Real Transformation happens when?

In light of the whole Tullian Tchividjian / Gospel Coalition dust-up in recent days, Mark Galli has an interesting piece at Christianity Today online titled “Real Transformation Happens When?”. Galli’s thesis will make you do a double-take:

I want to raise one sanctification issue that I don’t see discussed much. I do not doubt the biblical call to holy living (1 Pet. 1:15 being the quintessential text). But after living the Christian life for nearly a half century, I doubt the ability of Christians to make much progress in holiness.

What the what?

But don’t stop there, keep reading.

I look at my own life and marvel at the lack of real transformation after 50 years of effort. To be sure, outwardly I’m more patient, kind, gracious, and so forth. But even after half a century of transformation, my thoughts and motives are a cauldron of evil. Just one small example: When a friend fails to show up on time, I’m outwardly patient and kind, but inwardly I battle judgment and condemnation. Earlier in life, I would have lashed out at him for being tardy, as lack of respect for me among other things. Now I have some self-control as I smile and say, “Not a problem.”

Galli goes on to recognize that while he has undoubtedly improved in some areas, his motivations remain as torn as ever. He also sees patient, kind non-Christians and wonders whether his behavioral improvement is simply the result of maturity and not the Holy Spirit in his life.

Galli’s conclusion:

This is not to say that we are not “being transformed … from one degree of glory to another” (2 Cor. 3:18, NRSV) even now. But it seems to me the greatest transformation is not necessarily in outward virtue, but in increasing levels of self-awareness — awareness of the depth of our sin — and consequently increasing repentance and humility. Not a humility that points to some virtue in our lives and says, “It wasn’t me, it was the Lord working through me,” but the deeper humility that sees the desperately wicked heart and desperately prays daily, “Lord, have mercy.”

There’s plenty worth reading and considering in Galli’s full post, which I highly recommend you go read.

There are a couple of things that seem like omissions - likely intentional on Galli’s part but that are worth mentioning: first, that he’s writing primarily from the perspective of one who has spent a long time in the faith. A more comprehensive look at the topic would surely recognize that the Holy Spirit can and does make dramatic changes toward holiness in the lives of believers, especially in the case of new believers who have long lived for self before coming to Christ.

The second thought is that Galli may be a bit hard on himself in this article. And yet, as he notes in the post, the Apostle Paul himself, near the end of his life, described himself as “the worst of sinners”, writing in Romans 7 that

For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing…

I’m reminded of a conversation I had with a pastor one day on this topic where I quoted the first lines of Romans 6: “shall we continue in sin that grace may abound?”. I shook my head regretfully, knowing full well both Paul’s answer to his own rhetorical question, and the fact that I too often fail to measure up.

The pastor’s response was immediate, gracious, and breathtakingly honest: “well, I’ve generally found that to be my experience, yeah.”

I find myself once again incredibly thankful for God’s grace.

Bullet Points for a Thursday - French edition!

It’s Thursday at nearly 7 pm and I’m on the next-to-last day of a quick business trip to France. This is my first visit to France, so my bullet point format seems useful for sharing a few assorted observations after a few days here.

  • Jet lag is aggravated by shifted working hours. At home, I’m an early bird. Up before 5 am, at work before 7, home by 4, asleep by 10. Here work starts around 9, and dinner doesn’t start until at least 8. Last night’s dinner with customers started at 8:45 pm and ended just after midnight. Yummy food, but tough in the morning.
  • I think I could spend a full day exploring the Amsterdam airport before I really got bored. The place is huge. Unfortunately I only have 65-minute layovers there both directions.
  • For business hours being so late, all the shopping around here apparently closes at 5pm sharp. Makes it hard to shop for the family when I’m not here for a weekend. (Sorry in advance, family.)
  • If I were coming here very often, I would need to learn some French.
  • The food has been really good. I guess that shouldn’t come as a surprise.
  • I’ll probably set 3 alarms tonight to make sure that I wake up in time to catch my 6 am flight.
  • I know I’m bigger than the average human, but it’s still a little unnerving when every toilet I sit down on gives off ominous creaking noises as if it were going to fall off the wall.
  • That last bullet probably gave you an unpleasant mental image. Sorry.
  • OK, if I were really sorry I would’ve deleted that bullet.

Tomorrow morning at 6am I leave Toulouse. TLS -> AMS -> ATL -> CID and Lord willing I’m home by 4 pm Central time. That’s a long day, but with a happy end.

That's not me! - an update...

Last month I wrote That’s not me!, in which I lamented an Atlanta-based person using my Gmail address in contact forms and various online profiles, which had the end result of me getting frequent extra emails from car dealers, football teams, and cruise lines.

Yesterday, though, I got a little extra information. After getting another email from an Atlanta-area car dealership, I clicked on the unsubscribe link. The unsubscribe page it took me to included not just the contact email address, but also a contact cell number for texts and a contact mailing address.

So now, in theory, I could text or snail mail this person and let them know that their emails are coming to me. Now to decide if I should do so, and how confusing it might be to try to explain the issue and how I got the person’s cell number in the first place. Hmmmm…..

An app idea especially for Cubs fans

As a Cubs fan I set up my Yahoo sports iPhone app at the beginning of the season to pop up an alert with the final score at the end of each game.

My trouble is that the Cubs are, well, the Cubs. They’re currently 11-20 and 9.5 games back in the NL Central. (And it’s only May 7!) Which means I see a lot more alerts that look like this:

And not nearly enough that look like this:

Which gets kind of depressing, because if the Cubs’ season continues as it’s going right now, I’m going to see a “Cubs Win!” alert only about 55 times this year, and a “Cubs Lose” alert more than 100 times.

So here’s an idea for some enterprising app designer: allow me to select the Cubs as my favorite team, and to get alerts for final scores, but add a flag that only alerts me when the Cubs win. That way every three or four days I get a nice surprise… and I don’t have to deal with the disappointment the rest of the week.

I’d buy an app like that.

OK, this is pretty cool

I know this has been all over the internet already, but I’m going to post it here anyway. It’s a video of a group called Árstíðir singing the 13th-century Icelandic hymn Heyr himna smiður in a German train station. The acoustics… amazing.

This reminds me of a college choir trip when we stopped at the Illinois Memorial at the Vicksburg National Military Park in Vicksburg, Mississippi. We sang a hymn in there that reverberated for what seemed like an eternity… such a cool experience.

Somehow, given the choice between lots of voices in big stone buildings made to reverberate and all the microphones and audio equipment we usually use on a Sunday… most of the time I think my preference is for the voices.

I'm an uncle again!

The congratulations are due to my brother Andrew and his wife Heather on the birth of their second child, and first son, Isaiah David Hubbs. Isaiah was born this afternoon and everyone is doing well.

It’s a bit odd, coming from a family with mostly boys, but Isaiah is my first nephew on either side of the family. Three nieces on my wife’s side, three daughters, and Isaiah’s big sister have equaled out to lots of estrogen. Glad to have this young man to start to restore balance!

How can you not love this kid?

Bullet Points for a Thursday

Because hey, I haven’t done one of these on a Thursday for a while.

  • It’s been kinda quiet at work this week. Certainly that won’t last.
  • Looks like I’m going to make my first trip to Europe in a couple of weeks for some work meetings. Gonna be a lot of flying for two days of work, but it’ll at least cement my frequent flyer status for another year.
  • With the cold wet weather all week I have this suspicion we’re gonna go from pseudo-winter to summer without a decent stretch of spring in between. Which is kind of a bummer. I like spring.
  • I’m not sure what it is about Stephen Hough’s playing, but I’ve thoroughly enjoyed every record of his that I’ve gotten so far. (I got his new one, “In the Night”, this week. Hyperion has the digital downloads available a couple weeks before the CD drops.) My favorite is still his recording of Rachmaninov’s second concerto, though.
  • I’m annoyed that Home Sharing doesn’t work well on iOS7. I wanted to listen to that new Stephen Hough record on my phone in my bedroom last night, and should’ve been able to just hook up to home sharing from my iTunes library on my iMac. However, it stalls out about 80% of the way through the loading process and never actually works. Sounds like it’s a known problem since iOS 5 or so.
  • Even with that and a few other gripes with iOS, I have a hard time believing I could be inclined to get some Android phone instead of an iPhone 6 next time I need a phone.
  • This fall will be the first time in nearly 15 years of owning a cell phone that I won’t be champing at the bit for my 2-year contract to come up so I can get a new phone because I’m so unhappy with my old one. (I may be champing at the bit if the iPhone 6 is particularly awesome, though. I’d love a bigger screen, and to get a 32GB model instead of the 16GB iPhone 5 I have now.)

Well, that ended up more tech-oriented than I thought it would. Sorry. That’s what you get for random bullet points.

This Time I Can Stay - reflections on the music of a friend

I want to take a little time today to tell you about a guy I know named Andy. (He’s got a weird Dutch last name, so for the purposes of this post I’ll just call him Andy.) Last week Andy announced a fairly major transition in his life (for which I’m very happy for him) and it caused me to reflect on how he’s impacted my life over the last decade. So, forgive a friend a little nostalgia.

If I trace the story I actually end up a little further back than my getting to know Andy. I go back to the early 2000s when I became a fan of a Christian folk rock band called Caedmon’s Call. (My brother had tried to get me turned on to them in the late 90s but, as usual, it took me 5 years to catch up with his musical tastes.) I dug into Caedmons’ music, and got fanboy enough to start participating regularly in an online fan forum. Yeah, I was hooked.

Then came a fateful day in 2001 when Derek Webb, one of the founding members of Caedmon’s Call, announced that he was leaving the group. His replacement? This guy called Andy. Off to the fan forum I went to find out about this Andy guy. Apparently he’d fronted a band called The Normals back in the late 90s - again I was out of the loop. But he had an acoustic record out, so I got it and really dug it. Heck, he even posted in the fan forum every now and again. Very cool.

Fast-forward to fall 2005. I went to see Andrew Peterson play an outdoor show and was crazy excited the night before when I found out that Andy was coming along with him. I blogged about it and even posted a few (pretty scary) pictures. I was on cloud nine.

With summer 2006 came the release of Andy’s record The Morning. With this record I felt like Andy was writing with the voice I wish I could find. Every song hit home with me. I made my first road trip to Nashville to see Andy play a release show for the record.

I followed Andy’s career very closely after that. I drove all over the Midwest to hear him play shows. I set up a fan website. I sponsored a coffeehouse show here in Cedar Rapids. I bummed my way on to a house show road trip he took and rode along with him between a few shows. I hit him up to do lunch when I was in Nashville and hung out at a studio for a couple hours while he recorded vocals. I probably blurred the line between fan and crazy stalker a few times, but in the end I’m pretty sure I can still call Andy my friend.

In the fall of 2011 Andy had another wild idea - a concept album about an astronaut on a long solo trip through space. To make Leonard the Lonely Astronaut really complete, Andy wanted to build a rocket ship set in which to record. I spent another weekend in Nashville with a bunch of friends helping build. The great thing about that weekend is that while it was basically all about (and for) Andy, it helped cement relationships between a bunch of his fans that showed up - guys and gals that continue to be a rich online community even three years later.

Andy’s had a tough few years since the Leonard record came out. A water line broke in his house while he and his family were on a month-long trip and he spent most of the next few months rebuilding. Work was harder to come by. He had the opportunity to tour as a part of Steven Curtis Chapman’s band this past fall which was great for paying the bills but kinda tough on family life. (Andy and his wife have three daughters just a little younger than my own three.)

Two weeks ago Andy had a big announcement. Today (April 30) is his first day as an Artist and Repertoire guy at Capitol Records. It’s a far cry from his indie days - he’ll be working a regular job in a regular office with a salary and benefits and the whole deal. This will keep him from touring much any more, but will have the advantage of a steady income and the opportunity to be home with his family every night.

I couldn’t be happier for Andy in this new phase of his life. Last night he played an online hour-long “concert” from his living room, streaming to fans across the world. (Hey, I know folks from Canada and Brazil who were logged in, so that counts as “the world”, right?) He seemed happier and more relaxed than I’ve seen him in a long while. His daughters flitted in and out of the picture as he sang, at times singing harmony parts to songs they’ve undoubtedly heard a hundred times. It was a beautiful thing.

He finished off the night with a song from his early days with The Normals, called “I’ll Be Home Soon”:

Life it just goes on when the traveler’s gone
And that’s the hardest part, for time has no respect
For a lonely man with a longing heart
‘Cause once you’re where you’ve wanted, everything’s so fast
But I’ll be home soon I’ll be home soon And if you have a place where you belong
You’re a lucky one, for time was meant to waste
A laugh with good old friends or walking hand in hand
I can’t believe I’ll be there and this time I can stay
But I’ll be home soon
I’ll be home soon

I’m a richer man for the music and community that Andy has helped bring into my life over the past decade, but I’m so glad that he now has the opportunity to set some of it aside and just be a husband and a dad. His wife and three daughters will be glad that “I’ll be home soon” is a message they’ll be able to hear every evening around 5:00. We’ll hear more music from him before he’s done. And hey, it’s only a 10-hour drive to Nashville. Next time he plays a local show, I’ll be there.

Thanks, Andy, and blessings on you and your tribe as you start this next phase of your life.

One more Supreme Court amusement

I have some other posts planned, but my buddy Geof pointed out something in a Supreme Court ruling today that made me chuckle.

In Environmental Protection Agency v. EME Homer City Generation, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote a dissent (joined in by Justice Thomas). And Scalia never shies from making pointed opinions.

And it’s (more or less) true! (Scalia quoted Karl Marx, but not directly from the Communist Manifesto.) On page 3 of the dissent (page 40 of the PDF) Scalia says that the “EPA’s utterly fanciful “from each according to its ability” construction sacrifices democratically adopted text to bureaucratically favored policy.”

Now, Scalia wields a deft scalpel, inserting the (unattributed) quote to show even more disdain for the EPA’s action that the majority of SCOTUS affirmed.

As I was paging through the decision to find the reference that Geof mentioned, I also found another reference that amused me: Justice Ginsburg (a very liberal Jewish lady) quoting from the Gospel of John:

Some pollutants stay with­ in upwind States’ borders, the wind carries others to downwind States, and some subset of that group drifts to States without air quality problems. “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth.” The Holy Bible, John 3:8 (King James Version)

(From page 8 of the PDF. Apparently the KJV merits a full-blown citation.)

So Scalia quotes Marx, and Ginsburg quotes Jesus. That’s my amusement for the day.