It’s been a little over a year since Kory and I launched From the Fray. What began as a simple, “Hey, have you ever thought about writing?” has developed into an online storehouse of Gospel-based resources for those who find themselves in dark places. After adding hundreds of articles and videos, we believe we’re only getting started.
Since launching From The Fray in late 2017, both Kory and I were sent on (separate) remote assignments to the Middle East–away from our families for months at a time. As expected, those deployments brought hardship and frustration, as well as honor and joy.
While neither of us (nor our wives!) wants to repeat the process any time soon, we thank God for the experiences, the lessons learned, and the opportunity to serve Airmen on the front line of our nation’s defense efforts.
Those experiences only solidified our commitment to this project. Daily wading into hurt and disappointment, we feel a calling to share the lessons we’re learning “From the Fray” of ministry with anyone who might benefit.
We’re passionate about this project. We believe in it.
As Kory often says, “We’re waging a war on hopelessness.”
As we fight that war, we continue to lean on 3 foundational truths:
- Life is Messy
- Theology Must Bleed
- The Tomb is Empty
What follows is an explanation of those 3 truths. They are the “why” and the “how” of From The Fray. This is an excerpt first published as part of our document Battle-Worn Soul Care. You can download the entire pdf here:
Life is Messy
Life is messy. That may be the most self-evident statement ever made. Even with our best efforts and intentions, life gets messy. It’s hard. Unpredictable. Disappointing. Frustrating and unfair.
Life is very, very not fair.
Regardless of how you keep score, the math doesn’t add up the way we think it should. Bad things happen to good people. Good things happen to bad people. Accidents and diseases don’t care what color your skin is, whom you worship, or how much time you spend volunteering at nursing homes and animal shelters.
Without exception, every human must use words like cancer, depression, weep, sorrow, frustration, and struggle. Once would be too many times, but it often seems as if those words form the basis for our existence.
Some of our messes are self-inflicted. Others we inherit in the same way we’re assigned an eye color and a shoe size. Wish you were a foot taller? Well, you probably didn’t ask for an alcoholic parent or receding hairline either. Yet, life is messy. Often, life just hurts.
If we compartmentalize our existence[1], we can see how every aspect of who we are contributes to the mess:
Physical
Our mortality testifies to our brokenness. From the moment we’re born, the universe goes to work breaking us down and depleting our life force. Try as we might, much of our physical existence is out of our control.
Eat your vegetables, drink filtered water, and do plenty of cardio. The death rate is still one per person. Every ache, pain, cough and diagnosis reminds us: these bodies and this world are not eternally compatible.
Social
There are approximately 7.5 billion people on the planet. Most of them are indifferent to your existence. However, once you turned two and learned the word “mine,” you made your first enemy. While the names will change, the list of people currently unhappy with you will outlive you. The best people to walk the planet still die with enemies. Being good has little to no impact on being liked. Life is messy.
Being good has little to no impact on being liked.
Even on their best days, our friends and loved ones are carrying around messes of their own. Eventually, parts of their mess spill onto you and your mess. Often, that results in feelings of betrayal, failure, and disappointment. Suddenly those 7.5 billion indifferent people look more appealing.
Emotional
Perhaps more than anything else, our emotions are out front—representing who we are. They reveal what we value, what we fear, and what we fear losing. Emotions shouldn’t dominate us, but we can’t afford to ignore them either. On good days, our emotions can move us to be generous and self-sacrificing. By design, they help us survive by signaling danger and impatiently urging us to fight or flee. On occasion, those dangers get emotionally distorted and lead us toward the mother of all messes: insecurity.
It’s difficult to overstate the power of insecurity. It’s been said that man is driven entirely by his/her insecurities. Whether that’s true or not, we expend a tremendous amount of energy compensating (usually over-compensating) for our perceived shortcomings. We posture. We portray. We practice, and we pretend to be what we think we’re supposed to be. It’s usually obvious to everyone but ourselves. It’s a mess.
Spiritual
Both as cause and effect, all the messes mentioned so far are directly connected to our most profound mess: we are spiritually lost. The messiness of life makes us question our value and purpose. Because we question our value and purpose, we create messes everywhere we go.
Consequently, our most savage insecurity is a spiritual one: Am I enough? Does any of this matter? It goes without saying: those questions are intimately connected to our attitudes and actions.
Our most savage insecurity is a spiritual one.
Life is messy. It’s an uncontrollable, inexhaustible mess. In our career of walking with people in their pain and suffering, often the only appropriate response is to sit and cry in agreement: life’s not fair.
Theology Needs to Bleed
If you’ve ever tried to clean up a mess, you know how hard it is to stay clean while doing it. If it’s an especially messy mess, everything you use gets ruined in the process.
The same is true of the messes in our personal life. You can’t go through them unaffected. Whether you’re wading into your own mess or the messes of those around you, don’t expect to stay clean and dry. Some of the most meaningful words in the English language (compassion, empathy) describe coming alongside to share in the experiences of others.
Picture the battlefield surgeon: after hours of intense surgery to save a soldier’s life, he’s drenched in sweat and covered in blood. Every ounce of who he is went into removing the mess of war from the patient’s body. This is what we mean when we talk of “Bleeding Theology.” There are many things about God we don’t understand. Why does he allow life to be so messy? Perhaps the safest answer is: we don’t know.
However, one thing seems to be clear: God is willing to bleed.
If—after acknowledging the messiness of life—you still believe God has your best interests at heart, then you might expect Him to be intimately involved in your rescue effort. To be invested and committed to wading into the pit after you. We believe He is.
And we believe that seeing God in the pit—experiencing Him in the mess—is more powerful and more healing for your soul than any emotional high delivered by self-help or prosperity preaching. This project, our profession, and our very lives endeavor to be expressions of battle-worn soul care.
This is a compassionate attempt to wage war on hopelessness in the most God-like way possible: bleeding in the trenches. All we have to offer will come from the fray of our own experiences—our experience as practicing chaplains to be sure. But more to the point—from our experiences of being messy and getting wounded ourselves.
Every wound that’s ever healed has taught us one thing: theology has to bleed. Cheap answers and cookie-cutter faith won’t do. The response has to be as gritty as the mess. Bleeding theology is what we have to offer. That, and an Empty Tomb.
Cheap answers and cookie-cutter faith won’t do.
The Tomb is Empty
Everyday we’re invited to step into the messes of those around us. On any given day, we might be called to notify a parent or spouse that their loved one just died. Broken marriages, attempted suicides, and terminal diagnoses are the reasons people call us. We expect it. It’s what we signed up for.
And it’s exhausting. It’s humbling. At times, it can be both life-giving and depression-inducing. Why do we do it? We do it because the Tomb is Empty.
When Christians say that, they are referring to the Tomb that held Jesus’ dead body. For 3 days. Until He got up and walked out of it.
The resurrection of Jesus proves a lot of things. To sort through all of them here would be to risk missing the most important thing: God wins.
God wins. If you’re on God’s side you win too.
Take just a moment to reorient yourself in the clarity only that statement can deliver. God wins. This is more powerful than, “You can do it” or “Just try harder.” On the days when you have no “try” left in you, God still wins. During the moments when you think you just can’t, God still wins.
Some of the scariest movies are the ones that can convince us—even if we’re watching the movie for a second or third time—that the bad guy might win. Maybe he’ll kill the hero? Is he going to jump out of the darkness when no one is ready? As long as we think the end is in jeopardy, we sit in tension and fear.
Real life isn’t like that. God wins.
There’s no tension over who gets to walk away. God wins. The end isn’t in jeopardy. God wins.
There’s no promise your life won’t sometimes feel like a scary movie. In fact, we’re guaranteed it will. At times, life will feel like a messy, bloody, scary movie full of darkness. But we already know how this story ends. God wins.
Our prayer is that this project will help you welcome the Light of the World into your life. You’ll find His light is full of hope. Hope that endures because the end has already been written.
[1] There are many acceptable models for cataloguing what we mean when we say, “human.” Because it’s the one I use most often, I’ve chosen to use the US Air Force’s “Comprehensive Airman Fitness” approach.
Pdf Download:
Battle-worn Soul Care