Hello Reader,

Do you ever feel like life is speeding up and spinning out of control? No matter what you do or how much you worry or try, it only seems to get worse?

You hold on for dear life as the merry-go-round spins faster and faster. As a young child, you feel the thrill of it trying to fling you off. Your best friend, your big brother, or your dad runs along the outside, pushing hard and making you go even faster. You tighten your grip and beg them to stop. Thankfully, they eventually stop pushing. The merry-go-round slows down, comes to a stop, and you stumble off dizzily.

What might excite us as a young child can be nauseating when we become adults. The greater the speed on the merry-go-round, the more force trying to fling us off. As adults, most of us choose not to ride anymore. We no longer desire the disorientation and chaos.

That’s the challenge of contemporary life — most of us feel like we are stuck on a merry-go-round, going ever faster and faster. The pace of life only seems to be accelerating, changing more and more, leaving us feeling more and more fragmented. Technology that we found on the cutting edge a couple years ago is now woefully outdated. Social changes seem to come rapidly too, often too fast for us to fully comprehend, let alone evaluate and engage. What would have been unthinkable fifty years ago, and improbable just twenty years ago, is commonplace today.

Even the pace of daily life seems only to be increasing. Adult life feels, for many of us, like an incessant race against time, debt, and inflation (which we run with a job and a couple side hustles). It feels like a never-ending struggle to try and have the life we were promised we could have, if only we were willing to put in a little hard work. The more we work, though, the more we sense that, if we stop for more than a few minutes, we will be swept under and drown.

Even as we celebrate some of the changes in contemporary life (and lament others), we often discover that it is the pace of change that feels so overwhelming. Our life feels like that merry-go-round spinning faster and faster. The more quickly things change the more we fear that we will be thrown off completely, sent bruised and tumbling to the ground.

If you have felt this way, you are not alone. I have been struggling with these same feelings over the past month and I wanted to offer you three questions that can help us reframe the struggles of contemporary life so that we can better see God and how he is at work.

1. What might God bring out of the compost of our loss?

I had last week off to recover from the sprint of Holy Week and attend to my mental health. I did no writing, no editing, no meetings for church, and attended worship in a neighboring town. My church consistently guards my boundaries, so the elders and deacons did a great job of stepping up and allowing me time to rest. However, I entered that week deeply depleted. This has been one of the most exciting and rewarding seasons of ministry in the twelve years I have been a pastor, but I was waking up every night at 3:00 AM fearful that I was forgetting something and my mind frantically racing to anticipate this or that difficult meeting or conversation.

It took two days into the week before I was able to name what was happening. I was dealing with loss.

The loss of watching another congregation go through crisis and people question whether to leave the church altogether.
The loss of witnessing abuse of power and how it harms the flock of Christ
The loss of community as my denomination and region bites and devours one another
The loss of home as the land of my birth no longer resembles the nation I grew up in
The loss of trust as people who once praised my talents now turn verbally violent once I no longer agree with them.
The loss of being unable to set right all that is wrong in these and many other situations.

My anger was a form of grief and, in the midst of it all, I was wonder where God was and what he was doing. Then, in a moment of weakness, I checked my email.

I don’t generally do this when I am off for a week, but I had to deal with a few fires that wouldn’t stop burning because I was gone. Then, I came upon this newsletter from Chuck DeGroat and a casual line that changed my perspective on what I was going through.

Chuck was commenting that he no longer wanted “cheap hope” that was merely wishful thinking or over-zealous optimism. Instead he wanted, “a hope that rises, quietly from the compost of loss.”

I was riveted by that image of compost. Our loss is not a dead end, but a compost from which God brings forth something good.

In a landfill, we take what is broken and useless and bury it in the ground. We take our trash and put it out of sight, hoping to never have to see or deal with it again. So much of the breaking in our culture is like putting junk in a landfill. We see people, we see situations, we see systems and we think they are broken and useless and so we bury them. We no longer want to see them.

However, what if God didn’t want us to bury our losses, but compost them? What if the question was not whether we had loss, but what God might be doing in the midst of it? In a compost heap, what looks like a bunch of dead stuff is actually teaming with life. The leftovers and throwaway things are transformed, while we are not looking, into something that can grow and bring life.

Christian hope is not in progress or in "winning the battle" for the culture or denomination or anything else. Christian hope is in the God who raises the dead. This living God brings life out of death. This living God takes loss and composts it to bring forth something new.

I have been looking more at the loss and struggle in my life and wondering what God is going to bring forth from the compost. I'm wondering how you and I can patiently and gently let our losses rest without burying them, trusting that God will bring forth life from them.

2. What is God building here?

In a world that seems bent on breaking, what do we see God building?

I hardly need to tell you all the chaos and fracture that we are seeing in our world today. Economic uncertainty. Alliances and social contracts that had been in place for generations are crumbling. Churches and denominations coming apart at the seams. Loyalties that were once held dear are loosening and fading away.

And in the midst of it all, there are many who see strength in the ability to break, break, break. Strong enough to break your word and get away with it. Strong enough to break the will of others and get what you want. Strong enough to break decorum and decency and crush your enemies. Strong enough to break others in order to elevate yourself.

It is enough to make me despair of the future. It is enough to stoke significant anger in my gut.

In those moments, my mind knows that God is sovereign and in control, but my body and heart ache because of all that is wrong. In those moments, I need to know more than just that God is in control, but that he is actually doing something with this mess, with this chaos, with this brokenness.

As I have lived into this season of life, one question keeps me focused and hopeful: What is God building here?

3. How can we practice patience?

Not long after I started as a pastor in a small town in Iowa, one of the neighboring pastors invited me to his house on a Saturday afternoon. From the outside, that time might have looked like some weird science experiment. There were plastic tubes, bubbling brown liquid, tools and gadgets and bottles. However, at the end of the afternoon, we had made — not some potion or chemical — but beer.

Well, not technically beer. As we added the yeast at the end and put it in dark corner of his basement, I asked when we could drink it. “It’s not beer yet,” he said, “Give it two to three weeks and we can put it in bottles, another few before you would really want to open it.” At that moment, it looks only vaguely like beer (I later learned it was called “wort’), but in a few weeks, it would be silently and subtly transformed into beer. This “fermentation” would invisibly change the brown goop into beer.

Alan Kreider describes the growth of the early church as a kind of “patient ferment.” Like fermentation, the growth of the early church looked invisible, barely a bubble here and there, but was alive and transformative “it has a cumulative power that creates and transforms.” He sees the practice of patience as central to the witness of the early church. Because God has been patient with us, so we can be patient with one another. God’s patience is made known in Jesus Christ, so we who follow Christ can practice patience as a means of imitating our Lord. This patience had a profound impact on an impatient world. The early Christians saw violence as fundamentally rooted in impatience (a statement definitely worth reflecting on!), so they practiced peace as a form of patience in a world where they had no control.

Patience isn't how you "win." Patience is how you follow Jesus.

Patience isn't an "effective strategy." Patience is a reflection of how God has dealt with us.

Patience sets aside using force to get our way, but trusts the Sovereign Lord, not only in the end, but in the means of accomplishing his will.

Patience says, "I will not only seek the kingdom of Christ, but do it in the way of Christ."

Compost.

Building.

Patience.

These three images have helped center and strengthen me in a world that feels increasingly chaotic and uncertain. They remind me of the way that God works, that God's people have been here before, and that God has been faithful to continue to build his church wherever he sends his people.

May God bless you all.

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Writing Updates

No big updates this month. I will begin working on the edits for Count the Stars in May. We should be working on a cover soon and once that is available, I will be excited to share it with you.

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