Wrong. This never happens. And this never will happen. We have more access to entertainment than at any time in human history, yet somehow, we’re far less satisfied than when we’d spend half the evening driving to Blockbuster to pick out a movie, which we’d then watch twice over the weekend before having to drive back to the store to return it.

This paradox of our moment — having more choices yet feeling less satisfied — captures the essence of our struggle for control. Sociologist Hartmut Rosa explores this phenomenon in his short book The Uncontrollability of the World. The original German word unverfügbarkeit in the title is normally translated to “unpredictability,” but this failed to capture the emotional depth Rosa and his editor were aiming for. They instead landed on “uncontrollability,” a word that better captures modernity’s obsession and spiraling result of trying to make the world predictable, available, and disposable. Rosa explains his thesis:

The tremendously powerful idea that the key to a good life lies in expanding our share of the world has worked its way deep into our psychological and emotional life.

We’ve subscribed to the belief that if we can just bring more of the world within our reach and under our control, we’ll find the good life. The idea permeates every aspect of our existence, from toddlers mastering new skills to the elderly seeking security. It’s become the mantra of modern life, though it often goes unspoken: always act in a way that increases your share of the world.

But how’s that working out for us? There are apps that let us monitor our homes, control the temperature, and even see who’s at our door. But when the power goes out, all that control evaporates, leaving us more helpless than before. We’ve created a new kind of uncontrollability. Apps like Headspace, Calm, and Happify monitor our moods, but soon enough, that monitoring morphs into optimizing. Before we know it, we’re trying to control our emotions and natural body rhythms. Rosa argues that this relentless pursuit of control doesn’t lead to the good life, but rather burnout and a pervasive fear of burnout. We become numb to the world, unable to experience it in a way that resonates. As Rosa puts it, “The fundamental fear of modernity is fear of the world’s falling mute, of which burnout and depression are only timely expressions.”

This numbness bleeds into every part of life, especially parenting. Recently, the Surgeon General issued a warning about the pressures on parents today. At first, it sounded like satire — something straight out of the Onion mocking our culture’s fixation on mental health and over-therapization. I mean, where is this warning sticker supposed go — on bed sheets?? But reading the actual warning, a well of empathy begins to form. Not only are parents overwhelmed by the rising costs of childcare and the impossible maze of social media, but also the endless flood of information they’re supposed to both manage and master. Just this week, I received separate text messages about fluoride levels, radio frequencies, and forbidden foods for my own children. Behind each message was an expectation of understanding the argument and picking a side or else ending up on the wrong side of history … or worse, being labeled a bad parent. No wonder two out of five parents report feeling so overwhelmed they become numb. Our attempts to control have backfired, leaving us more anxious than before. The world is becoming cold and mute.

So where do we turn when our efforts at control have not only failed us but also created a worse form of uncontrollability?

Rosa suggests that instead of doubling down on more measuring and maximizing, we ought to instead discover resonance: a meaningful, responsive connection with the world around us. Resonance requires something outside of us calling out to us in some way. It can happen when you are compelled by a story, captured by a sunset, or moved by a song — anything that reaches out and touches you or causes abreaction. This movement leads to a form of transformation that you can’t cause or engineer. It is more than a psychological state or feeling and it can never be coerced or manipulated. Resonance is uncontrollable.

We see literal resonance in a tuning fork: when struck, the vibrations affect everything around it. Another tuning fork held up to the first will begin to respond in harmony. Or for those who ever played a sport to the point of exhaustion out of self-forgetful delight, resonance is like that “flow” state where in responding to the movement happening on the court or field, you become so immersed in the unfolding drama that you completely forget about yourself and your performance. Most players describe their peak performance in that state, but you can’t force your way in — it always just happens when it does.

Resonance finds its deepest expression in the New Testament. In 1 Corinthians 10, Paul describes Jesus as the rock that was struck in the desert to provide water for his people. Like us in the twenty-first century, the Israelites wandering the desert felt closed off from the world around them. The solution wasn’t to engineer a way out but to resonate with what God was doing by Moses striking the rock. They merely had to receive the water and be reminded of the God who was at work.

The good life is not about bringing more of the world within your grasp. Instead, it’s about being grasped by the one who gave himself for us. It’s about finding rest in the uncontrollable grace of God and being freed from the exhausting pursuit of control. In a world that demands more of our time, attention, and energy, the good life is Christ and him crucified.

What does this look like practically? It’s something like the simple children’s book The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats. The child, experiencing snow for the first time, is captivated by wonder — even his own footprints in the fluffy powder draw him into a world of transformation and discovery. Like us, he tries to control and keep it, packing a snowball in his pocket for later, but it melts away while he takes a bath. The next morning, despite dreaming the snow would be gone, he wakes to a fresh covering of snow — a picture that God’s grace is not something we control but a gift that renews every morning, inviting us to resonate with what he’s up to in the world around us again and again.

The post Control is Overrated appeared first on Red Tree.

After he left, my wife and I couldn’t help but realize that soon enough that’ll be us, that someday we’ll come back and have the same conversation with younger owners, tearing up at the memories of raising a family there.

Change is an interesting thing. It can be both good and bad. And I’m often struck by how uncomfortable yet unavoidable it is — almost like death, though not as dark, and with less fear attached to it. It’s maybe why we talk so much about the good old days, yet simultaneously find ourselves unable or unwilling to see the inevitability of drifting away from them. Sometimes the only outlet, then, is longing and sadness, but also some healthy self-awareness that dips its toe into the theological.

If change seems inevitable for us, the opposite is the case for God, who is (to use a fancy theological word) immutable, unchangeable. And not only God but also the gospel itself – an unshakable promise that never changes or weakens. Time moves on, but we’re called more to remembrance than innovation. And yet, without even trying, we often “age” past the wooden rafters of the gospel and try to add to what’s been given. It’s ingrained in all of us. I was recently talking with some friends who were lamenting how they made the Christian life too complicated, and how their story was one of spiritual recovery back to simple, grace-based Christianity. I could relate.

I wonder if Jesus’ call to childlike faith in the Gospels isn’t simply a call to weakness and dependence (though it is), but also a call to simplicity. We get older in the faith, and often with age comes the trap of thinking we know better than we used to. Going deeper into the love of God, as Paul prays for the Ephesians, is one thing, but qualifying or going past the love of God is another, and altogether dangerous. Love is the final frontier, you could say. It never ends. It always perseveres. There’s no uncharted theological land outside of it that needs to be explored. Grace is always the last word, so the way forward is down, beneath our feet. We’ve only begun to understand how rich, unending, and surprising God’s love is for us in Christ. But so much of our understanding of what growth and progress are has to do with novelty, and so it goes on and on, the cycle of thinking there’s more out there for us than what God called his final and fixed word of love in Hebrews 1.

I find solace in the fact that scripture’s “heroes” struggle with this — like Peter, whose unwillingness to dine with dirty gentiles brought into question how much he really believed God’s grace was enough. So, I cling to the anchor that Jesus died not just for my big bad sins, but my “faith sins” as well, those sins that operate from the shadows and seek to add to the grace that I know deep down is sufficient — “If I just ascended a little bit more, I think I could prove that I was worth saving.” But that way of living ages me swiftly and leads me not only to forget the beauty of the gospel but also to change it into something it’s not, into some awful hybrid of law and grace, which, Paul says in Romans, then ceases to become grace (Rom 11:6).

But God doesn’t age. And he’s more comfortable with repetition than we are. G. K. Chesterton once wrote:

Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that he has the eternal appetite of infancy: for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.

Maybe, somewhere deep down, whether we realize it or not, the reason we’re overcome with emotion when walking into the old garages of our past is because the gospel is in there somewhere. We change and fluctuate in our sin, streaks of gray hair growing in over our ears. We wander. We forget. Many times our worst days are toward the end of our life rather than the beginning, even though others tell us that shouldn’t be the case. But then we smell the old wooden cross, and we remember that though our bodies break down, God’s love remains unchanged, and it’s ok to be a child in the faith. Grace really is free, though paid for at the highest of costs by Jesus. These things tend to elicit more and more tears with age — tears of joy and thankfulness, mixed with hope for a future when God will restore all things and bring our longings for permanence and eternal life to fruition.

The post An Ageless God, A Timeless Gospel appeared first on Red Tree.

Why include such a petty detail here at the apex of the story? Some argue it adds a layer of forthrightness to the scriptures that make it more believable. In other words, while religious texts often seek to paint their followers in a positive light, this one doesn’t hide from seeing people as people. 

Undoubtedly this type of honesty strengthens the trustworthiness of the text, but it still doesn’t answer the question of why it’s here – at such a pivotal moment in the story. There is an abundance of sights and sounds from the first Easter Sunday to choose from so why land on this offhanded, gloaty comparison?  

One possible answer can be stated in the form of a question: instead of reading these words as John bragging, what if we consider him to be confessing?  

John has a front-row seat to the most exciting moment in history and yet he’s still stuck thinking about himself. Imagine sitting courtside to watch Caitlin Clark break the NCAA all-time scoring record, but you don’t clap because you’re trapped in your own head considering the ways you’ve made better life choices than your sister…or how that dumb friend from high school’s salary is double your own…or how the emotional intelligence of your supervisor could possibly be that low… or on and on we go. The scores we keep may be petty, but their grip on our thought life is undeniable. 

And maybe that’s the point. John’s confession is one of many invitations from God heading into Good Friday and Easter. Our intuitions during Holy Week often include doing spiritual things to feel closer to God. John’s approach here is to show how the doorway to things above, that is, holy (literally set apart) activity is never what we expect because it’s upside down. God is not saying to step up or speed up, to moral high ground, but instead to step down from the ladder of our ideal versions of ourselves and back into reality – to look at who we actually are in the dark recesses of our own hearts. Holy Week is all about acknowledging the things we actually think about because here is where we find our great need for rescue.    

Jesus died on Good Friday to deliver us from our daily scorekeeping and petty comparisons. He passed us up in our race to self-deification and showed us the end of those things is only death, but he rose again to bring us into a new reality, never again to be marked by our place in relation to others. Freedom looks a lot like self-forgetfulness, and the surest way to forget about yourself is counterintuitive: confess the scores you keep and watch them lessen their grip because the last will be first. Jesus wasn’t in the tomb awarding John with a first-place ribbon. Our races don’t flatter him, he’s never at the finish lines we expect, because he’s already out there working to find us apart from our best efforts. 

The post That Weird Easter Footrace appeared first on Red Tree.

We should also add that we are all fallen beings — we are broken in how we view the world and how we experience it. One of the ways that this manifests is through our instinctual bent toward comparison. To compare ourselves with others is part of the human experience. Consider all the silly ways we keep score: education level, relationship status, career satisfaction, physical abilities, clothing styles, house size, social media highlights, how much we suffer, grades in school, and what our W-2s say at tax time.

To be caught in these cycles of comparison never leads to anything good. As the old saying goes, “Comparison is the thief of joy.” After some mindless scrolling on social media, what might begin as a pretty benign thought of, “What a fun trip! I’m genuinely happy for them” devolves into “They always seem to travel, I wish I could have those experiences,” and from there bottoming out at, “Gosh, what a life they live. Why can’t I live such a life? I wish I had more money and time to do all the things.” During these cycles, there are feelings and emotions that lead to a hard and cold heart. 

We see some of these emotions emerge in Scripture as well. In the story of Cain and Abel, Cain kills Abel because God was pleased with Abel’s offering and not his. A few chapters later, we see another family feud take place between Joseph and his brothers because of their father’s seemingly biased love. Later, King Saul is jealous of David because he’s being praised for his military success. In Luke 15, the older brother compares his dad’s love for him and his younger brother and gets angry because of it. The list goes on.

The emotions displayed in these passages are so intense and so severe that one person takes the life of another, or at least wants to, which is just as bad.

Digging deeper, we often find the culprit underneath the surface – pride — this ancient and unavoidable inner brokenness that pits us against others and makes competitions out of the most menial of things. Pride says, “I know best. I am the best. I am capable. I deserve the best.” But it doesn’t always lead to outright boastfulness. It can crush us too when we realize that others have more than us or have accomplished more than us.

When it comes to spirituality we might say, “Thank God that I don’t deal with that sin like that other poor, less mature person is,” or we might say, “Why do I struggle with this thing that my friend never seems to deal with? Why am I such a terrible person?”

Anyone else having moments of yuck yet? 

Take a moment to consider the emotions you might feel when playing these comparison games. I often experience envy, jealousy, resentment, and anxiety — all of these mixed with sadness because these are not emotions that I want to be experiencing. When I feel them building up within me, I feel stuck. I feel shame because it’s hard to admit it out loud when I’m feeling them. I want to hide and not share with others. 

Proverbs 14:30 says, “A tranquil heart gives life to the flesh, but envy makes the bones rot.” Envy produces a visceral response. Turns out comparison isn’t just the thief of joy, it’s the thief of any and all positive emotions. 

Yet, it’s right at that moment, right when we think all is lost and that we feel that all has been taken from us, right when we realize how hard it is to have a tranquil heart, that the gospel speaks a better word: Jesus died for our present reality, not our ideal.

The law says, “Do these things to obtain the ideal. By completing these things, you will reach fulfillment.” But, the law was only a shadow, a placeholder that showed us that the solution would never come from within, but from without. Christ came to fulfill the law; he was its finish line. And the word of his blood is that he saw us in the reality of our sin and said, “I choose you, the reality you’re in. It’s not the ideal you that I died for, it’s you in the ‘right now.’ The one who is broken — you are who I want, who I desire to know and love.”

Comparison will always be part of our shared story as broken people. God knew that and still chose us. He died for us, impartially, apart from what we’ve done and what life has dealt us, so that we can rest in him, come what may. Comparison is the thief of joy, and in this life we’ll never be truly free from its grasp, but thanks be to God: grace is the thief of comparison.

The post The Comparison Games We Play appeared first on Red Tree.

~ Spoilers to follow ~

When a near fender-bender in a parking lot results in excessively-honked horns and a faceless middle finger, Danny Cho (played by Steven Yeun) channels The Dude of The Big Lebowski: “This aggression will not stand, man.” Danny was primed for an outburst as he’d just endured a jaw-tightening episode of trying to return merchandise and being denied. It’s the latest in a long string of indignities he’s faced, as we’ll come to learn. Soon he’s speeding after the offending SUV and its aggressive pilot, screaming through neighborhoods and taking out gardens while people gawk. Unable to look his enemy in the eye before they get away, he takes down the plate number and retreats, still fuming and not letting this go. 

We are then introduced to the other driver, Amy Lau (played by Ali Wong). She’s an upper-class business owner who has slaved away at growing her houseplant company until an elite millionaire retail mogul finally shows interest in acquiring it. On this particular day, she’s also set up for a fit of rage as the pressures of career and family threaten to crush her once and for all.

What follows for these two characters is a series of escalating interactions as they angrily orbit each other, each trying to bring the other down for the crime of road rage. 

It becomes clear through all of this that both of them have been killing themselves for years in a desperate search for validation, stability, and love and neither has found it. As we come to know more about their lives, we find past sins and mistakes contributing to their pattern of behavior today as the problems just keep getting worse the harder they try to atone for themselves. It’s a deeply human quandary that so many of us find ourselves stuck in as we ask, “Will anything actually make me happy?”

As he reckons with his failures, Danny finds himself back at the Korean-American church of his youth. In a moment of raw emotion, he weeps during a worship song, and a stranger gives him a hug with no questions asked. It’s a glimmer of love and it moves him deeply, nudging him back into that community a bit. He meets his ex-girlfriend’s husband Edwin who is a mini-celebrity in the small church and relishes this status with a devilish smile. One of my favorite moments in the show is during a church league basketball game when Edwin’s pride is being brought low by Danny’s superior skills. He steps back and launches a 3-pointer, yelling “For the Lord!”, only to brick the shot and ultimately lose the game. He’s devastated, sensing his self-worth slip away as his role is usurped by Danny. A work of pride masquerading as Christian devotion is foolishness for Edwin while Danny’s pride has almost no mask at all as he uses the church as a fence for illegal dealings on behalf of his criminal cousin while also leading the worship band himself. It’s all so twisted. 

Amy, on the other hand, is devoted not to a church community but to the hustle of her work and the “spiritual leaders” of that realm take her in and preach the gospel of fortune and excess. In her quest to grab hold of her dream of windfall profit and freedom from the millstone of expectations, she aligns herself with an even richer business owner and guru. She compromises and sacrifices her family to further her attempts at a deal, which only makes her burden heavier and her mental health worse. At one point, she’s pulled on stage for a panel discussion on entrepreneurship where she smiles and says “I’ve learned you can actually have it all” even as her life is spiraling further and further out of control. 

Soon Amy begins flashing back to her younger years when she imagined being visited by a folklore demon who silently takes note of all her sins. Terrified of the demon tattling on her for eating candy when she’s not supposed to, young Amy asked the monster “Are you going to tell anyone?” The demon answers “No”. Amy asks why and the demon calmly replies, “Because then no one would love you.” Amy’s secret pain and the burden of sin that she carries becomes more and more crippling in her life because she believes Satan’s lie that there is no forgiveness and love on the other side of confession. 

In the final episodes, Danny and Amy become more and more fixated on the other as the avatar of all that has gone wrong in their lives. If they could just exact righteous punishment on their rival then all would finally be right in their own life! When everything comes to a violent, chaotic climax of gunfire and gruesome death, Danny and Amy somehow manage to flee from the wreckage and find themselves alone together in a desert, injured and poisoned by the wild fruit they thought would keep them alive. They spew hatred at each other as they spew bile to the ground and begin to realize they may be dying together. 

Here is where undiluted grace finally breaks through as it so often does — in the lowest moments. Danny and Amy, in their hallucinatory states, begin to see each other for the first time. In fact, their addled brains entangle their identities until they hear their own words come from the other person’s lips. They are seen by the other and they are the same. They are broken people without hope who have spent their entire lives kicking against the goads (as Paul calls it in Acts 26). For the first time in their lives, they are not hiding. They are exposed but the other isn’t attacking or recoiling.  At the end of their own rope, they have been transported to the Garden of Eden. Two human beings, truly naked and unashamed. Fully known and fully loved.

Danny and Amy came together as bitter enemies over brake lights and horns. On that day, they were faceless personifications of the seemingly unjust fact that their blood, sweat, and tears have amounted to unfulfilled lives. But lying on the ground in a California desert, they finally understand each other and themselves. As they “die” together and awake the next morning free from the effects of the poisonous berries, they are somehow no longer enemies. They are not lovers, but more like spiritual siblings who fought tooth and nail but were ultimately restored. Like Jacob and Esau in Genesis 33, meeting later in life after so much anger and betrayal and somehow finding healing and restoration, almost to their own surprise. The show ends with a quiet picture of inexplicable love and care.

Grace turns enemies into friends, and bitter rivals into brothers and sisters. Grace cools hot tempers and invites broken people to dine together at the table set by Jesus himself, leveling the ground so we can see our brokenness and need. His own body and blood were broken and shed so that angry, undeserving people could be saved from the poison of their own toil and comparisons and be made whole. Beef screams “It’s not about you” in a voice choked with pain, but it’s a song we all must hear to be saved. And then, like The Dude, grace abides.

The post Grace From Carnage appeared first on Red Tree.

One inflammatory opinion gets tossed to the other side of the table and before a reasonable response is given time to form, another grenade is lobbed from the adjacent corner. The contrasting viewpoints suck the air out of the room, but the reason for the title of the skit is soon revealed when a savvy child steps over to the radio and blasts Adele causing the group to break out in harmony together, bonded by a song about heartbreak and relational debris. Perhaps, it takes a child’s eyes to see how only weakness is powerful enough to tear down the walls that divide us. 

What is it about gathering around a table with people who have different views than us that creates such inner instability? Why do we feel a need to put on armor or dig a trench when an opinion is raised we disagree with or find offensive? Maybe we’re afraid of being wrong, exposed, or found out. Maybe that article we read or video we watched that convinced us about the right opinion to hold isn’t even sturdy enough to handle the scrutiny of our delirious uncle. 

Nick Cave, the author of the title track for the famous mob-show on Netflix, “Peaky Blinders,” has a newsletter he started which answers questions from fans, but perhaps is moreso his effort of making sense of the world in light of the grief the comes from being human. Cave is familiar with grief as one has undergone the indescribable pain of losing not one but two children. In a more recent response to the question of whether or not someone should speak up or hold their tongue, he writes about good faith conversations:

“A good faith conversation begins with curiosity. It looks for common ground while making room for disagreement. It should be primarily about exchange of thoughts and information rather than instruction, and it affords us, among other things, the great privilege of being wrong; we feel supported in our unknowing and, in the sincere spirit of inquiry, free to move around the sometimes treacherous waters of ideas. A good faith conversation strengthens our better ideas and challenges, and hopefully corrects, our low-quality or unsound ideas.”

We are prone to unsound ideas because we can never see the whole picture on any topic. By recognizing we all start from the same foggy position of not having everything figured out about anything (see 1 Corinthians 13:12), we can begin to build something with the people we talk with, and bypass the common conversational cancers of seeking to win, inform, or instruct. 

Conversations aren’t math problems. The purpose of a discussion is not to bring our previously discovered right answers to the table and then prove our work in front of others. When we make this mistake, and we all do, we buy into a lie as old as time that we can garner admiration (and even love) by how correct we are – but in reality, we only feed a dynamic of superiority that always breeds disconnection and distance. 

At the end of the day, what we want is to be wanted at the table with no one to impress and nothing to prove. There is an obscure story in the Old Testament that shows us how. In 2 Samuel 9, King David is looking for descendents of Saul, the former king, who had previously made assassinating King David his full time job. Viewers of any big name dramas involving a throne would expect ill will in David’s hunt for a rival challenger to the crown.

Only one descendent is found. His name is really hard to pronounce (Mephibosheth), and he’s a crippled man who is unable to make a living for himself. He is summoned to the palace, and as he is placed before the king, he trembles in fear as one found to be on the wrong side of history. 

But instead of receiving the guillotine, he is shown supernatural kindness. The king restores to him the fortune that would have been his, had his grandfather Saul not perished, and he even receives a nameplated seat at the king’s table for the rest of his life! 

What does this have to do with Thanksgiving turbulence, Adele, and good faith conversations? Everything. In the New Testament, King David is shown to be a small picture of what King Jesus is like ahead of time. This means our place in the story is not the one who wears the crown but is instead the crippled man who is an enemy of the throne. We are uncertain of our lot in life and afraid of the King whose allegiance we betray. But the former enemy of the king, whose physical incapabilities resemble our human incapability of knowing all things and justifying ourselves, is brought into the dining room of royalty to eat with and enjoy the company of the king for the remainder of his days. 

God’s kindness is extended to the treasonous. He prepares a table before the presence of his enemies and makes them family. He bleeds and even dies for traitors so that their invitation to the table is irrevocable and everlasting. 

Jesus was nailed to a tree naked and exposed, absorbing our great fears of being the same. The need to self protect has been dismantled and replaced by the unshakeable safety that there is now nothing to prove, things are settled. Heaven’s heart broke when God himself was crucified, but it became a song that unites enemies of every stripe. We can even take a deep breath and be proven wrong at the dinner table, then go throw more stuffing on our plates. Happy Thanksgiving!

The post Afraid At The Table appeared first on Red Tree.

But within two minutes of passing through the security gate, in a place where I expected to be overtaken by joy and excitement, I brought only stress and an argumentative spirit toward my wife. I began to complain about where to go and what foods to try, all in an effort to best optimize our experience in order to have maximum amounts of fun. 

This isn’t new for me. Whether it’s the State Fair, a night out, or a vacation, my tendency is to act like a jerk even though deep down I really want to create a nice environment for my family. If the point is to have fun and make memories, why do I do the opposite?

For starters, it’s hard to resist the promise that experiences are what I’m really missing in life – travel is the key I’ve been missing to unlock the true capacity for positive change and self discovery. I regularly buy what the industry is selling: Travel makes us free, joyful, human, whole, and alive (see here and here). No matter how much I know it isn’t true, it’s compelling. Their ads work on my heart:

“The new tagline, ‘Where Can We Take You?’, evokes not only the physical destinations one reaches when they travel, but the personal and spiritual destinations travel lifts them to. The line and the campaign underscore the brand’s belief in travel’s ability to help one grow, heal, and find common ground.” 

Now, add to my expectations time and monetary investments and I find myself feeling entitled to the most optimal experience complete with curated photos and curated joy. It’s a feeling I earned! Even more, I end up feeling entitled to find myself.

But the truth is more like the SNL sketch, “Romano Tours” where Adam Sandler plays a tour guide of famous Italian sites, who wants to temper expectations for excited travelers. The most poignant joke of the sketch reminds us of the limits of travel and experiences: “If you are sad where you are, and you get on a plane to Italy, the you in Italy will be the same sad you from before, just in a new place. Does that make sense? There’s a lot a vacation can do. Help you unwind, see some different looking squirrels. But it cannot fix deeper issues, like how you behave in group settings, or your general baseline mood.”

My expectations become solidified in the hope that a trip to the State Fair, a date night, or a trip to California to see the Sequoia trees is going to bring me to new ‘personal and spiritual destinations.’ I’m looking to travel and experiences to change me, but the truth is, they can’t. I’m the same person on vacation that I am every other day. Travel shows me more of who I really am, so I guess in a way, I truly am finding myself, but the picture isn’t pretty. Realizing travel hasn’t healed me, but has actually revealed to me that I’m still me (just in a different place), snaps me back to reality like an overstretched rubber band.

Where is the hope, then, for a burned out “experience seeker” like myself? I can work harder to temper my own expectations for what an experience should be. I can spend more time planning to create a better schedule. But isn’t that just more attempts at optimization? Adding more behavior modification to my already wearied life seems to be the cause of the problem, not the solution. 

The deliverance I seek from the burned out, self-seeking, optimized life of travel experiences isn’t to come up with a better plan but to be shown the grace of the one who traveled to me, and to us.  

Jesus coming down to earth reveals that life isn’t about optimizing or travel hacking our way to heaven. Instead, it’s about coming face to face with the rest and relief that only the Son of God can bring. Grace teaches us that relief and rescue come not from inside, but from outside of us, from the Son of God who willingly comes to us to lay down his life, in order that we would let the well of our endless striving to be better finally dry up. 

The cross of Christ pronounces the expiration date on all forms of self-optimization because, in the end, Christ’s greatest work was his death. There’s no experience that is less “optimized” than that! It is his costly and horrible experience on the cross that becomes the pathway to true life for all of us who are tired of trying to fix ourselves with the next experience and are ready to simply believe. Only in Jesus do I find the one who truly makes me free, joyful, human, whole, and alive.

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Hopefully, we let the majority of these wrong impressions calibrate as we actually get to know this person, but we are all well acquainted with instances where that change is not favorable. The verdict isn’t always positive. We swipe left. 

Even beyond these first impressions, the same “unfree” feeling begins to make its presence known within all of our relationships. Why do we feel the way we do about anyone? What charges us with a sense of superiority in certain relationships and inferiority complexes in others? What’s behind our inability to celebrate that coworker getting a promotion or that feeling of my-life-would-just-be-better-if-such-and-such-person did not exist? The closer we get to these questions, the more we find we are locked up under affections and apprehensions we do not choose for ourselves.

C.S. Lewis once observed how much easier it is to be enthusiastic about capital “H” humanity than it is to love individual men and women, especially those who are uninteresting, exasperating, depraved, or otherwise unattractive. Loving everybody in general can always serve as a great excuse for loving nobody in particular.  

Consider the ease with which we typecast friends and family around us as if they were characters in the drama of our own story: “of course Uncle Charlie made the night about him, he’s such a narcissist” or “that’s so like Stacy to take your things without asking, she’s been doing that for years.” The labels we receive and stick onto others cement more quickly than we notice, locking us and them into categories with little hope for release or redemption. 

There’s a subtle parable in the fifth chapter of the book of Acts that puts this interpersonal imprisonment on display.

The religious high priest and his entourage, controlled and compelled by an unrelenting sense of jealousy and resentment, literally imprison the apostles for preaching the gospel. One flash of their religious ruler badge, and the apostles are thrown behind bars in the local penitentiary. 

But during the night an angel of the Lord opened the doors of the jail and brought them out. “Go, stand in the temple courts,” he said, “and tell the people all about this new life” Acts 5:19-20

God sneaks into the prison undetected and unlocks the door. But he does more than just release them. They are to go back and communicate to their captors that everyone is behind bars that can’t be seen. No one is free, all are imprisoned. Though we can’t see the chains that bind us, we often feel them weighing on us in our own jealousy, bitterness, and even hatred toward people God himself made and delights in. The religious rulers proudly wear their self-righteous resentment, but it’s shown to be a noose tied by their own hands. 

God sends the apostles back to the temple courts to share how the law has no power to liberate. Even the temple, despite all of its ordinances and commitment toward transformation, can only condemn perpetrators. This is what makes the rope-removing, prison-releasing salvation in Jesus so surprising. It’s the death of God that holds the power and promise of this new life. And he is making his way to everyone who is held captive to the tyranny of self, locked behind the bars of judgment and judging one another.

The angel of the Lord effortlessly breaking the apostles out of prison is like neon letters presenting “the how” of Christianity. In the death of Jesus on the cross, he willingly redirects all the scorn you’ve ever felt toward someone onto himself. Moreover, he receives and even becomes the righteous indignation anyone, including God, has ever felt toward you.  

Martin Luther says that God receives none but those who are forsaken, restores health to none but those who are sick, gives sight to none but the blind and life to none but the dead, he has mercy on none but the wretched and gives grace to none but those who are in disgrace. We might add that he sets free none but those who are bound.

Someone will be critical of you today. You are powerless to stop them. But the gospel is news that God is decidedly not critical toward you today and everyday. He does not judge you based on his first, second, or 10,000 impression of you. Perfect love casts out criticism. And the love that brought Jesus to Calvary rests at the very heart of reality. It’s of the prison-breaking, judgment-absorbing variety, and it’s given for you.

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This post originally appeared on mbird.com

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If the trope is true, then if the second season of a show you love passes muster, we are often filled with a surprising sense of relief (see: Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and The Crown). But if the second season somehow transcends the first, we’ve encountered something truly worth talking about.

Ted Lasso has (miraculously?) bucked the trend to become that latter beacon of hope.

Season one caught us off guard during the worst year in recent memory. In our burdensome era of complaining and outrage, which was only accelerated and magnified during a global pandemic and the 2020 presidential election, the show was dropped into our locked down living rooms and became one of the few sanctuaries to breathe the fresh air of grace. The writers gave us several, emotionally persuasive pictures of one-way love toward undeserving human beings.

Critics deemed the show a shining light of kindness and decency and a triumph of can-do optimism. Coach Lasso became a role model, a counterpoint to toxic masculinity. For many, the show promised that if we can only embody the resilience and grace of Ted, then we will finally breeze through life’s many challenges and hurdles like we’ve always imagined (even professional coaches are joining in our folly). This portrait of grace became an aspirational ideal.

We are afflicted with the belief that we can heal ourselves. This is why we love what theologians label “the law” – the prospect of self-improvement by gaining more knowledge.

The only and main problem is, the law doesn’t work. The time between season one’s release and season two has shown us that none of us actually are Ted Lasso in our nine-to-fives. Rather than laugh at ourselves with the crowd, forgive the ones who wrong us, and celebrate the names of the janitors, we defend our decisions until we’re out of breath and nurse our bitterness towards others. More often than we care to admit, we resemble “Led Tasso,” Ted’s neurotic split personality.

But then along comes season two.

Now, in order to leave the magic of this season untarnished for first time viewers, we can broadly say that the second season shows us in bright, brilliant colors that we are, in fact, not ok. We all suffer from an inability to love those we care about most, little-man syndrome, known and unknown father wounds, or neglect.

And in addition to bundling your favorite rom-coms into an episode about how love motivates, persuades, and influences our decisions more than logic, the whole second season resembles the mystery of the gospel, that the way up is down. Joy is found through confession, strength arises through vulnerability, and life springs forth from what feels like death.

Roy Kent’s path is paved by several deaths to his self-protected tough-guy image. His rage and militant independence can only be undone through the crucible of self-awareness. It’s coming to terms with the wake he is leaving behind that opens his eyes, and his relationships with Phoebe and Keely respectively reveal the dark parts of Roy Kent that are being brought to an end.

Ted’s own not-ok-ness is disclosed in new ways this time around, seen in particular through his fidgety exchanges with the team therapist, Dr. Sharon Fieldstone. After watching Ted blame, hide, and humor his way out of confronting the unfunny, painful parts of who he is, Fieldstone says to Ted and (ultimately all of us) “the truth will set you free. But first it will piss you off.” The truth harms before it heals. The order of operations is significant.

Season one gave us an ideal version of who we ought to be, while season two is showing us our need for the type of healing that addresses our unseen selves.

This “two-season” story is beginning to resemble the Bible’s own two testament narrative. Like Ted Lasso, God’s second season wasn’t a betrayal of the first, but a deepening of its themes in new directions.

Far from flopping, season two (i.e. the New Testament) consists of God’s best material. On the other side of Jesus’ cross and resurrection, our little “d” deaths through the hard, frustrating parts of confronting ourselves and lives are the only true pathway to healing. We do not become who we ought to be by grit and smiling determination, but by admitting who we actually are. Deeply flawed, and wounded — yet loved to hell and back by the Truth who put on human flesh to bleed for us. By his wounds, we are healed.

God’s second round of wine at the party exceeds the first, leaving everyone both dumbfounded with surprise and satisfaction.  The second season of God’s story reveals how life has always been cruciform. It may not have been what anyone expected, but it was precisely the plot twist we needed.

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This post originally appeared on mbird.com

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