Spirituality Column #320
January 1, 2013
Current in Carmel – Westfield – Noblesville – Fishers – Zionsville

Spirituality Column #319

Shopping for Innocence
By Bob Walters

Two carefree, local elementary school students happily hopped off a Friday afternoon school bus recently and their tearful mother fairly rushed the curb, hugging the bewildered children tightly and kissing them furiously.

Viewing the scene through my windshield and having been listening to the radio, I knew something the startled children didn’t: that their mother’s heart had melted-down with that day’s news of the Sandy Hook K-4 elementary school shootings in Newtown, Conn.

The bus’s red flashing stop arms held the moment: the mother’s children were safe; their world is not.  Not even at Christmas.

I caught the mother’s eye, nodded and touched my hand to my heart, a knowing, sincere salute to her fierce love and to the beautiful innocence of her children.  Emotion and tears came easily.  Is there any time of year when a child’s innocence is more valued and celebrated?

If we are selfish and frivolous, we will dwell on the inconvenience of this tragedy so close to “our” Christmas.  If we are circumspect and serious, we will add God’s message of Jesus Christ to our calculus of assessing both this tragedy and the holiday’s true significance.

We want Christmas to be gentle, but for God to be powerful and tough.  We want God to stop the bad guys.  We want him to protect us along with the people and things we love.  If Jesus was sent as God’s servant, then we want Him to serve us … now.

Ironically, our macro-culture is too modern and educated to believe all that religious nonsense, yet privately we are too desperate and confused to entirely discount God.  We shop for God “on sale” – on better terms for us with less at stake.  We eject God from our public midst but blame God for our troubles.  We opine, “God wouldn’t let this happen.”  Then we demand, “Well God, I’m waiting.  Fix this mess.”

We don’t know who is surrendering to Whom.

This Christmas my thoughts go to King Herod (Matthew 2).  He tried to kill Jesus but instead killed every other baby boy in Bethlehem.  Baby Jesus born in that Bethlehem manger is the innocence and righteousness that God truly desires for mankind, once the perfect image of His Creation but now fallen in sin.

Sadly, the innocent and the righteous are not protected from the fallen world’s viciousness and violence; look at what happened to Jesus on the Cross.  We are shocked at Newtown, but evil is nothing new.

It’s no wonder that we hug our innocent children tightly.

Oh, for a world where we hug Jesus even tighter than that.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com, www.commonchristianity.blogspot.com) prays along with so many others for peace, mercy, comfort … and truth.  Have a merry and gentle Chistmas.

Spirituality Column #318
December 18, 2012
Current in Carmel – Westfield – Noblesville – Fishers – Zionsville

Shopping, Rebellion, and Surprise
By Bob Walters
Author of (click) Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Spirituality Column #317
December 11, 2012
Current in Carmel – Westfield – Noblesville – Fishers – Zionsville

By Bob Walters
Author of (click) Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

During the thirty years of my life that I spent religiously not going to church, I don’t recall ever searching for “hope in Christ.”

Spirituality Column #316
December 4, 2012
Current in Carmel – Westfield – Noblesville – Fishers – Zionsville

By Bob Walters
Author of (click) Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Rarely when we shop for the perfect Christmas gift are we thinking about the best gift of all – encouragement.

We generally purchase gifts based on what we think will make someone “happy” by meeting a material desire or temporary comfort.  Instead of building people up by providing the stuff of encouragement – peace, grace, mercy, forgiveness, and hope – we shop for the stuff of this world and then beat down doors at midnight to get it cheap.

Anybody see any Bible parallels or problems there?

The gift of encouragement is a much tougher “find.”  Few people put “encouragement” on their Christmas wish list.  I didn’t see a single Black Friday sale featuring a discount on or special shopping hours for “encouragement.”

Christmas gift-giving winds up being about expressing our love – a good thing – by making other people happy, preferably at a righteous discount.  But holiday gift exchanges are mostly semi-redundant expressions of our affection.  We present gifts to, and receive them from, people who already know we care.  I mean, it’s creepy to get a Christmas gift from someone we don’t like, isn’t it?  And who shops for their enemies?

This is all to say that Christmas gift-giving is geared not so much toward mimicking God’s universal encouragement of mankind but toward simple and transitory, worldly expressions of “I didn’t forget you” or “I want you to be happy.”

That’s all fine, but … the entire dynamic is out of sync with the actual story of Christmas and the glorious incarnation of God on earth.  Jesus was God’s ultimate gift of gracious, eternal encouragement to a world that didn’t know Him, would largely ignore Him, would treat Him as an enemy, mock Him, and kill Him.  Mankind never even asked for the gift God so spectacularly provided (John 1:1-14).

This was the gift of all gifts: God’s encouragement in the form of man’s eternal salvation through the humble human life and sin-cleansing death of his Son and our Lord, Jesus Christ.  The entire Old Testament points to this coming gift, but people interpreted scripture and prophecy to mean that God would give them happiness and comfort in exchange for their obedience.

People expected a trade, a transaction, a quid pro quo.  Almost everyone missed the cosmic, life-altering importance of divine encouragement – the love, freedom, grace, and life – God sent in His gift of Jesus.

Be encouraged and think about that while you’re out shopping.

Speaking of Christmas shopping, Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) published  Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary, a book of his first 260 Current columns, available at (click one) Amazon.com, Lulu.com, Barnes&Noble .  He’d be encouraged if you gave somebody one as a gift. 

Spirituality Column #315
November 27, 2012
Current in Carmel – Westfield – Noblesville – Fishers – Zionsville

By Bob Walters
Author of (click) Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Spirituality Column #314
November 20, 2012
Current in Carmel – Westfield – Noblesville – Fishers – Zionsville

By Bob Walters
Author of (click) Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

I am blessed to be around intelligent, bright-eyed teenagers on a regular basis.

Recently, upon learning that I write Christian commentary, a particularly upbeat eighth-grader sincerely and innocently offered: “I don’t know what religion I am, but I believe in God.”

I responded warmly, “That’s a great start.”

Yes, a great start indeed.  I am so very thankful there is a God we all can know; a God Who has put it in our hearts and heads that He is indeed there, whether we know Him, want Him, love Him, praise Him, pursue Him, fear Him, trust Him, blame Him, or ignore Him.  God is there and anyone can get to know Him.

Each human story for “getting to know God” is unique.  That reflects the truly unique nature of the Christian faith: the personal, relational presence of the Holy Creator and Almighty God in our lives and humanity.  That Presence – the One who God sent amid humanity to restore, adopt, and save us into eternal loving relationship with God – is the Lord Jesus Christ.  And the only way we can know that is through our faith in God, Christ’s grace, and the comforting, illuminating work of the Holy Spirit.

That is the face of the Trinity; the God who Himself works as a loving community to bring us into loving community with Him.  Sometimes it’s gentle love, sometimes it is tough love, and sometimes it is truly inexplicable love.  But we must begin to know God by remembering that love didn’t start with reason and people; love started with the Creator God: “His love endures forever” (Psalm 136:1 and hundreds of other verses).

“Forever” – that’s past, present, and future; beginning, middle and end.

Believing in God – which is common to many faith traditions – is different from knowing God.  The terms on which we “know God” – sacrificial love (Christianity), the Law (Judaism), God’s power (Islam), elimination of self (Buddhism), or whatever – defines our religion.  What God offered to humanity through Jesus Christ is not only the unique physical human presence in time, space, and history of the one and true eternal Creator God, but also the renewed gift of eternal human relationship with God.

Rationally, linguistically, and humanly, “love” implies relationship.  Mercifully and uniquely, God’s love implies His active relationship with humanity and all His Creation.  God reaches deep into our hearts, minds and souls to make us aware He is there.

In His love, God lets us decide freely, seriously, and independently, “what religion we are.”

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com), still reeling from the national election results, is  thankful for this unprecedented opportunity to exercise faith and trust in Christ alone.  Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us.