you knew what inquiry was for. There was a time when you asked questions because you wanted answers, and were glad when you had found them...[But now] you have gone far wrong. Thirst was made for water; inquiry for truth. What you now call the free play of inquiry has neither more nor less to do with the ends for which intelligence was given you than masturbation has to do with marriage."

Lewis captures something profoundly biblical in this story. This is the type of person whom the Apostle Paul castigates as "always learning, and never able to come to a knowledge of the truth" (2 Tim. 3:7). Always asking questions, but never really wanting definite answers. Always comparing alternatives, but never willing to choose between them. Always deconstructing other people's views, but rarely questioning his own mixed motives. Always searching for truth, but somehow resistant to finding it.

It seems rather odd, doesn't it? The idea of searching for truth but not wanting to find it lest our search be over? You'd think that was the point of the search--to find what we were searching for!

So why would anyone do this?

Answer: because we love searching more than we love truth.

Truth requires us to submit; to stand under it and conform ourselves to it. Truth, we suspect, would require us to acknowledge a reality outside of ourselves that doesn't depend on what we think and won't simply be what we want it to be. But searching, at least the kind of searching that we prefer, allows us to chart our own course and act as our own guide, while also giving us the illusion of being more humble than the person who claims to have found the truth.

I say "the kind of searching we prefer," because there is another kind of searching that God invites us to. The searching of a creature seeking to know his Creator; the searching of a servant seeking to obey her Master's will. Those who seek like that will find.

But that's the problem. Apart from the work of the Spirit, there is none who seeks like that, not even one (Rom. 3:11). Apart from Christ, we're fools. We don't want the Triune God walking with us on our journey, because he has an annoying tendency to steer us away from paths that seem right to us (Prov. 4:12) and toward paths that will make us wildly unpopular with the very people we want to please (John 5:39-44). So we prefer to walk alone. Or else to walk with peers who won't "judge" us for the directions we choose to take.

We should ask ourselves the obvious question: "If I resist the very idea of finding truth and ending my search, am I really searching for it? Or am I actually evading it?"

God calls us to a different kind of searching. He calls us to search for truth out of love for truth. And at the end of the day, truth is a person (John 14: 6). To know Jesus is to know the truth, and he delights to be found by those who search for him. Indeed, when you find him, you realize that it was he who was seeking you all along.

When you find the truth as it is in Jesus, you find that it isn't stagnant. Because he who is truth is also life (John 14:6). Rather than enslaving you, knowing this truth sets you free (John 8:31). Why? Because knowing this truth is what your search was designed for. It's what your open mind (like an open trap) was meant to close on. To use Lewis's graphic analogy, if endless searching is like masturbating all your life, finding Jesus is like finally getting married. It's what your mind is for--a consummation devoutly to be wished.

And unlike the endless search, in which you are always learning but never able to come to a knowledge of the truth, finding Jesus enables you to have the truth yet always to be learning. Because you are finite and Jesus is infinite, there is always room to go deeper. As a Christian, you can say "I have found him whom my soul desires" while also saying "Oh that I might know him!" Christ is both within us as our wisdom (Col. 1:272:3), and before us, beckoning us on to greater knowledge. As Paul put it, "I press on to make it my own because Christ Jesus has made me his own" (Phil. 3:12). It's an upward spiral into a truth we have already grasped (or better, a Truth whom we have already been grasped by), rather than a downward spiral away from a truth we are seeking to evade.

So let us search well, but search rightly, remembering the goal of our search.

If I may appropriate the words of the Preacher for my own use:

"There is a time to search, and a time to quit searching" (Eccl. 3:6, NLT).

*********************************************************************************

Further reading: The End of our Exploring, by Matthew Lee Anderson. 





Thursday, May 15, 2014

Justified in Christ: How are Christians like Hawaii?

By Justin

On July 4, Hawaii will celebrate its Independence Day. That is, Hawaii will celebrate the fact that on July 4, 1776, the united American colonies declared their independence from Great Britain and became the United States. The Fourth of July is Hawaii's Independence Day. We all know this, right?

And yet it's kind of strange when you think about it. After all, Hawaii didn’t send any delegates to Philadelphia in 1776. Not one Hawaiian signature can be found on the Declaration of Independence, and not one drop of Hawaiian blood was shed to free us from Great Britain.

If all that is so, then why does July 4 have anything to do with Hawaii? Answer: because in 1959 Hawaii joined the Union. She entered into union with the United States, such that our history became her history. When we fought, she fought. When we triumphed, she triumphed. Because of her union with the U.S., our privileges of citizenship have now become her privileges of citizenship. Our army has become her army, and our flag her flag. And on the flipside, her debts became our debts. This is what union with America is all about about.

Something similar is going on with what the Bible calls "justification."

As Christians, we celebrate the fact that we have died to sin and have been raised to righteousness. We glory in the fact that God has forgiven us of all our transgressions and declared us to be completely righteous. As far as God is concerned, it's as though we had never sinned and had always obeyed. There is no condemnation. None. "He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities" (Psalm 103:10).

And yet it's kind of strange when you think about it. After all, we deserve God's condemnation. We actually have sinned--often!--and we haven't always obeyed. Given God's righteous character and hatred of sin, forgiving our sins seems totally unfair, even reprehensible. As the Proverb says, "He who justifies the wicked and he who condemns the righteous, are both alike an abomination to the Lord" (Prov. 17:15).

If all this is so, then how can justification by God have anything to do with us? Answer: because like Hawaii, we, too have entered a union. Not a union with America, but a union with Jesus Christ, such that his history becomes our history. When he obeyed, we obeyed. When he died and was raised, we died and were raised. Because of our union with Christ, Christ's privileges of Sonship have now become our privileges of sonship. His righteousness has become our righteousness, and his Holy Spirit our Holy Spirit. And on the flipside, our sin became his sin, and he carried it in his body on the tree. This is what union with Christ is all about.

And this is how we are justified--by being in Christ through faith. "There is now no condemnation"--for whom?--"for those who are in Christ Jesus" (Rom. 8:1).

Now that's a union worth celebrating. And you don't even have to wait for the Fourth of July (2 Cor. 6:2).

Tuesday, May 13, 2014

When Did It Become Wrong for Christians to Obey Jesus?

The issue contained in the title of this post is known as "antinomianism." See my short review of Mark Jones's book Antinomianism: Reformed Theology's Unwelcome Guest here: http://www.9marks.org/books/book-review-antinomianism-mark-jones

Monday, May 12, 2014

The Sister Books: children's stories for girls I love




By Tilly Dillehay

This one is a very personal project. A few weeks ago, I had ideas for a handful of children's stories, each of which featured one of my four sisters.

Probably got a little carried away. I borrowed a book of old family photos and did illustrations of each girl, printed them up, bound them in sort of a homemade way, and presented them to the girls this past weekend.

We had a sleepover planned with all five girls + Mama, and it worked just so sweetly that I was able to give them all their books at the same time. Now that the recipients have seen them, I thought I might share them here on the blog. You may not enjoy them quite as much as a family member would, but then again... you might.

You know something? I would recommend this kind of an exercise for anybody. Nothing stirs up natural, warm, sisterly affection like turning your heart and mind towards a sibling to remember them when they were young.

And my heart is just extremely full of natural, warm affection for my sisters right now. That's all I can say about that without gushing. I love my sisters! Look at these photos below and you'll see why...



Emma

---

Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Emma. Emma had very soft blonde hair and very blue eyes, and a little blue birthmark next to her mouth. She had round cheeks and bangs on her forehead.

Emma liked dogs very much. She liked that they were loyal, and kind, and very very smart. One day, when Emma was still very small, she got confused and began to think that she was a dog. Nobody knew how she got confused (because she was actually a little girl); they just knew that it had happened.

From then on, Emma acted just like a dog.

She ran around on her hands and feet, just like a dog with his paws. Because she was going around on hands and feet instead of hands and knees (like most children do when they pretend to be animals), she could get around very fast.

When her family was eating their dinner, sometimes she would come galloping through the room, and she would get clean through and out the door in just a few seconds. It was very amazing.

She would bark like a dog, too. When her mother asked her to go upstairs and get in the bath, Emma would just whimper like a dog and bark a few times. This signified 'no', but her mother didn't understand it, so Emma had to have her bath anyway. Emma shook her head like a beagle and made very sad eyes as she was taken upstairs.

She would also sleep like a dog. She curled up into a little half-moon shape, in corners and on couches and in her bed, and sort of burrowed into the pillow.

Her family tried over and over again to tell her that she was a little girl and not a dog, but she would have none of it.

Little by little, when Emma was a little bit older, she stopped being a dog. But nobody noticed.

One day when she was even older still—almost a grown up—Emma was getting ready for school one day. She came downstairs for breakfast where her family was, and she had brushed her hair back from her face. She didn't look like a dog at all. In fact, she looked like a blonde and pretty young lady.

"Hey," said one of her brothers suddenly. "Emma doesn't act like a dog anymore!"

And they all looked at her. That was when they noticed something.

Emma was loyal, as loyal as a dog. Emma was kind, as kind as a dog. And Emma was smart... much smarter than the very smartest dog you ever met. Smarter than most people.

"Well," they said. "Maybe she just kept the good parts."

And it seemed certain that she had.



Emma is now 17 years old. She will graduate from high school next year.





Phoebe

---

Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Phoebe. Phoebe was a very small girl, with little tiny bones and little tiny feet and little tiny brown curls all over her head. The only thing about her that wasn't tiny was her eyes.

Her eyes were very big hazel ones. Strangely, even though they were very big, they couldn't see very well. You would think that big eyes would be very good at seeing, but that is not always the case.

One of her eyes was lazy, too. This doesn't mean that her eye liked to hang around on a hammock and drink out of a straw and leave dishes piling up in the sink. It means that no matter what little Phoebe was looking at, one of her eyes inched... drifted... and twisted inwards towards her nose.

So even if one of her eyes was pointing at a puppy, or a book, or her mother, the other one was always pointed at her own nose.

Phoebe's Papa and Mama didn't know what to do to help Phoebe see. They bought her some round little glasses, with a rubber frame to stay on better, and big, fat lenses.

She threw them in the well.

They made her do exercises, where she had to wear a pirate's eye patch and look very hard at things that were moving around.

They took her to the doctor, who told them that maybe a surgery would help Phoebe's eye to stop pointing at her nose.

When Phoebe got a little bit older, she started to wear her glasses and not throw them down the well. She did the eye exercises, because she didn't want the doctor to get her and take her in to surgery.

But still, she didn't have very good eyes. Everybody knew it.

One day, when she was even older still—almost a grown up—she sat down in her room and picked up a guitar that she found there. She hummed a little tune. She thrummed a few of the strings. Then, she wrote a song. She put words to it.

"Now what's the use of preaching to your brother
Acting just like you're his mother
Not so nice, it's not so nice
When you don't take your own advice
Not so nice at all
Not so nice..." the words said.

And when she sang the song, everybody found out something for the first time.

Phoebe, who had such very big and very bad eyes, could actually see things that no one else could see at all.





Phoebe is now 21 years old. She is married to Danny Deffenbaugh, and is a musician at The Vespers.






Callie

---


Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Callie. Callie was a very unfortunate girl, with whom anybody could sympathize. She'd been born into the Cryar family. The Cryar family was very strange—everybody in it liked to cry.

Papa Cryar liked to cry.
Mama Cryar liked to cry.
Callie's four sisters liked to cry.
And Callie's two brothers even liked to cry—when no one was looking.

But not Callie. Nobody had seen her cry since she was a little bitty baby (and even that time can't be proven, based on spurious evidence).

Callie thought it was silly for people to cry like that. So she crossed her little arms and tossed her pretty straight brown hair and refused to cry ever again. "No, no, no," she said.

She didn't cry when her little dog Tippy-toe was lost forever.

And she didn't cry when she fell off of her bike and made a big hole in her leg, the size of a baseball.

And she didn't cry when boys made fun of her at school.

One day, when Callie was getting older—almost a grown up—she met a boy named Reed. Reed was very nice to her. He said nice things to her, and he bought her food, and he tried to hold her hand.

"No, no, no," Callie said. She crossed her arms and tossed her pretty straight brown hair. So finally, after he was nice for a while longer, Reed went away.

Callie sat down in her bedroom and thought about it for a while. Her chin began to wobble. Something wet started coming into her eyes.

"I feel..." she said.

"I feel..."

"I feel... "

"...like I want to CRY!"

And that is what she did.

When it was over, she dried her eyes. "Well," she said. "That wasn't so bad after all."

And when Reed saw that Callie had cried, he knew that it was all right to be nice to her again. So he was.




Callie is now 23 years old. She is married to Reed Pittman, and is a musician at The Vespers.






Sophie

---



Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Sophie. Sophie had curly hair and the biggest lips of anyone in her neighborhood.

Sophie was a good talker, and sort of bossy.

She bossed her little sisters.

She bossed the dog and the cat.

She bossed the children next door, even if they weren't in her yard.

And when she was done bossing, she would go inside and put a tape in the tape player. (Tapes are like an iPod that only hold 10 songs. That was all they had when Sophie was a little girl.)

She would look around to make sure no one was nearby, and then she would listen to the words that the lady on the tape was singing, and she would sing with them.

She would make her voice sound just like the lady on the tape. Even though she was just a little girl, she could do that. It was very amazing. But no one knew that about Sophie. They just knew that she was bossy.

When she got a little bit older—almost a grown up—she bossed the people at her job.

She bossed her own self... although she never would listen to it.

She even tried to boss her husband... although he never would listen to it, either.

Then one day, she found out that she wasn't the boss. There was a very very big big Boss that she didn't know about, until he picked her up by the shoulders and kissed her on the forehead.

As soon as he did that, a little smile appeared on the corner of her great big lips. It spread wider, and wider, and wider. Suddenly, she leapt up and gave a great big shout.

"I'm not the boss of you!!!" she said.

And the great big Boss said, "No, you're not."

And Sophie was very happy. She was so happy, that she started to sing. She sang and sang and sang. She taught other people how to sing, too.

And the big Boss liked to hear her sing. "I Am the boss of you," said the big Boss. "And you should keep singing."

So that's exactly what she did.



Sophie is now 28 years old. She is married to Jordan Shear, and is a vocal coach at Sophie Shear Vocal Studios.
----

Thursday, May 1, 2014

3 reasons I stopped being afraid of Ministry Fraud

By Tilly Dillehay
 
One year when I was in college, I agreed to go on a missions trip to Northern Ireland. The trip was an all-girls affair, the only one of its kind in the school’s missions department. There were about a dozen of us who signed on to go, all corralled in and drawn by the charismatic power of the trip’s leader, a girl I’ll call Mary Ellen.
 
Mary Ellen was like a bottle rocket. Shimmering with personality and quip, she drew us all by the sheer force of her will. Each of us had been personally invited, and the effect was irresistible. When she spoke to you about doing something with her, you immediately experienced a sense of privilege. It felt as if you were being invited in on a secret, and you simply wanted to do it, whatever it was.
 
So Mary Ellen had gathered a motley crew for this trip. We were varied, but it seemed to me that most of us were very spirited, interesting girls, pretty girls. Girls with varying degrees of spiritual maturity (or, I would find out later, no spiritual maturity of all).
 
There was a sarcastic, modern-looking girl with choppy blonde hair. There was a shy beautiful girl who never spoke much. There was a thin, zany redhead with an absolutely delightful personality. There were a few preppy brunettes and a few Bible school girls…. And there was me.
 
We were going to go stay in a manor house near Belfast. The mission house was run by a middle-aged Welshman with a round pot belly, who was married to an Englishwoman. Also living in the large house was a young and handsome Scott, who was dating the one temporary female missionary also on the team—an American.
 
The mission house served a small village community. One of their main projects was hosting mission teams like ours; the teams would go out with the staff to do workshops for youth, street evangelism, and Bible camp types of activities.
Before we all left, we were given the task of fundraising. We accomplished this with heartfelt letters, which talked about “the work we intend to do for God’s kingdom, organizing and teaching a workshop for troubled teenage girls in a rural area of Northern Ireland.”
 
We also had the requisite girly late night heart-to-heart talks as a group, during which we all told our carefully curated deepest darkest secrets, prepared for just such an occasion.
 
Then we flew over the ocean.
 
We organized our material, we prepared a workshop for those troubled teen girls, and we waited for them to come. They came, and we taught them about self-acceptance, making them look in mirrors and identify beautiful things they saw there. We taught them about how skewed the culture of beauty is (I brought along one of my CD covers and pointed out to them in detail how they’d been Photoshopped); we led them through ice-breakers and discussions and exercises.
 
We were very very earnest, but none of us noticed that the material we gave them could just as easily have come from Oprah, from any old humanistic self-help seminar. The only real problems we had while delivering this material was keeping our 11-14 year old attendees from sneaking vodka into the end-of-week sleepover, and trying to limit their smoking to fifteen-minute breaks. There was no gospel for the girls to react to, or resist.
 
But we were spiritually on our way, we thought. Missionaries.
 
And then something happened, on the second to last night there, that shook my perception of our undertaking. Late that night, in the large room full of bunkbeds that all of us slept in, I was awakened.
 
Female voices were raised.
 
I sat up just in time to catch a glimpse of Mary Ellen, shouting into the face of our spunky blonde team member. She was just finishing a retort, which was returned with a screamed profanity from the blonde. She returned in kind. The two of them shot two final arrows at one another before Mary Ellen took off into the darkness, slamming the door behind her. She ended up outside the house (against the rules), wandering around in the surrounding highlands. A few hours later she returned, sullen.
 
I never did learn what had happened between them, or how things had escalated to such a point. Nevertheless, I was called on the following morning. A meeting was held between the two warring girls, the one faculty member who had come with us on the trip, and a staff member from the house.
 
They asked me to attend this meeting as a sort of mediator. I don’t know why—I hadn’t heard the argument escalate, and was not in any position of leadership. I can only guess that it was because of my face. I think I have one of those deceitfully wise faces; something about my face makes people think that I am mature and responsible, empathetic and understanding.
 
The two girls obviously didn’t want me sitting there, offering soothing words when I could think of them and trying to look patient. But this meeting proved to be an important moment for me.
 
As I sat there, listening to the girls sharply defend their positions, something struck me between the eyes:

This trip is a fraud. We are not missionaries. I’m not sure if we are Christians—I’m not sure if I am a Christian.
 
We are on a glorified chick vacation.
 
And that was a devastating thought. Because it made the mission seem petty, suddenly, spiritually bankrupt. It punched all sorts of holes in my missional vanity.
 
They ended up inviting me to stay on at the house there, as a short-term staff missionary, but in the end I refused. I slunk off home with the rest of the group, because I knew the truth about us—about me. I had no business doing ministry.
 
I was a Ministry Fraud.

-----

This experience—almost a decade ago—came back to bite me last year, when I was in the process of starting a ministry to the local jail in my town.

I was about three years into my Christian walk. I’d been married less than a year.

Regularly, my job took me into this jail to get stories. One day while I was there, I encountered a woman who had been on the front page of the newspaper for her involvement with a drug ring. Loudly, she observed to her friend (glaring at me) that the newspaper loves to print the bad things about people, but we don’t go after the stories of people being exonerated and declared innocent. Actually, she said, we don’t care about people at all—we just care about selling papers.

This incident, while jolting me awake and evoking a protest, also confirmed a growing desire that I’d already been ruminating over.

I wanted to get inside the jail and start a ministry there.

It had nothing to do with the paper and how it was run. I was simply tired of printing the names of these women, week after week, and never connecting with them as human beings. I’d begun to feel parts of my heart that were closed off towards them, that regarded the people in the mugshots as belonging to some other world than the world I occupy. How could I stop this crawling hard-heartedness without finding a way to meet and serve them?

But this problem does nothing to describe the urge to get inside that jail—how can I describe a conviction? It was the sense that I would never get comfortable until the thing had been started; a restless knowledge that in order to mature as a Christian, this thing had been laid on the path in front of me.

The thought was to do something that was more interpersonal than the services that were sometimes held in the jail already, something with an element of Biblical counseling. I wanted to talk about Jesus Christ with them, and the power and authority of scripture in their lives. I wanted them to know that I was dirty, too. I wanted to see what the power gospel looks like in Macon County, TN, when it is offered to people who have already burned bridges and lost children to the System and done damage to their own bodies.

After this conviction came to rest with certainty in my heart and mind, another three or four months expired. What was I waiting for during this time?

I was afraid.

I was afraid of the Ministry Fraud. I was afraid of watching myself quit another thing, walk off the set of another good intention. Flakiness. Immaturity prevailing. My own sin and unbelief complicating the work of the ministry. My moods, shooting holes in the gospel even as I tried to relay it.

It wasn’t messiness of the women that I was afraid of—I romanticized those things. The dramatic things that might occur when you get mixed up with drug addicts and petty thieves and women with three dangerous ex-husbands. Those things were almost part of the draw (and this shamed me to know)—because for some reason, people raised in Christian culture are fascinated by ‘gritty’ things.

I was afraid of the ordinary stuff. Of 3:30 on a Monday, hours before I drive over to the jail, realizing that there’s just barely enough time to cook dinner for my husband and finish printing off outlines for the lesson. Of logistics and tiredness getting in the way. Of the excitement from new connections with the women giving way to relational laziness and comfort.

Even, on some level, of screaming fights in the middle of the night—or my version of that, which would be polite passive-aggressive arguments about curriculum with my fellow ministry volunteers.

Even worse, I was afraid I had seen enough of my own reliability to wonder whether the idea would last. Would we start this thing just long enough to get tired and quit, leaving the ladies in the jail with another miniature abandonment? Would I get into it for bragging rights—because it’s a nice Christianese tool, to be able to say ‘my ministry to the blah-blah-blah?’ Did I feel a true conviction to go and do it, or did I simply feel yet another moment of obsession with a romanticized idea of living on the cultural edge and making friends with criminals?

Did I, in fact, care about connecting people with the gospel? Did I, in fact, care enough to go do so, week after week after week?  Was I, in fact, setting myself up for another chick trip to Northern Ireland?

It took months of this discomfort and indecision for me to see that the idea was a conviction, rather than a fancy.

Three ideas helped with this:

1.      If you doubt that you’ll finish something you start, you should START by doubting whether you’ll finish the biggest thing you’ve ever started. The Christian walk, after all, is the longest-running, scariest commitment you’ll ever make. You're already in. If God has put himself in charge of your sanctification (a miracle), then surely he can be trusted to take charge of keeping you faithful to a little local ministry.
      Remember: God gives the increase (1 Cor. 3:6). He ensures the growing process, the flowering process, the harvest. He is also in charge of the planting.

2.      The question of time was another doubt for me, but these were also sifted away. Yes, I realized, I work full time and have a husband, but I’m also childless. There will always be a reason to say no to things. Many of them will be better than the ones I have right now.

3.      I understood, finally, that I was actually in need of a means of strengthening my faith. The desire for this was the final push.
I needed to practice the feel of the gospel in my mouth. I needed to see ‘proof’ of the work of the Holy Spirit in my life and in the lives of others. I needed to keep growing in my belief. Isn’t that part of the reason we are commanded to speak the gospel to others? As you talk about something to new people, your love for that thing grows. They are not the only beneficiaries.

It was spiritual blessing that I was looking for—and relief from that nagging pressure of conviction that I, this year, for as long as I am able, need to be with the women of the Macon County Jail. In the end, it made me bolder to see that the only stakes riding on this small town endeavor were exactly the same stakes that ride on every Christian’s endeavor to live the Christian life, every day that they wake up.
You get up, you make coffee. You try to do it to God’s glory. You kiss your family, you go to work. You try to do it to God’s glory. You sin, you repent and confess, you realize that something was learned. You try to go on to God’s glory. Over weeks, months, and years, you  look behind you and see that something has been done. You realize that something supernatural has sustained the whole thing. God has accomplished something in you.
And your faith is grown again.
So you get up, you make coffee. You go to work. You make dinner for your husband, you print off your lesson, and you drive to the Macon County Jail...

--------

“Likewise the spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.”
-Romans 8:26-30