Category: religion

enjoy life, life, religion

Suffering as Service

I don’t know why, but from the time I was a kid, I have had this idea that there is a certain amount of pain and suffering in the world that gets distributed across humanity. Like suffering was an actual thing with quantity that could be measured in cups and miles. Or maybe tears and hours of agony. Some people are dealt a larger portion of this suffering than others. The way to reduce the amount of suffering in the world is to process what comes to you and let it go. Pain and suffering that doesn’t get dealt with, gets passed on to those around us. It can even be multiplied in this process. The ability to suffer without passing it on to those around us is part of how we can serve the world. A person who can endure a lot of suffering without passing it on is performing a real service to humanity.

Like a lot of highly sensitive people, I have spent my share of time crying over people, circumstances and suffering that I do not know, have not encountered and can do nothing about. (I wrote about how I learned to stop doing this so much here.) Even as a kid when I would find myself crying over people and events that affect me not one whit, I would pray, “please let every tear I cry be one less that those going through it have to cry.” It doesn’t make much sense and I have no reason to think that it works that way, but I hope it does. The burden of grief should be shared, not multiplied after all. Continue reading “Suffering as Service”

Unknown's avatarRebecca Trotter4 Comments
religion

God’s Discipline

Have I ever told you about the time I had a homeless Cameroonian living in my house? No? Well, allow me to share. For the purposes of this discussion, we’ll call our homeless Cameroonian friend Ben. A few years back my family was involved with a church where I had volunteered to call people who filled out visitor cards asking for more information about getting involved in small groups. Ben had visited and asked to be contacted. I reached him on the phone a few days later. He was at the airport in D.C. getting ready to return from a conference of Christian aid workers working on water issues in Africa. In the course of talking with him, I discovered that Ben was heading to a homeless shelter that night to sleep. It didn’t feel right to allow that to happen so I called my husband. I asked him to talk with Ben and extend an offer to stay at our place while we worked to find a better solution to the situation. (My husband is preternaturally good at reading people and suspicious to boot, so I wanted him to make sure we weren’t inviting an ax-murderer into our home.) When my husband called back to let me know that he had arranged to pick Ben up from the airport, I said to him, “he’s under God’s discipline isn’t he?” I could just sense it in my spirit. There’s a certain way that things go wrong in a Christian’s life when a person is under God’s discipline. The bits of Ben’s story I had gotten from our phone conversation all pointed in that direction. My husband affirmed my own impression and said, “this should be interesting.” Continue reading “God’s Discipline”

Unknown's avatarRebecca Trotter6 Comments
prayer, religion

Whatcha Praying For?

Do you want to know what you really look like to God? Pull out a piece of paper and make a list of the things you have prayed for most fervently. What’s there is the sort of person you are presenting yourself to God as. Who have you told God you are? Someone who wants things? Someone who wants people? Someone who wants comfort and ease? Someone who wants God himself? Who do you want God to know you as?

Let me be a blessing to you, Lord.

Be careful what you pray for – asking God for something is a bit like telling the genie in the lamp your wish. He may take you at your word.

Let my heart love and desire nothing and no one more than it loves and desires you, God.

Pray a prayer like that at your own risk Continue reading “Whatcha Praying For?”

Unknown's avatarRebecca Trotter3 Comments
religion

The Transfiguration and Being Known

One of the things I have become fascinated with over the last few years is the experience of Jesus. Hebrews 2:17-18 says:

For this reason [Jesus] had to be made like his brothers in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, and that he might make atonement for the sins of the people. Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.

I don’t think many Christians understand the full implications of this. Too many of us have this idea of Jesus as super-human. A Jesus who just knew everything – never had to figure anything out, never struggled with doubt, never had to work to forgive, never wondered what his purpose was – in other words a Jesus who doesn’t actually share in our struggles. Continue reading “The Transfiguration and Being Known”

Unknown's avatarRebecca Trotter1 Comment
religion

Why Do I Keep Faith?

Why do I keep faith? Believe it or not, that’s not a question I have much of an answer for right now. I know I should say, “because God is good and his promises are sure and He’s always been faithful to me.” But that’s just not where I’m at right now. Instead I have been asking myself quite seriously on a fairly regular basis – why do I keep faith? What is it? Why can’t I let go? It doesn’t make any sense. I’ve kept my faith, I’ve kept on the narrow path, I’ve been obedient in things big and small, I’ve relied on God’s grace and forgiveness to cover me. And for what? Misery and humiliation and rejection and poverty? A husband with more issues than Reader’s Digest Magazine? Kids who I love but who just take and take and take and need more than I have left in me to give?  Boys who I put my all into and adore, but who can’t even pull together a decent report card or a crappy certificate of achievement? A God who won’t show himself to me? A bird’s eye view of my every ugly imperfection with the full realization that I’ve done my best and I’m still a hopeless wreck? A million whiny, complaining, woe-is-me blog posts to break things up around here? Continue reading “Why Do I Keep Faith?”

Unknown's avatarRebecca Trotter
enjoy life, prayer, relationships, religion, thoughts

Allow Me to Screw Up Your Sex Life a Bit

“We monks do not try to repress our sexual passions . . . Woe to those monks and nuns, who shovel into their subconscious their sexual passions. . . There is no spirituality in that. What happens, and what we aim at, is the transmutation of erotic energy from earthly attractions to God.” – Father Maximos quoted in The Mountain of Silence: A Search for Orthodox Spirituality by Kyriacos C. Markides

In the old pagan world, sex and religion were all tied up together. Temple prostitutes and depictions of group sex on ancient Hindu temple walls and all that. Christianity has too often taken the opposite tact – sex as being so unholy that for a while it was considered a sin even in the context of marriage by the Roman church. Which led to possibly the most dysfunctional set-up ever; putatively and sometimes actually celibate priests being told each time a parishioner had sex with their spouse. What could be the problem with that, eh? Although the actual rejection of sex by the Christian church has varied wildly from place to place and time to time, the reality is that a lot of people continue to see sex and God as inevitably belonging in two separate spheres of our lives. To the extent that God and sex intersect, it is in the parsing out of rules for sexual conduct. But when actual sex takes place, well if our guardian angels could please exit the room, that would be great. And surely God has the good manners to turn his head for a few minutes. Wouldn’t want to be caught in flagrante delicto by the creator of the universe. That would be too weird. Continue reading “Allow Me to Screw Up Your Sex Life a Bit”

Unknown's avatarRebecca Trotter9 Comments
family, life, religion

Honor Your Father and Your Mother

Recently I asked a dad I know how the teen thing was going for him and his 16 year old step-daughter who lives with him. “She seems to be doing well. But it would be going much better if she’d just do what I told her to do!” he replied. He was quite serious, but I had to laugh. He’d be happy if she did what he said and she’d be in therapy later learning to think for herself after years of misery. Such is life.

I suppose there are dads out there who have actually heard the words, “if only I had listened to you!” But those are probably the fathers of recovering intravenous drug users and people who get into relationships with the psychotically violent. The normal course of things seems to be that we find our own way down paths that nearly put our parents into an early grave and are glad for the experience. Later we complain that our own kids don’t listen to us. (All this is coming from a person about whom her mother’s most bitter complaint has always been, “not that you ever would have listened to us anyways.” Just so we’re clear where my own sympathies lie! LOL) Continue reading “Honor Your Father and Your Mother”

Unknown's avatarRebecca Trotter2 Comments
religion

Mary, The Bondservant Who Waited

Sometimes I think about Mary. When she was told that she would bear a child who would be “Son of the Most High” she agreed by declaring herself a “bond-servant” of God. Shortly after, while visiting her sister-in-law Elizabeth, she spoke what is known as the Magnificat. Her poem or song shows that unlike many of her contemporaries, Mary understood that the purposes of God were social, personal and redemptive – not political. She really got it – the redemption, the care for the least of these, the re-ordering of the world into the Kingdom of God. As Scot McKnight put it “Mary’s vision is the realization of the long-expected hope when God will create the society he promised to his people and through his prophets. This society will marked by justice and peace, by fear of God and holiness and mercy/love.” This was the mission she was signing on for when she agreed to God’s will for her life. Continue reading “Mary, The Bondservant Who Waited”

Unknown's avatarRebecca Trotter2 Comments
religion

A God of Love, A God of Hate?

You know that old canard that love and hate are not opposites, but two sides of the same coin? Neurobiology seems to have confirmed that there is a lot truth to that idea. It turns out that we have something that neurobiologists refer to as a “hate circuit” in our brains. It is a set of three structures in the brain which all light up together when we experience hate. And the more intense the hatred, the more intense the activity in these structures is. (Each structure is also involved in other activities so it’s not that they exist purely for feelings of hatred. It’s just that when we experience hatred these three work together.) Interestingly, two of these structures are also involved in the feeling of intense love.

Continue reading “A God of Love, A God of Hate?”

Unknown's avatarRebecca Trotter7 Comments
book, giftedness, religion, thoughts

Christianity and Giftedness

When I was putting together my book The Upside Down World ~ A Book of Wisdom in Progress last summer, I went back and forth and back and forth about including an essay I had originally published here titled “How Being Gifted Means Being Different”. It was one of the most popular posts I had done. And many people had contacted me since I put it up to thank me for writing it. However, it didn’t seem to fit. The book is very grounded in my faith and the post is about being gifted. The two seem incongruent. But every time I went to take it out, there was that little tug that I’ve learned to listen to telling me to leave it be. So I did without really know why it was there. And I’m sure that those who read it wondered what it was doing there as well.

It wasn’t until some time later that I began to understand why it was there. The fact is that the church as a whole does not do a good job of making room for or embracing those parts of the body which are smarter and more creative than the norm. We see this in those parts of the church which fiercely oppose science and will even claim that those who engage in the work of science are doing the devil’s work. It is present in those who insist that a “plain reading” of scripture is good enough and refuse to consider context, history, translation or any of the other issues which affect the way that we read and understand the text. It shows up in how churches deal with their members who produce art, literature or music. Continue reading “Christianity and Giftedness”

Unknown's avatarRebecca Trotter4 Comments