Where have the last two years gone?

Wow.. I can't believe it has been two years since my last post. I've decided that I will try to maintain a blog again. Mainly to keep up with the discipline of journalling and recording how God is moving in my life. lol, I pray that God will keep my disciplined in this discipline. But we shall see!

 For those of you who find your way back to this blog, I am still teaching in Louisiana as a Special Education Teacher. It has been my absolute privilege to serve my students for the past two and a half years and it's been my blessing to see how they have grown even in the most minuscule of ways. What the future holds for me, I shall perhaps discuss in a future post.

But today, I wanted to share about a section of the book The Reason for God by Tim Keller. I picked up this book in New York City over the Thanksgiving break and it has been challenging as I take a fresh look at an intellectual argument for Christianity.

This particular section is in a fairly early part of the book in a chapter called Christianity Is a Straitjacket. I will type out the entirety of this particular section for your reading pleasure (hopefully I am not breaking any copyright laws?).

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Taken from The Reason for God by Tim Keller, p.48-51.

Love, the Ultimate Freedom, Is More Constraining Than We Might Think
What then is the moral-spiritual reality we must acknowledge to thrive? What is the environment that liberates us if we confine ourselves to it, like water liberates the fish? Love. Love is the most liberating freedom-loss of all.

One of the principles of love-either love for a friend or romantic love-is that you have to lose independence to attain greater intimacy. If you want the "freedoms" of love- the fulfillment, security, sense of worth that it brings-you must limit your freedom in many ways. You cannot enter a deep relationship and still make unilateral decisions or allow your friend or lover no say in how you live your life. To experience the joy and freedom of love, you must give up your personal autonomy. The French novelist Francoise Sagan expressed this well in an interview in Le Monde. She expressed that she was satisfied with the way she had lived her life and had no regrets:

Interviewer: Then you have had the freedom you wanted?
Sagan: Yes... I was obviously less free when I was in love with someone... But one's not in love all the time. Apart from that...I'm free.

Sagan is right. A love relationship limits your personal options. Again we are confronted with the complexity of the concept of "freedom." Human beings are most free and alive in relationships of love. We only become ourselves in love, and yet healthy love relationships involve mutual, unselfish service, a mutual loss of independence. C.S. Lewis puts it eloquently:

Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket-safe, dark, motionless, airless-it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation.

Freedom, then, is not the absence of limitations and constraints but it is finding the right ones, those that fit our nature and liberate us.

For a love relationship to be healthy there must be a mutual loss of independence. It can't be just one way. Both sides must say to the other, "I will adjust to you. I will change for you. I'll serve you even though it means a sacrifice for me." If only one party does all the sacrificing and giving, and the other does all the ordering and taking, the relationship will be exploitative and will oppress and distort the lives of both people.

At first sight, then, a relationship with God seems inherently dehumanizing. Surely it will have to be "one way," God's way. God, the divine being, has all the power. I must adjust to God-there is now way that God could adjust to and serve me.

While this may be true in other forms of religion and belief in God, it is not true in Christianity. In the most radical way, God has adjusted to us-in his incarnation and atonement. In Jesus Christ he became a limited human being, vulnerable to suffering and death. On the cross, he submitted to our condition-as sinners-and died in our place to forgive us. In the most profound way, God has said to us, in Christ, "I will adjust to you. I will change for you. I'll serve you though it means a sacrifice for me." If he has done this for us, we can and should say the same to God and others. St. Paul writes, "the love of Christ constrains us" (2 Corinthians 5:14)

A friend of C.S. Lewis's was once asked, "Is it easy to love God?" and he replied, "It is easy to those who do it." That is not as paradoxical as it sounds. When you fall deeply in love, you want to please the beloved. You don't wait for the person to ask you to do something for her. You eagerly research and learn every little thing that brings her pleasure. Then you get it for her, even if it costs you money or great inconvenience. "Your wish is my command," you feel-and it doesn't feel oppressive at all. From the outside, bemused friends may think, "She's leading him around by the nose," but from the inside it feels like heaven.

For a Christian, it's the same with Jesus. The love of Christ constrains. Once you realize how Jesus changed for you and gave himself for you, you aren't afraid of giving up your freedom and therefore finding your freedom in him.

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Prior to this section, Keller is arguing against the statement that Christianity is limit to personal growth and potential because it constrains our freedom to choose our own beliefs. So I think the argument for love constraining us while at the same time liberating us is incredibly important to notice. I think as I grow older, this concept of self-sacrificing love becomes more apparent. Even in my relationship with my students, I realize that I genuinely love them for the people that they are. Though they constantly cut up and test my patience, at the end of the day, I would do anything for them. My love for them constrains me from pursuing another career or spending my free time doing anything else, and yet because of this constraint, I'm able to fully serve them as their teacher. So I agree with his point that love is that environment that liberates us if we confine ourselves to it.

Keller then makes such an important point. God is God. The very definition of God means a Super Being. From a humanistic standpoint, this should warrant nothing but a serving relationship because God is greater than us. It reminds me of the olden days where there were Kings and Queens who held an ultimate form of sovereignty in their kingdom. They could do whatever they wanted to their people and their people could do nothing back except to serve. Yet, the Christian faith shows us that God, though being omnipotent and omniscient humbles himself and adjusts himself radically to reach out to us first. What a love relationship that is. God submitting himself to our condition as sinners, paying the price for forgiveness himself and then inviting us to live a freed life in him. And that freedom, though constraining because of the standard God calls us to, is in fact such liberating freedom, particularly because it is a total response to God's love for us.

I love saturday's at starbucks spent reading and chilling :D

Soli Deo Gloria!