Sin: To Conceal or to Confess?

By Justin Dillehay

“The wicked flee though no one pursues, but the righteous are as bold as a lion.” (Proverbs 28:1 ESV)

“Whoever conceals their sins does not prosper, but the one who confesses and renounces them finds mercy.”  (Prov. 28:13, NIV)

Rarely do I feel worse than when I'm trying to conceal some sin. Not prospering. That’s an accurate way to describe it. I would also describe it as a tiring, anxiety-inducing state of paranoia.

Which is why the Wisdom writer notes a few verses earlier, “The wicked flee when no one pursues.” (Prov. 28:1). Hiding sin requires you to think about your sin constantly, which makes you think that everyone else must be thinking about your sin as much as you are. Off-handed, unrelated comments make you think that you’ve been found out. “How did they know what I was trying to hide?!”  You take off running, leaving the poor ignorant person wondering “What’s with her? Did I say something wrong?”

The best remedy I have found is that described in the second half of verse 13: “but the one who confesses and renounces [these concealed sins] finds mercy.” Confessing my sins means dragging them out of the darkness and into the light—the one place they hate to be. My hidden sins are like vampires or Gremlins; when I bring them into the light they scream and melt. Needless to say, this requires humility, because in my pride I would rather no one know how bad a sinner I still am. But it also requires courage.

And in the gospel I find both. Knowing that my sins were so vile that Christ had to be tortured to wash them away makes me humble. Knowing that “if I confess my sins, he is faithful and just to forgive me my sins and cleans me from all unrighteousness” gives me courage (1 John 1:9). After all, one of the main reasons why we stay in the darkness and refuse to come to the light (aside from loving our sins and not wishing to give them up) is that we’re afraid that God will blast us to much-deserved smithereens as soon we step into the light with our sins exposed. The gospel is meant to destroy this fear.

Because of what Christ has done through his cross and resurrection, God can now forgive us our sins without compromising his justice (Rom. 3:25-26). Indeed, not only is God not unjust to forgive those who confess their sins, he is positively just to do so (1 John 1:9). This is why anyone who comes to God through Jesus can lay aside timidity and come with confidence (Heb. 4:16).

Little wonder verse 1 ends like it does. “The wicked flee though no one pursues, but the righteous are as bold as a lion” (Proverbs 28:1 ESV).

Why is the Sabbath no longer on Saturday?

by Justin Dillehay

My wife Tilly ministers to a group of ladies at a local jail. On occasion, she brings home questions from the ladies for me to write an answer to. This was one of those.

Dear friend,

You asked:

"Q: Why is the Sabbath day no longer on Saturday and we go to church on Sunday?"

A: This is not an easy question to answer, and it’s one that good Christian people disagree on. Indeed, it’s a question that I have changed my own views on through the years.

If you don’t mind, let me break this question down into two separate questions.

Q:1—Why do we go to church on Sundays? That is, why is Sunday “The Lord’s Day”?

Q:2—Is Sunday the New Testament version of the Old Testament Sabbath? Or are they totally unrelated?

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

Q:1—Why do we go to church on Sundays? That is, why is Sunday “The Lord’s Day”? 

From the earliest recorded days of the church, Christians have gathered for worship on the first day of the week, known as Sunday.

This practice goes back to the New Testament itself. In Acts 20:5-7, we find the church in Troas gathering one the first day of the week to break bread. In 1 Corinthians 16:1-2, Paul is speaking about a collection of money is taking up for poor Christians, and how he plans to stop through Corinth on his way to Jerusalem to collect from them. So he tells them,

“Now concerning the collection for the saints: as I directed the churches of Galatia, so you also are to do. On the first day of every week, each of you is to put something aside and store it up, as he may prosper, so that there will be no collecting when I come.”

Why collect on the first day of the week? The most reasonable answer seems to be the same as what we read in Acts 20, “Because that’s when the church was gathered together.” And notice, it wasn’t just the Corinthians who met on the first day of the week—Paul had directed the churches of Galatia to do the same thing.

And finally, in Revelation 1:9-10, the Apostle John says this: “I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day.” Does John explicitly tell us that the “Lord’s Day” was the first day of the week? No. But there are really no other live options for what he means by that phrase.

1. Since John didn't specify what day it was, he must have expected his readers to know which day he was talking about. Apparently the phrase “the Lord’s Day” was common by the time John wrote Revelation (c. 95 A.D). 
2. He must have been referring to a specific day. To say that John simply meant that ‘every day is the Lord’s Day’ would defeat the purpose, since his goal was to inform his readers of when he received the vision.
3. The only other option besides Sunday would be Saturday, the Old Testament Jewish Sabbath day. But this can’t be what John means, since he was writing to Gentiles, and the New Testament is clear that Gentile Christians were not obligated to keep the Jewish Sabbath. See Colossians 2:16-17. Plus, John is writing to churches in Asia Minor (Rev 1:4; 2-3) which just so happens to be where Galatia and Troas are located. Recall that Galatia is a place where Paul says the churches kept the first day of the week in 1 Cor. 16:1-2. And Troas is the same area that Paul was in Acts 20:5-7 where the church met on the first day of the week.

So I conclude that when John spoke of the “Lord’s Day,” he had to have been speaking of the first day of the week, Sunday.

But here’s the question: Why the first day of the week? Why not the third or fourth or fifth day? What event could be so significant that the apostles all of a sudden felt free to break with over a millennium of Old Testament practice and begin worshiping on the first day of the week instead of the seventh? (No small change for the apostles—who were all God-fearing Jews who held to the authority of the Old Testament.) What event could have been so significant? Does the New Testament offer us any clues?

The answer is clearly “Yes, it does.” Arguably the most significant event in history of the world was the resurrection of Jesus. And all four gospels record the fact that Christ rose from the dead “on the first day of the week.” Not many such small details get mentioned in all four Gospels. But this one does. Furthermore, when the gospel writers wrote that Jesus rose on the “first day of the week,” they used a very unusual wording in Greek. It’s an unusual wording that occurs in only two other places outside the four Gospels.

Care to take a guess at what those two places are? If you guessed Acts 20:7 and 1 Corinthians 16:2, the two passages already mentioned which describe Christians as meeting on the first day of the week, then you'd be right.

So the evidence is very strong that the reason the NT church began meeting on the first day of the week was because this was the day on which the Lord Jesus Christ rose from the dead. Here’s how a Christian named Justin Martyr put it in about 150 A.D., about 60 years after the New Testament was finished.

“But Sunday is the day on which we all hold our common assembly, because it is the first day on which God, having wrought a change in the darkness and matter, made the world; and Jesus Christ our Savior on the same day rose from the dead. For He was crucified on the day before that of Saturn (Saturday); and on the day after that of Saturn, which is the day of the Sun, having appeared to His apostles and disciples, He taught them these things, which we have submitted to you also for your consideration.”

Q:2—Is Sunday the New Testament version of the Old Testament Sabbath? Or are they totally unrelated?

With regard to Q:1, essentially the entire church throughout history would agree with my answer. When it comes to this next question, however, there is more disagreement. My own view is not as popular today as it once was.

But my answer to this second question would be “Yes, the Sunday Lord’s Day is the New Testament version of the Old Testament Sabbath.” Yes, they are different in some ways, but they are also similar in obvious ways. The differences can be accounted for by the fact that Jesus has come and transformed the day for his people.

Let me point out how the two are different, and then how they are similar.

How they’re different:

The most obvious difference is that they fall on different days of the week—the first instead of the seventh.

But there’s more. The OT Sabbath was stricter—you could be stoned to death for breaking it. Whereas there seems to be nothing like that for the NT Lord’s Day. Plus, the reason you could be stoned for breaking the OT Sabbath is because OT Israel was a political nation with civil laws. But the NT Church is a spiritual nation with no land of its own and no civil government enforcing its Sabbath laws. Christians live as pilgrims in every nation on earth, and we wait for Jesus to return and make the kingdoms of this world his own.

Also, the OT Sabbath was a shadow pointing forward to Jesus (Colossians 2:16-17). Whereas the NT Lord’s Day is a fulfillment that looks back at Christ’s finished work, and points forward to our eternal rest in the new heavens and new earth.

How they’re similar:

But we shouldn't overlook how much these two days have in common.

1) They’re both one day in seven.

2) They’re both “the Lord’s Day” in a special sense. The fact that every day belongs to the Lord in one sense doesn't mean that he can’t sanctify one day in a special sense. Think of these parallel cases: the fact that we sometimes glorify God by fasting doesn't denigrate food—we also glorify God by eating with thankful hearts. The fact that we frequently dedicate time in secret to shut the closet door and pray doesn't denigrate sporadic prayer throughout the day—we are also to pray without ceasing. The fact that we glorify God by resting one day a week doesn't denigrate work—we also glorify God by laboring for the other six days. The fact that we call one special meal “The Lord’s Supper” doesn't denigrate all other meals—whether we eat or drink or whatever we do, we do all to the glory of God (1 Cor. 10:31).

And the fact that God calls Sunday “the Lord’s Day” doesn't denigrate all other days—we worship God every day of the week. But God knows our frame; he’s a practical God. And he doesn't lay on his church the burden of gathering together every day. To do this would severely disrupt creation ordinances like raising your family and working for a living. So he graciously gives us one day to gather on and worship him corporately and to mark the dawning of the new creation in the resurrection of Christ.

3) They both commemorate creation. The OT Sabbath commemorates the old creation, which we read about in Genesis 1, and the NT Lord’s Day commemorates the new creation, which began with the resurrection of Jesus on the first day of the week. But what does Jesus’ resurrection have to do with the new creation, you might ask? Here’s what I mean: God’s raising of Jesus is simply the beginning of God’s raising and restoring of all things, including God’s people and God’s world (see 1 Corinthians 15:12-28; Romans 8:18-25).

4) They both commemorate redemption. According the Deuteronomy 5:15, the OT Sabbath, besides pointing back to creation, also pointed to Israel’s redemption from slavery in Egypt. The NT Lord’s Day points to our redemption from sin, when Christ was “raised for our justification” (Romans 4:25).

The fact that we still have one day in seven as “the Lord’s Day” for rest and worship in the NT points to the ‘already/not yet’ character of our redemption during the time between the first and second comings of Jesus. As Christians, in one sense we have already “entered into rest.” Jesus is our rest; he says “Come to me, all that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11). And yet, in another sense, we have not yet entered fully into our rest, because Jesus has not yet returned. There still remains an eternal Sabbath rest for God’s people (Hebrews 3-4). And one day, when he appears, even the Lord’s Day will pass away.

In short, the transformation of the OT Sabbath into the NT Lord’s Day is all about Jesus—last Adam, Lord of the Sabbath, and firstborn from the dead. So as you worship and rest this Sunday, lift up your eyes to the risen Christ, from whom your rest comes.

Abortion is easier to get in TN than a tatoo

By Tilly Dillehay

If you walk into a dentist office in Tennessee to have a cavity filled, the dentist is required by law to acquire informed consent from you. This means that by law, she has to go over some basic information.

She’ll have to tell you the nature of the procedure, explain reasonable alternatives to the proposed intervention, and the relevant risks, benefits, and uncertainties related to each alternative. She’ll have to assess your understanding, and get a verbal or written acceptance of the intervention from you.

This is just Basic Medical Care 101. In the medical world, patients are supposed to know what happens to them in a doctor’s office. They’re supposed to be educated before they consent to let a doctor operate on them.

This is why it comes as such a surprise to me that when a woman walks into an abortion facility in Tennessee to terminate a pregnancy, she may not get any of that. In fact, legally, she doesn’t have to be told anything about anything before they lay her down and get to work.

Here’s something even more shocking: She has no way of knowing anything about the basic health and safety standards of a facility she walks into. We live in a state where a tattoo artist or veterinarian has to undergo more rigorous certification and facility inspection than an abortion provider.

That’s right. Only half of the abortion clinics in this state are overseen, licensed, or inspected by ANY THIRD PARTY. The Department of Health, though perfectly willing to regulate these facilities as it does almost every other medically-related field, is legally unable to do so.

None of the facilitates are required to undergo inspection; some voluntarily submit to it. Many of those, once inspected, have routinely failed health codes (a recent inspection of a Knoxville facility rendered 57 pages of deficiencies, including uncertified medical personnel and dirty medical equipment).

Think about that.

Let’s just go back and think, for one second, about what is happening in the process of an abortion. A woman’s body is invaded, either by drug or by serious surgical procedure. And I do mean serious: in one version of the abortion procedures legally conducted in Tennessee, the abortionist reaches in with a foreign object, crushes the skull of the fetus, suctions body parts out of a living, breathing woman, and then re-assembles them to make sure nothing was left inside. This is done under local or general anesthesia. In other cases, he may simply use a suction technique, a saline injection, or an abortive pill, which results in a forced miscarriage, which may or may not be followed by a D&C.

I’m attempting—excuse me—to lay aside for a moment the moral outrage that I feel when I consider that Planned Parenthood (which is legally classified as a non-profit organization) reported a profit (revenue over expenditure) of $58.2 million for 2012-2013, and that PP performed 3,643,988 abortions between 2000 and 2012, according to their own published reports.

Laying aside the stomach-turning fact that this organization literally profits off of the bodies of women and their children, and is supported (to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year) by both federal and state government… just putting that aside for a moment, let us examine this little troubling thing about Tennessee and the total lack of medical accountability that our abortionists are currently held to.

PP is responsible for something else, as well. They’re responsible for making Tennessee into an abortion destination. They’re responsible for the fact that abortionists in our state are free to do business without oversight and without structure, peddling death with the ease and convenience of a vending machine.

I’m biased, obviously. Clearly I’m biased, because I consider abortion itself to be morally reprehensible, a machine that has run away with the sane hearts and minds of the American people.

But even if I agree to set aside argument about the ethics of abortion, we should all be able to agree on one thing: it’s not good for women to be treated this way. This is an entire branch of the “medical” industry in our state we're talking about. Women have the right to know exactly what’s happening to them and their unborn child, and to know that the person making it happen is being overseen by some regulating entity.

They also have the right to know that ten years ago, Nashville’s #1 abortion provider (PP, located downtown) went to court to prove that they no longer had to be inspected and licensed by the TN Department of Health. (They won, and this is why the Dept. of Health currently has its hands tied.)

There is now no routine inspection or licensure process in abortion facilities in Tennessee. There is no informed consent, no waiting period, no required ultrasounds. Nothing, in fact, that might give a girl reasonable hope that her abortion experience will be as safe and well informed as her trip to the tattoo parlor.

The number of abortions in Tennessee has risen dramatically in the last fourteen years, and one in four of the women who get abortions here each year are coming from out of state, because Tennessee offers unregulated abortion on demand, unlike any other state in the Southeast region of the U.S.

That's right. Tennessee: the land of good country music, good craft beer, and in-n-out abortion day
trips.

How did this happen? Tennessee hasn’t always been this way. The people of Tennessee, through the voices of their elected representatives, have spent years placing commonsense protections into the structure of our society for women considering abortion.

Here’s how it happened. In 2000, all of those protections were overturned, in one day, by just a handful of people.

Because of one TN Supreme Court ruling in 2000, in a case titled “Planned Parenthood of Middle Tennessee V. Sundquist,” all of the laws on the books regarding abortion—and any future ones attempted—were rendered unenforceable.

We just had an election yesterday. In November of this year, there will be another election. On the ballot, you’ll see something called Amendment 1. Amendment 1 does only one thing: it nullifies that ruling of fourteen years ago, and allows our common sense protections to do what they were designed to do.

It doesn’t make abortion illegal (although some of us may wish it did). It doesn’t actually write any abortion-specific laws at all; only our elected officials can do that. It simply states, explicitly, that people of Tennessee have the right to place safeguards around women considering abortion.

This is why I, and others you may talk to, will ask you to do the following: vote Yes on Amendment 1 in November. For more information, visit www.yesonone.org.

-----

The Fourth of July and Chicken Fried Common Grace

by Justin Dillehay

Country music definitely has its flaws. As a case in point, witness the current travesty of so called "Truck Songs," which feature as their staple items: 1) a guy with a truck 2) a 'perty thang' sitting next to him 3) a river bank 4) alcohol of some sort 5) lame attempts at rapping.

So yes, country music has its flaws; especially at the moment. But it also retains certain virtues that other genres have long lost (if they ever had them). Amid all its truck-centered hedonism, you can still find songs touting sane views of manhood and womanhood, the natural family, and love for one's country, much of which you would never hear on pop radio.

As you would expect, it's the patriotic element in country music that occasions this Fourth of July post.

About a year ago, my wife Tilly and I were driving down the road, and I decided to introduce her to "Chicken Fried," the debut single from the Zac Brown Band. If you haven't heard it, click on the link and listen to it. Seeing the lyrics will help you appreciate this post.

"Chicken Fried" is what I would call an ode to the good things in life. The simple blessings that make life pleasant: chicken fried, cold beer on a Friday night, a pair of jeans that fit just right, the sunrise, sweet tea, pecan pie, the love in your wife's eyes, the touch of a precious child, a mother's love, etc.

All good things. Tilly may have thought the song a little cheesy, but she agreed that all of these things were among life's little blessings.

But what really drew her laughter was the final verse. After a nifty instrumental bridge, Brown finally reaches this lyrical climax:

I thank God for my life
For the stars and stripes
May freedom forever fly
Let it ring
Salute the ones who died [cue military drums at this point]
The ones who give their lives
So we don't have to sacrifice
All the things we love...like our chicken fried...

She chuckled at this stock-patriotism because it seemed totally out of left field. Fried chicken, cute babies, sweet tea, and patriotism??? Is Zac Brown not simply pulling a David Allen Coe and trying to load every country music stereotype into one song?

But as I told her at the time, she was wrong to scoff.

Here's why.

Whether you think Brown's lyrics particularly poetic or not, his basic point is solid. And it's this:

Freedom to enjoy life's little blessings doesn't grow in a vacuum. It doesn't emerge naturally like the air that we breathe. Instead, it is blood-bought. 

In a fallen world filled with fallen people, we need not ask "Why is there war and injustice?" Such things come with the territory. We should instead ask, "What makes for peace and justice?"

We know why people want to enjoy fried chicken and quiet evenings: because these are good things. But that doesn't necessarily mean they'll be able to. Just ask the millions of people who lived in Mao's China and Stalin's Russia.

Peace and justice don't just happen. They are the fruit of a civil government restraining evil and pursuing the common good, and of soldiers willing to give their lives to maintain a just peace. Here's how C.S. Lewis put it:

The secular community, since it exists for our natural good, has no higher end than to facilitate and to safeguard the family, and friendship, and solitude...As long as we are thinking only of natural values, we must say that the sun looks down on nothing half so good as a household laughing together over a meal, or two friends talking over a pint of beer, or a man alone reading a book that interests him...All economies, politics, laws, armies, and institutions are a mere plowing the sand and sowing the ocean...save insofar as they prolong and multiply such scenes.

According to C.S. Lewis, that's why governments and armies exist: so that a family can laugh together over a meal ("a little bit of chicken fried"); so that two friends can talk peacefully over a pint of beer ("a cold beer on a Friday night"); and so that a man can sit alone and enjoy a book ("and the radio up"--OK, this parallel is a bit of a stretch, but you get the point).

And according to Zac Brown, good governments and armies are the reason we can enjoy all those things. (Conversely, bad governments and armies are often what keep whole societies from enjoying those things.)

All this stems from a good God's blessing--what theologians call God's 'common grace.' God loves it when his creation is lawfully enjoyed (Deut. 14:23-26), but there are a million wicked things (including ourselves) that will keep us from such enjoyment. This is why God ordained government--to praise good, punish evil, and promote human flourishing.

Failing to see this will only make us spoiled and ungrateful. And at the end of the day that's really all that being patriotic means--being grateful. Recognizing that multitudes of others both dead and living have made it possible for you to eat your 'chicken fried' in peace.

So as you gather with your families and eat your pecan pie and drink your beer this Fourth of July weekend, eat and drink with grateful hearts. Remember who has made this possible. Give honor to whom honor is due. And praise God for chicken fried common grace.

A miscarriage story

By Tilly Dillehay

I found out I was pregnant on a Friday. I'd crept home from work in the afternoon between projects, because some kind of instinctual suspicion hit me and I realized I needn't wait until the next day to take a test.

It was a big day at work for me—the culmination of months of fundraising for Relay for Life. I was on the committee and heading up our Relay team as well, and the day of the event itself had finally come. So I was in and out of the local park all afternoon, setting up camp and helping the committee to blow up balloons.

During a lull in activity, I decided to just run home and rest a bit before a long evening—and, if there was time, take one of those tests. I'd taken many of these over the ten months that we'd been trying. Very familiar with the missing positive line.

I set the test going, walked around the apartment, loaded a few dishes into the dishwasher, poured myself a drink... and walked back in as nonchalantly as possible.

The line was there.

I jumped, covered my mouth, leapt into the air, cried aloud, and crouched to the ground in gratefulness. My palms itched with joy; a flood of indigestible plans and calculations and dreams overwhelmed me. February? Was it February, the due date?

In a haze, I left the apartment, and the sunshine was different. I drove back to the campsite, and continued with my work quietly, but felt oddly separate from the goings on around me. As I talked to the others, took instruction, gave instruction, taped and arranged and sweated and smiled, I felt a glow of secret promise. It was encapsulated in my very person. There was life in me, and no one knew it but I.

Even that—being the only one who knew—was somehow precious for those first few hours.
My husband was at work, and I knew that I'd be working late into the night at this event. Soon, the desire to tell him began to overtake my other sensations; the joy was not complete until he knew. He was a father, you see—and he didn't know it.

I wondered if he'd be home in time from work, that I could slip home again and meet him there. The event would kick off at 6:00, and there was no question of my not being there. But if there were a few moments—twenty, even—of time...

He sent a text a few minutes later, telling me that he was off and on his way home. I picked up my keys and ran to my car.

When I walked into the cool apartment, he was taking off his work boots.

"Hello," he said in surprise. "I didn't think you'd be coming back."

"Yes," I said, suddenly shy. "Well, I wanted to tell you something."

Then I thought that this was the kind of thing I wanted to remember for a while—what his face looked like when I told him—so I asked him to sit down and pushed a coffee table off to the side in a rush, nearly upsetting the hot mug he'd just set there.

We sat opposite each other on the couch, and I smiled, and he knew already, and I said it:
"I'm pregnant."

He looked for a moment like he might cry, and then like he might laugh, and then his mouth dropped open wordlessly for a few more seconds and he exhaled once. Then we were suddenly laughing, gathering each other into messy embraces, and he was asking questions.

When did you find out? Oh, goodness, oh my goodness. When will it come? Oh my. Praise God. Oh, wow. When should we tell our parents? Oh, honey.

Then, my time was up and I had to go. That night, late, we cuddled up in bed and laughed together with glee. The baby was affectionately dubbed Gabriel—a name we'd jokingly called our eventual offspring for over a year.

The next few days were simply marvelous. That Sunday, we'd had a visit planned with my family. All of them, sisters and husbands and parents, were going to be together in the same house, and it was too perfect an opportunity. We were already supposed to be celebrating Father's Day.

Over lunch, with everyone at the table, we all gave my dad a card. Then I gave him a present, casually saying "this is from Justin and me," though Papa heard it and no one else did.

He opened the box, and I had the delight of watching his face as he pulled out a baby's garment. Across the front I'd lettered in fabric paint, "I love my Grandpapa."

The next moment, the whole table erupted in one prolonged scream.

"Who is it? Who is it?" A few people yelled. There are four young, married daughters in the family right now.

"It's me! It's me!" I yelled back.

And tears. And Laughter. Family pictures, with everyone gathered round pointing at my stomach. A phone call to a brother, who is away in the Navy.

We went home in a happy haze, planning to have the same glorious unveiling with Justin's family on the following Sunday. We talked houses, and names, and genders, and dreams. We thanked God profusely, together and apart.

On Tuesday morning, the bleeding started.

At the first moment of discovery, I simply gasped and began to beg God aloud. "No," I said. "No, no, no, no. Please, no."

God, no. It took ten months to see that life can be made through our two bodies. Don't take the life away. Not now, not later. Give it a chance, God. Please. I wrote out a prayer of pleading that morning before going to work, and wept my protest. But I finished the prayer with a psalm of praise.

I called Justin from the parking lot and broke the news, told him that I didn't know for sure but it seemed bad. A few hours into work, I completed the things I needed to do for a looming deadline.  The cramping worsened. I burst into tears in front of my employer and went home.

There I stayed for three days.

The doctors said that it wasn't certain, and that I couldn't give up hope until it was time to do a blood test. They said I needed to stay in bed just in case. But I knew, somehow. I didn't feel the same.

Justin came home Tuesday night after work and crept into the bed with me, where we whispered our disbelief and cried together. The next day, Justin stayed home from work, and we had a very quiet and sweet day. We were tender with one another, and gentle, and found ourselves bound tightly to one another in a new way. There was no word of bitterness against God between us, and I am not aware of sinning against God in my prayers during this time or afterwards.

Indeed, the sweet memory of these few days of closeness between myself and my husband have moved me to conclude that of the two options—never having become pregnant, or losing a pregnancy—I would have chosen the experience of those few weeks.

I wanted to go back to work by the third day, but Justin laid down a husbandly mandate, to stick to the plan and stay in bed. My sister came and spent the day with me, which I deeply appreciated.

I told Justin that I didn't want to go overdo our mourning in some dramatic way. It was a five-week pregnancy, and we knew about it for four days. No graves, no little services, even between ourselves.

But the next week, I did something I've never done before. I bought seeds: Sweet Basil, Parsley, and—for some reason—Snapdragon, a flower that boasted "hardy and easy growing." I purchased some little seed starter cups and starter soil. At home, I read the directions and took everything to the back patio to plant them. I started six little cups—two for each kind of seed. I took them inside to tray and watered them carefully with my hands.

Every morning and evening, I've sprayed a little water on them and covered them back over. They're supposed to stay moist, apparently, and they're supposed to be kept covered until they sprout.

Yesterday, I opened them up and gasped. "Justin!" I called. "My plants!"

In five of the six cups, tiny little sprouts could be seen poking over the surface of the soil. How miraculous. Life had occurred again—life that God always seems to be creating and sustaining. Life that he ends in his own time, but that is intended to glorify him for as long as existence is gifted to it.

The next morning found me on my stomach, watching the little plants at eye level and smelling them, reasoning that a little carbon-dioxide breath from me wouldn't do them any harm. It was a healing thing, to see that I could still be involved in the budding of a seed, the fertility of the soil, the productivity of God's natural world.

If we buy a house, as we plan to do in the next few months, I'll take these little shoots with me. I'll put them in the back yard.

They'll remind me that I worship a God of life—a God who gives life and takes it away but never disrespects it; a God who gives perfect gifts in his good time; a God who is merciful and sweet to us if we but kneel down in the soil to see his mercy. 

Why can't I just be myself?

by Justin Dillehay

Some of the dumbest things I ever did in life, I did because people around me were doing it. Skoal dipping, for example.

I still remember my first dip. My best friend had gotten into it, and I wanted to be like him. I wanted to identify with the kind of redneck culture my friends were into, so I reasoned in good Foxworthy fashion, "If I can dip Skoal without getting sick, I might be a redneck."

Judging by my subsequent vomiting, I must not have had it in me yet.

Then there was the phase in junior high when I wanted to identify as a cowboy. I started wearing Wrangler jeans (where else could I have kept the Skoal?), Ropers (those are a brand of lace-up cowboy boots), and a large belt-buckle (with a Rebel flag on it, of course). I topped it off by investing in a Resistol hat and matching bolo. The fact that I didn't live on a ranch, couldn't use a lasso, and had scarcely ever ridden a horse didn't seem to phase me. What mattered was that my friends dressed that way, and those were the people I wanted to imitate.

What all this nonsense must have looked like to my parents I can only imagine.

As far as I can tell, I haven't suffered any permanent damage from my adolescent foolishness. Indeed, it all seems rather silly to me now. But surely we all know how common this sort of behavior is. I was patterning myself after those I wished to be like.

I was imitating my heroes.

But Why Not Just Be Yourself?

Heroes are people we look up to. People we want to be like. This seems natural enough. And yet, many people's counsel for Justin the aspiring cowboy would have been: "Don't try to imitate others. Just be yourself."

Professor Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind, observed this "Be yourself" doctrine over many years with his students, and how it competed with the notion of having heroes.

Having heard over a period of years the same kinds of responses to my question about favorite books [i.e. dead silence], I began to ask students who their heroes are. Again, there is usually silence, and most frequently nothing follows. Why should anyone have heroes? One should be oneself and not form oneself in an alien mold...

What Bloom also noticed, however, was that these same students constantly imitated other people, even as they insisted on "being themselves." Oddly enough, their "selves" tended to look a lot like other "selves" around them. In other words, they were deceiving themselves. And they were deceiving themselves because having heroes is unavoidable. Everyone imitates someone. Bloom continues:

[But] from what source within themselves would they draw the goals they think they set for themselves? Liberation from the heroic only means that they have no resource whatsoever against conformity to the current 'role models.'

In other words, you will have heroes--the only question is, who will they be? If they're not great men and women, they will tend to be your idiot peers or people you see on TV.

Because Imitation is Unavoidable

God has designed the world in such a way that we are all becoming more and more like someone. Christian theologian Jason Hood fleshes this out:

...Imitation is simply inescapable. From birth to adulthood, imitation drives our behavior and beliefs. Peer pressure, the herd mentality, word of mouth, and other social factors and processes create fresh plausibility structures that facilitate experimentation with drugs, religion, facial hair, sushi, and new television programs. We rarely adopt a child, try a new diet, or engage in fasting and prayer unless exemplars model these actions and the mindsets that make the actions possible. We keep up with the Joneses, sometimes with reckless abandon, sometimes almost subconsciously duplicating their patterns of speech, consumption, dress, and recreation. We don't often use the word imitation to describe this phenomenon, perhaps in part because we love to think of ourselves as unique and independent actors. But we are all imitators, shaped in a thousand ways by what we see and hear around us.
-Jason B. Hood, Imitating God in Christ: Recovering a Biblical Pattern 

In other words, we're all conformists in some sense.

But not necessarily in the same sense. There are wise conformists and foolish ones. Wise conformists imitate their heroes on purpose, with their eyes open to what they're doing. Foolish conformists ("conformists" in the usual sense of the word) are typically blind to what they're doing, slavishly copying the latest fashions in everything, all the while claiming that they're just "being themselves."

As the demon Screwtape remarked, lamenting the bland taste of the damned souls he and his fellow demons had been feasting on,

They all tasted to me like undersexed morons who had blundered or trickled into the wrong beds in automatic response to sexy advertisements, or to make themselves feel modern or emancipated, or to reassure themselves about their...normalcy.                                                 -C.S. Lewis, "Screwtape Proposes a Toast"

Unthinking conformism can land us in the wrong beds, the wrong clothes, the wrong habits, the wrong religions, and eventually the wrong eternal destiny. It's that serious. If we want a better outcome, we're going to have to be more conscious, more deliberate, and more choosy about our heroes.

Choosing Your Heroes

The question is not "Will I have heroes?" but "Which heroes will I choose?" Not "Will I be conformed to someone's image?" but rather, "Whose image will I be conformed to?" And on that question, Scripture offers us basically two options: 1) Adam and the sinners 2) Christ and the saints.

Conforming to Adam and his offspring is easy. Since it's who we are by nature, it takes no effort at all. Indeed, apart from divine intervention, every last one of us heeds the voice of Adam's followers in its (superficially) competing forms (Isa. 53:6). And since the gate is wide and the way is broad and many people go into it, we'll never lack positive reinforcement on our journey (Matt. 7:13). We'll find plenty of people to reassure us that we're on the right side of history as we become more and more conformed to this world.

Being conformed to Christ is not easy, however. In fact, it's impossible, unless a person is born again (John 3:3, 5). But even for those who are born again, it's still difficult--so difficult that it can feel like taking up a cross. You'll have to swim against the current of this present evil age. The gate is narrow and way is hard. But at the end of the journey you end you end up alive, not damned (Matt. 7:14). In the end, you end up conformed to the image of Christ.

This is the Christian life. We are non-conformists to the world (Rom. 12:2), but conformists nevertheless. Conformists to Jesus Christ, our Savior and Hero (Rom. 8:29). He is our pattern. He has left us an example, that we might follow in his steps (1 Pet. 2:21). And he has also left us the imperfect but necessary example of multitudes of others who have followed in his steps.

These too are heroes. People like the Apostle Paul and St. Augustine and your sainted grandmother who can look you in the eye and honestly say, "I haven't fully arrived, but I'm on the right road. So imitate me as I imitate Christ" (Phil. 3:12-17 ).

So don't fool yourself into thinking you can just be yourself.

Choose your heroes wisely.

12-year-old stabbing wasn't caused by the internet: Slenderman, genocide, and our Western culture of death

By Tilly Dillehay

I was extremely distressed when I read this news story from last week about the two girls in Wisconsin who stabbed their friend.

If you were under a rock this week and didn’t hear about it, I’ll give it to you as briefly as I can because it’s truly awful. Two 12-year-old girls lured a friend into a public park after a sleepover and stabbed her 19 times because they had begun to believe stories they read online about a fake character named Slenderman. Authorities said the girls believed they would need to “physically kill someone” in order to “become proxies of Slender,” the Huffington Post reported.

And this, friends, is why I don’t like horror movies, certain kinds of creepy stories, and even, to some extent, haunted houses.

Not because I think that stories like these have some kind of power to make innocent little girls do things they don’t want to do. Certainly not because I think that every child who read stories like this is likely take it to such a wicked end.

I blame sin, and the culture of death.

Remember this quote, if you remember nothing else. One of the girls told authorities, “It was weird that I didn't feel remorse."

This is absolutely earth-shatteringly, gut-wrenchingly horrifying. “Weird,” she says. Weird, like when you find a five dollar bill in your pocket that you don’t remember putting there. Weird, like when your brother makes a certain face and you experience déjà vu.

“Weird,” like when your best school friend is lying on the ground and you have just put a knife into her arms and legs and back nineteen times, and then ordered her to stay there, hoping that she will die while you pretend to go for help, and you “don’t feel remorse.”

This is the picture of evil. Evil is a confusion of mind that sees reality as reality ISN’T. Evil sets up the desires (or, in this case, whims) of the self over the desires (or in this case, life) of another. Evil takes things of great importance and shoves them into a position of low importance, and takes things of low importance and elevates them beyond reason, beyond love, beyond the future, beyond reality.

These little girls experienced and participated in wickedness out there in the woods. But they also participated in it in the months leading up to this incident, as they were reading these stories, latching onto them, hoarding them up in their hearts, and making their plans. They encountered this particular brand of wickedness as they were wandering through a cool, scary webpage that some college students made in their free time. That wickedness took root in their hearts and flowered in the rich soil of sin already waiting there.

No, it’s not the nonsense of the horror film or the haunted house that I blame here. But I must say this much: if we think that these things are harmless, we are vastly underestimating the power of evil.

Because evil is not content to live in urban legends on the internet. It’s not content to hover in the realm of games and costume blood and stories around a camp fire. When we talk about, dwell on, and feed these stories and the culture of death that they live in, we are talking about, dwelling on, and feeding a picture of something real.

Evil is a real thing. Surely we know this. Surely we haven’t dulled our sense of life and truth and honor and reality to the extent that we disbelieve the existence of the things that live in the shadows. Surely we haven’t dulled our self-awareness to the point that we really deny the things that lurk in the shadows of our own hearts.

I say that we ‘surely’ haven’t forgotten these things, but I’m far from confident that this is the case. Our culture laughs at darkness. We laugh at it and celebrate it by turns. It’s as if so many years of experiencing common-grace light—the byproduct of a culture built on a foundation of life and productivity rather than death—have made us doubtful that darkness could ever come.

Have we forgotten what things come out of a culture of death? Have we forgotten the KKK? Have we forgotten the WWII Holocaust? Have we forgotten Rwandan genocide, Polish genocide, Aboriginal genocide, Bosnian genocide, or the ongoing genocide of millions of American infants every year? (I could go further back into history, but the 20^th century really provides us all the examples we'd ever need.)

Perhaps this seems like a left-field pitch, to bring up genocide in a discussion about horror stories and a backwoods stabbing. But I bring them up to illustrate something else about death culture, something we all seem so determined to forget: it slips in the back door. It comes up through the ranks. It comes from behind, disguised as entertainment, as a political stance, as reproductive freedom, as ‘finally getting our economy back on its feet’. Nobody who perpetrates a genocide is born with dreams of perpetrating genocide.

Sin is the problem here. The truly terrifying thing to contemplate is the fact that at any moment, our own hearts may produce this kind of wickedness and death.



These girls didn’t go online, I imagine, ready to kill somebody. There was a period of time during which their minds underwent a change... through stages of fascination, obsession, discussion, encouragement, and fantasy... to the point that when they woke up on the morning of May 31, killing made sense.

We cannot, must not fail to draw some kind of connection between this culture of death that we’ve created and are creating—a culture that hates and devalues life—and the stabbing of a 12-year-old girl in the Wisconsin woods by her two sleepover buddies.

If we do, we’re kidding ourselves.

---