It is indeed a strange circumstance when the things and people we trust become sources of error.  I walked into the kitchen this week anticipating bacon, eggs, and the Tiger Woods decorated sports section.  Instead, my wife handed me the USA Today’s Life section with a three-quarter page article on the dangers of CT scans.  The picture shows the long, cold bed covered in tear-away sanitized paper, a technician adjusting the settings, and the waiting white hole that more resembles a Play-Doh creation.

“Recent studies found that patients may receive far more radiation from the common diagnostic tests called CT scans than previously estimated.  These scans may cause 29,000 new cancers a year- as well as 14,500 deaths.”

The USA Today suggests many doctors know less than they need to about the radiation dosage sizes and often prescribe CT scans to cover themselves.  Some children actually receive adult-sized radiation doses due to negligence.  Others times, the risks do not outweigh the benefits, though the doctor schedules the scan out of routine habit.  One frightening 2004 survey statistic stated that only 50% of radiologists recognized CT scans increase risks of cancer.

Great.  Perhaps this makes me like a 101^st Airborne soldier in a Nazi POW camp that must risk death to escape.  If he stays put, he’ll surely die.  Yeah, that sounds much more valiant.

I will undergo my next scan in February.  How could something so painless and effortless harm me?  I lay there, close my eyes, and listen to the computerized feminine voice, “Breathe in.  Hold your breath.  Breathe.  Breathe in.  Hold your breath.  Breathe.”  Then the IV shoots liquid into me that tastes like I am sucking on metal.  I do my best not to stare directly at the red light above my head, despite the written warning: “Do Not Stare at Laser”.  Then I walk down the hall to hear my doctor inform me of the good results.

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The whole life of Christ was a cross.  And the more spiritual progress you strive for, the heavier your crosses become, for as your love for God increases so will the pain of your exile.

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Continued from this post: Spiritual Frontier

Back in high school, our Fellowship of Christian Athletes met in the health classroom, three long tables deep, all facing the white board.  Health posters that said “Don’t smoke” and “Exercise Helps Your Self-Esteem!”, decorated the otherwise bare cinder block walls.  A handful of teen-zombies stumbled into the room cleaning sleep from their eyes.  These were the days before double-shots, macchiatos, ventis, and mochas on every corner.  Looking back now, I wonder how much fellowshipping could be expected at 7 AM.  Disoriented good mornings and mumbled hellos.

I’ll never forget one gentleman that came to share one Thursday morning.  I believe he had wonderful intentions, bless his heart, to direct high school students in life with Christ.  He spoke with the warmth of a grandfather and possessed a smile that rivaled Santa’s.  With the dry-erase marker and blank canvas he diagramed an old fashioned wheel, a cross between a boat’s steering device and a bicycle tire.  He explained that Christ belongs at the hub, and our Christian life flows out of that through four spokes of fellowship, prayer, the Word of God, and the Holy Spirit.  To complete the metaphor, he described the engineering of a wheel and how uneven spokes would hinder a wheels capacity to function.  You can imagine the wheel’s inability to roll when its spokes differ in length.  His message asserted that in order to live the functional Christian life, our prayer life and time in the Word and experience of community and life in the Spirit must be at equal and sufficient levels.  Then life works.

Even at seventeen, I knew something wasn’t right.  True, elements of the message have value, but overall his explanation of life with Jesus was as exciting as the lesson on proteins and carbohydrates I’d hear later that day.  It was as if he fed us vegetables minus the nutritional value.  I fear he lead us to a formula for success rather than a river of life.  Plugging prayer, Scripture, friends, and what Celtic Christians call the wild goose all equally into my Blackberry calendar simply will not translate into spiritual growth.  Philip Yancey comments, “I used to think that everything important in my life- marriage, work, close friends, relationship with God- needed to be in order.  One defective area, like one malfunctioning program on my computer, would cause the entire system to crash.  I have since learned to pursue God and lean heavily on his grace even when, especially when, one of the other areas is plummeting toward disaster.”

I wrestle with what it means to go after “more”.  My inner administrator wants a plan and schedule rather than a cry from the heart, one that may go unanswered.

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I feel more and more that we must not judge of God from this world, it’s just a study that didn’t come off.  What can you do with a study that has gone wrong?- if you are fond of the artist, you do not find much to criticize- you hold your tongue.  But you have a right to ask for something better…The study is ruined in so many ways.  It is only a master who can make such a blunder, and perhaps that is the best consolation we can have out of it, since in that case we have a right to hope that we’ll see the same creative hand get even with itself.

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My creative writing assignment in class today said this: Your life has been turned into a book.  Write the back cover that will attract readers at Barnes and Noble.

The answer of the day came from a student that’s somehow been dubbed my teaching assistant:

You are about to be blown away.  This is an epic story of drama and action.  The story about a young man coming from Sparta, fighting in the Roman gladiatorial pits, meeting Russell Crowe, his quest: to become a TA.  This story will truly leave you standing in awe and make you say, “I want to be that guy.”

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The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn’t have been complete without you.

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I look at Brennan Manning and see and man I want to be like and a man I want to pretend I never saw.  He cannot see well enough to sit down unaided.  His frail shoulders threaten to snap if the church air conditioning fan is turned up.  His jeans would style a clash between a hip-hop teenager and a hippie rather than a seventy-five year old man.  He pauses awkwardly in the middle of sentences, sometimes changing the subject in the process.  And yet, his words turn to gold to an audience waiting like hungry babies.  Passion colors his face, a passion redefined by the fact that he has lived the journey through with belief and heart intact and will die soon.  He still believes enough to raise his voice in excitement to an audience he has no reason to manipulate and cannot base his self-worth on because he cannot see their facial response.  People listen because this man has led with his brokenness, his courage and trust that his failures and exposed flesh have power to bless.  And so, in some way, he is the essence of his opening statement, that it is better to live naked in truth than clothed in fantasy.

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We ought to give thanks for all fortune; if it is “good,” because it is good, if “bad” because it works in us patience, humility, and the contempt of this world and the hope of our eternal country.

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He spoke about the gospel.  About religion beginning with God’s movement toward us and not the other way around.  About brokenness and pain and crying out.  About dying and selfishness and scandalous grace.  His resume supported his message:  he became “an aguador (water carrier), transporting water to rural villages via donkey and buckboard; a mason’s assistant, shoveling mud and straw in the blazing Spanish heat; a dishwasher in France; a voluntary prisoner in a Swiss jail, his identity as a priest known only to the warden; a solitary contemplative secluded in a remote cave for six months in the Zaragoza desert.”  He later returned to the United States and served and ministered to shrimpers in Alabama and lepers in Louisiana.  His message focused not on his journey, but on words burned into his life, “Once you come to know the love of Jesus Christ, nothing else in the world will seem as beautiful or desirable.”  So he spoke about the love of a Father, about our inability to hear his tender voice, and our refusal to believe him when we do listen.  He said God likes us, not just loves us because theologically he has to, but that he actually delights in who we are and not who we could or should be.  He spoke about a heart big enough and a grace wide enough to cover an alcoholic that depends on his home group christened the “Camel Club”, since a camel can go forever without a drink.

When he was done, I asked him to sign my book, unaware that his eyes could hardly see the page before him.  He pressed his pen to the title page of The Ragamuffin Gospel and inscribed “Brennan” directly over the word “Gospel”.  Fitting, not because he has marked the gospel, but because the gospel has marked him.

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I was trying to think of a good operating definition of marriage the other day and this is what I came up with: Two guarded people managing their disappointment, negotiating for better terms through a DMZ they call marriage.

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