My Dear Bandersnatch...(or Screwtape Letters about a single girl)

This was written the spirit of C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters, a collection of letters from a more experienced demon to a younger demon in the art of temptation and human soul-winning for "our Father below."

My Dear Bandersnatch,

I am pleased to read your last letter. The young woman you mention is right where she is most open to your influence, and the best of it is - she thinks she is nearly immune to it because of her "Christian" faith. Your work has been most excellent to bring her to this place. A young single woman, living on her own in a tiny, affordable flat. Attractive male friends. A job she adores that she considers "ministry" within the community of other Christians. And a romantic heart that is relatively undiscerning about is own nature. The juicy morsel is right before your lips, Bandersnatch. Guard it carefully, guard it carefully lest the Enemy slip it out of your hands.

Let me explain just how perfect your young woman's position is. (One of the annoyances I often have with younger demons is that because you have such little experience, you can't appreciate the fine-tuned work that has gone into this position, and you often don't know how fragile this position is because to you, it was rather effortless. How I wish our Father Below would assign you initiates to tasks where you must really cut your teeth on harder work…) First, let me explain about her heart. Take heed, Bandersnatch - you think you are responsible for this (and in a very small way, you are) - though you think you know about human hearts, you must be sure you always understand how they work in order to better use that knowledge to your advantage.

Human hearts are probably the closest thing to the human condition that we can understand. Though that makes us thankfully very different from the varmints, it does make our task more difficult since we have never experienced life in the nasty flesh as the Enemy has. But we are spiritual, and since their hearts are also spiritual, we can understand some of this. You are not locked in the prison cell of time. Human beings are. This means that they believe reality is sequential. (Pay attention, B. I know your habits of skimming things that bore you, and your recompense may be losing the soul of this woman!) 

Try to imagine, if you can, believing that every event is a. caused by a previous event and b. causes future events, but that each of those events are entirely natural, with nothing to do with the spiritual reality. (This thinking pattern is, might I add, one of our proudest accomplishments - thanks to the work of your predecessors in the period we have named - it just tickles me - the Enlightenment.) Therefore, the human creatures think that everything has a natural (not a spiritual) cause. Most of the ones in America don't even think that humans are spiritual beings. Those that do recognize this spiritual dimension are often our easy targets for pride, since they can easily think themselves better than others for this "discovery" of their true nature.

But I digress. Back to the heart of the human creatures. As I was saying, the American humans are scarcely aware that they are spiritual beings, and so it follows that they do not well recognize that their heart and desires are the pulse of their spiritual desires. This makes our work so much easier. You see, the Enemy has aptly said in his filthy book that he has set eternity in the hearts of men, yet so that they cannot find out what the Enemy has done from the beginning to the end. (It is amusing to me that the Christians praise him for his wisdom, since putting them into this paradox seems to me the height of stupidity…) So their hearts desire the spiritual, yet they are trapped within time and flesh. They rarely ever think that their desires come from the spiritual dimension of their hearts, and yet that is the very seat of their desires! The reason they have desires at all is because they are spiritual! Because of this impeccable deception, they can easily be persuaded that these spiritual desires are really not spiritual at all, but can be attributed to something as unspiritual as a lousy egg sandwich.

So, back to your young woman. Looking at her education records, I am encouraged, and yet we must be cautious. She has studied the Enemy's book extensively, and continues to do so for her job as well as on her own. She must be guarded from the reality of her heart's condition. I'll attach a few simple yet tried-and-true tips that you can use to keep her from the Enemy's book later on. Here's the crux of it - her heart longs for the spiritual, and desires things that nothing in the world can satisfy. Your task will be twofold - first make her believe that those desires are for things in the world that are attainable, and second, encourage her to pursue all of those things in order to satisfy her, but keep them nearly always out of her grasp so that she never finds out by experience that they don't actually satisfy. (If she does happen to acquire some of them and discover that dissatisfaction, then you can always tell her that the ones she has are not quite right, that conditions need to be a little different, the people she is with are the problem, etc. The ultimate goal is to keep her from realizing that her heart's desire is outside of the physical world.)

I took the liberty of reviewing her life file the other day, and was able to see that she is 25 years old and single. This age and condition, Bandersnatch, is ideal for telling her heart that the cause for her spiritual hunger is her lack of a man. Get her to believe that the one thing that will satisfy her completely is a husband. It is the real nature of the human women to desire companionship - this is a desire that we can use. It is also factual that biologically, her body is at its prime to bear children. She is quite aware of this, both due to her own biology, and due to watching her other female friends marry and reproduce. Because of these ideal conditions, she does have a natural desire for a man. But her deeper desire is spiritual, and it is easy for us to cause her to confuse those things. Watch her closely, for example, to see what makes her feel the longing. Does a sunset? Watching the leaves fall down to the ground in all of their different colors? Watching a young wedded couple look deeply into each others' eyes? Seeing families with children? All of these things should evoke in her the longing. 

Now, you and I know that beauty, seasons, loving marriage, and families are all pictures that the Enemy has made for his silly and senseless humans to see and to remember and long after him. But thanks to our Father below, their minds are darkened, so that intellectual connection is not as easy as it used to be. Every time she sees one of these things and feels the longing, tell her, "If only you had a man to share this 'romantic' (don't ever let her define that word - it has excellent connotations for a lonely heart) moment with, it would be better." You will then make her believe that this spiritual longing is not, in fact, spiritual, but a very natural longing for a man. This, combined with her natural female condition, will most assuredly redirect her affections. But the best part is that she will begin to associate that spiritual longing with man-longing. If you are as intelligent as you assure me you are, you will, undoubtedly, see the advantage of this kind of thinking.

 Here is some advice for what she calls "this season of singleness:"

1. Make her continue to idealize the marriages around her.
2. Make her feel that she has been patient for long enough - that her "turn" to get married, which is overdue, has not yet come up. Make her believe that she deserves a husband.
3. Cause her to pity herself, and indulge other pleasures that she feels she deserves.
4. When friends get married, convince her that she deserves that, too. If you are especially crafty, capitalize on the minor qualities in her friends that she has overlooked. Make her compare herself with her friends and find that she is the best of each of them. Make her resent them even more, and look down on her friends' husbands and fiancés for choosing her friends. If she has love for them, this might be difficult.
5. Most importantly, do not let her focus come away from herself and her lack of a man. Be especially wary of involvement in selfless activities - every time an opportunity comes up, make her hesitate and decide to wait until she has a husband to really get invested.

The best attack, however, is to always tell her that her spiritual hunger is simply man-longing. There is some fact to this, which makes it more believable. She will slowly starve. It will be like parading a banquet of choice foods before a slowly starving man, yet watching him refuse it all because none of the morsels are potatoes. He will starve, refusing to be convinced that what he needs is right before him. If you can get him to believe the lie, you will walk him nearly into our Father Below's hands. If you can get this young woman to believe that all of her spiritual longings are man-longings, you will be on your way to watching her soul starve for the food of the Enemy, and that starvation makes her most vulnerable to listening to you.

Guard her heart closely, Bandersnatch. Do not let this one slip through your fingers…

Your affectionate uncle,

Wormwood

Ministry...an unnecessary word?

I think that up until recent years in my life, I have misunderstood "ministry" because I have misunderstood the Christian life. Though there have been clashes - moments when there has been a cognitive dissonance - when I have seen or heard something that bashed my understanding of a life well-lived in a head-on collision - it's only been in recent years that I have understood why. Here are a few of those clashes.

~~~

The setting is the second row on the left side of the room facing the theology professor who was also my pastor. While the class was focused around worship and the church, that topic is pretty broad and connects to pretty much everything. So it was no surprise when questions and entire classes seemed to meander away from the topic at hand, and yet still ended up teaching us more than we thought we would learn. A guy sitting in front of me asked, "So what is a pastor to do, say, with his own kids if they're not believers?" I can't remember the context, but the context isn't important - it was Dr. Duguid's answer, in his crisp British accent. "Excellent question. Yes. How is a pastor, or any Christian leader, or any Christian, for that matter, supposed to handle family members who aren't believers, or who aren't walking in a manner worthy of the gospel? It's quite simple. You treat them like nonbelievers." The air of surprise and concern that filled the room was evidence of the cognitive crash that was occurring. Treat them like nonbelievers? Is that loving? Is that right? What does that look like? Dr. Duguid, knowing his audience very well, had set us up for this necessary crash.

He knew that most of us had grown up in Christian homes, gone to Christian schools or been homeschooled, worked at Christian camps during the summers, gone on missions trips, and had few friends outside of our upper-middle class white protestant circles. To put it in biblical terms, he knew he was talking to salt that had never left the saltshaker. And there we were, sitting in a theology class in a Christian college, wondering what to do with the nonbeliever in our families. But he saw the bigger issue. "You're all wondering,what does that look like? Well, how are we supposed to treat nonbelievers? We spend time with them, we develop deep friendships with them, we live life with them, we love them and invite them into our lives. How else will they become acquainted with the beauty of the gospel, if it's not lived out in relationships?" At that moment, I realized that everything I had known about ministry had been wrong.

~~~

A sophomore in college, I was sitting at lunch, across from a friend who was really struggling with girl questions. The classic ones that all the women's self-help books address: Am I beautiful? Am I worth pursuing? Etc. I was trying to think of the right things to tell her, to direct her towards the right passages of Scripture, the right books to read, the right stuff to fix her problems and bring up to my level of "normal." And she was closing up as rapidly as I was thinking. Bewildered, and wondering what I was doing wrong, I did something that I used to do a whole lot, and have since become more aware of. I said some words insincerely. Meaning that I knew that they were perfect for this situation, but if I was honest, they weren't coming genuinely from me. "Becca, I'm sorry about all of this going on in your life. I love you and I want to help you, but you need to know that I don't see you as a project. You're my friend, and that's why I want to help you." She arched her eyebrows. "You don't see me as a project?" She forced a smile and gently patted my hand. "Okay then. Thanks for telling me." But her tone and her face made it clear to me that she could see straight through me. I realized the lie that I had told her when I reflected on the situation a little later on.

~~~

This summer, the night before I left for a summer construction project with a group of kids from my church, some confusion and hurt and miscommunications in a particularly dear friendship suddenly left it on the rocks, and questionable as to whether or not it could survive. Though bodily present with the kids, it was so difficult for me to focus on anything completely, because of what was on the backburner. I decided not to tell anyone except the bare minimum of details to Holly, the other female adult from my church. First, I didn't want to talk about this with anyone - I wanted to pray and hear the Lord's voice clearly without any distractions. Second, I knew the girls in my church were particularly loving and sensitive towards others' pain, and I wanted to be there for them and for the great conversations I knew we would have, without making them feel like a "burden" in any way. But that was sabotaged the first day when Holly and I were alone in the cabin and she was gently checking in on me. One of the younger girls walked in and could tell by my face that something was wrong. I told her what I had shared with Holly, and she ran across the room, gave me a huge hug, promised to pray for me, and spoke to me in a way that touched my heart.

Later that week, on a walk, I shared with one of the older high school girls what was going on when she asked about my life. We walked and talked for an hour, and by the end of that conversation, I realized that she had poured some healing balm on my heart as we discussed the situation together. I began to sort out what was going on. And I thought back to a class discussion I had had with my seventh grade students at the end of the school year.

~~~

We had just finished reading Homer's Odyssey, and were having several discussions about ideas it raised. Middle schoolers love to discuss their ideas, and after a year of discussions and training on how to master this art, they were eager and excited for our very last one. The question: How can theOdyssey be a picture of the Christian life that helps us to understand it better? Normally I have a plan as to where the discussion ought to end up. Rarely do I need to enter it, but occasionally I will ask a question to draw my students in the right direction. This time, I ended up with six pages of notes. The insights my seventh graders were able to draw from The Odyssey and the deep connections they made to their experience of the Christian life blew me away. The Odyssey became even more dear to my heart as a result of that discussion, and my understanding of the Christian life deepened.

~~~

There was a link between what I was experiencing with my church girls and what I had experienced with my seventh graders. It is an error of understanding, and though I don't know its exact origin, I see it very clearly in our modern school system: In first grade, the very first day on the playground, you meet a student you haven't seen before. Immediately you ask, "What grade are you in?" There are three options: 1) I'm in first grade. Me too! There is rapport, and the seeds of a potential friendship are planted. You'll probably go climb the monkey bars together. 2) "I'm in 2nd (or 3rd, 4th, 5th, etc.) grade." "Oh, I'm in first grade." And you immediately know that no friendship will likely grow, unless there is a grand condescension on the part of the upperclassman. Which, considering the age, isn't particularly likely. 3) "I'm in kindergarten." At this point, you puff up your chest and look down your wise first-grade nose and say with all the dignity the gap in your teeth will allow you to muster, "Hm. I'm in first grade." And the decision is yours - to run off and snub the little kiddies because you've moved on to bigger and better things, or to condescend, and play with the little kiddies because you're a big first grader and who wouldn't welcome the friendship of a more important person?

Maybe that wasn't necessarily everyone's experience in first grade, but I remember very clearly standing in line in my little plaid dress with my fellow first-graders, and looking over at the taller and more dignified third graders. I remember watching them, and I remember the moment when I realized, Next year I'll be in second grade, the year after that I'll be in third, but they'll keep moving up, too, and I will never be an equal with any of them. I'll never get to be friends with that girl  - the third grader who was cool because she did back handsprings on the sidelines of the soccer field at recess. And though I was disappointed, that was life, this was how things operate, and there were plenty of cool first graders. So I forgot about it for the most part.

The idea at work here, is that life is fundamentally a competition. The first grader doesn't have as many "points" so to speak, as the second grader does. Within the first grade class, the kid who can do magic card tricks has more points than the kid who has three cats, but the card kid gets trumped by the kid who scores three goals in soccer who is trumped by the kid who can run fastest in P.E. This generally is at work at every level of life. This is why there is a movie called "Mean Girls". Girls in middle school, high school, college, (and adult life if they don't unlearn it or become too good at the game) compete against one another in a silent contest of who is most attractive, most liked by others, smartest, most athletic, etc. It gets even trickier as an adult. While it's a somewhat silly example (though I've heard many versions of it), this is how a conversation between two women night go:

Lady 1 - Oh my gosh, I just love your shoes!Lady 2 - Thanks! I do too - they're so comfortable.Lady 1 - Really? What brand are they?Lady 2 - Umm, let me check… Franco SartoLady 1 - Wow, super cute. I love his stuff. Pricey, but they're such good quality. If they go on a major sale, I might be able to afford get a similar pair.Lady 2 - Actually, I found them at TJMaxx - they were having a huge sale last week. You might still be able to find them.

Did you catch the subtle competition? This could be a normal conversation, but more often than not, it's evidence of a neck and neck battle. These women have graduated from a competition of who looks better. Now they're going for the "Miss Frugality" ribbon, because that ribbon is worth more points in the Life competition than the "Cutest Shoes" ribbon. Lady 1 loves the shoes, Lady 2 tells her about them, presumably because Lady 1 would like to buy a pair. Lady 1 realizes that they are expensive, and is able to subtly point out that she is more frugal because she will get them when there is a sale. Lady 2, however, eeks out the victory because she actually didn't pay full price for them, which puts her back in the runnings for Miss Frugality.

I think this happens in all spheres of life (I could give you a different example of this unspoken competition from my seventh graders every single day) because we want to "make it" or "measure up" or feel that we are worth something. An easy way to do this is to "one-up" another person by comparing myself to him or her, and to find myself the better of the two. While this is incredibly unhealthy for a person and for any relationships, that's another issue. This is part of the root of my misunderstanding of ministry. When I was sitting in my college class, thinking about what it means to treat people as nonbelievers, I was thinking that I would treat them as if they had fewer "points" than I did because they didn't have the "right answers" and that that somehow lessened their worth. While this clashed with the gospel that I was only beginning to grasp, I couldn't see clearly how I was ranking people. When I was trying to help my friend, I saw myself as having finished ahead of her in the "Going in the Right Direction" race, and that somehow she wasn't an equal with me. When I was in first grade, I knew that the third-grade gymnast had more points than I did in the race of life, and so I never even considered trying to get to know her, because I would lose the race.

Friendship is the great equalizer that we are all familiar with. In friendship, there is no more competition, or at least, in a healthy one, that is set aside, because each accepts and affirms the other in such a way that the desire to compete subsides. Each, in a way, says to the other, "You're worth something - you don't need to do anything for me to accept you because I accept you as you are," and each heaves an internal sigh of relief. This is what is meant to happen in the Body of Christ, but in an even greater way. There is no more competition - no status within that Body - each is part of the Body and that is an equalizer, for sure. But the greatest equalizer is to recognize our waywardness, and the Father who has set his love upon us because he is a Lover. I no longer need to compete, because I've already lost the ultimate competition, but He has chosen me anyway. What could possibly trump that? When we who have been deeply loved gather together, that is another link between us. As the Body of his Beloved, we open our hearts to one another, and invite each person to walk in and out. Josh Garrels says it well in his song, "Bread and Wine," when he sings:

I was wrong: everybody needs someone to hold on. Take my hand, I've been a lonesome man, took a while to understand: there's some things we can't live without, A man's so prone to doubt. Faithful are the wounds of friends. So give it just a little time, share some bread and wine. Weave your heart into mine, my friend. Walls fall down, where there's a peaceful sound, lonely souls hang around. Don't be shy, there's nothing left to hide, come on let's talk a while of the places we left behind, no longer yours and mine. But we could build a good thing here too. So give it just a little time, share bread and wine. Weave your heart into mine and If I fall, I fall alone, but you can help to bear the load, a threefold cord is hard to break. And all I have I give to you if you will share your sorrows too, then joy will be the crown upon our heads, my friend.

I love the language he uses: Share some bread and wine; weave your heart into mine, my friend. And if we are doing this, this living the Christian life by weaving our hearts into one another's by sharing life, food, sorrows, and joys with one another, isn't that ministry? We minister to one another by being the Body of Christ - being a Body. A friend who was talking about this topic once said, "Being the Body of Christ means that we are to be connected to each other in the same way that my arm is connected to my chest." We weave our lives into one another's by spending time with each other. When someone chooses to spend time with me, I intuitively know that I am loved.

And so then, how do we treat the nonbeliever? How do we minister to those who don't know Christ? We treat them as nonbelievers. We love them. We spend time with them. We eat and drink with them and open our lives to them. We build relationships with them. We pray fervently for them. And within this friendship, there is no competition. I do not have more worth that a nonbeliever. To our Father, we're both his favorites. One just hasn't come home to Him yet, but his love is overflowing for both of us.

This is so different from my previous understanding of ministry in two ways. First, I had assumed that though I didn't have it all together, I knew what was necessary for any situation and was happy to direct people the same way I was going. (Oh Lord, forgive my arrogance!) Second, if I was trying to "minister to" someone, it was a one-way street. I didn't expect to receive anything from him or her, because that wasn't how ministry works.

But what I have learned since then has changed my life. And now the cognitive dissonance is a good and healthy one. I was spending time with a friend who doesn't know the Lord, and who has no interest that I can detect. She is rapidly becoming a dear friend, and I remember a moment, sitting across from her, when my heart just jumped up and cheered and said, "Ohmigosh! You too? You understand!" and my old self reacted and asked, "hmm…should you be this excited about becoming this close with someone who isn't a Christian?" And my new self replied joyously, "Yes. The Pharisees only befriended people who had enough points in the competition, but Jesus threw the game out and spent time with people who were "losers" in the Judiasm-Master competition. I am doing the things that my Father does, and in that, there is no greater joy."

So.  Ministry.  The word might be unnecessary.  Because we know the Lord, we throw out the competition because we've lost our need for competition. We freely love by living life with the people around us. Living as we are called to live as the Body of Christ - that is ministry.