One summer's day my wife and I journeyed to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to attend a conference. We packed early in the morning and joined a colleague and his wife for breakfast. The other couple was also attending the Pittsburgh conference. After saying "goodbye" to our friends, we indicated that we would see them at the hotel in Pittsburgh. We were leaving directly from the breakfast while they were not leaving for another two or three hours, after they went home, packed, and took their children to the hotel. Diane and I pounded up to Pittsburgh, driving a few miles over the speed limit and stopping only for gas. When we arrived at the hotel, we carried our luggage from the car, and there to our amazement was the other couple by the swimming pool. "Where have you been?" he asked. "We've been here over an hour."

"You must have flown up here! How fast were you going?" I retorted.

"Fifty-five miles an hour," he said.

"Well," I began. "I came the best way the map showed."

"Let me see that map," he stated, grabbing it from my hand.

"This thing is three years old. They've opened up a new interstate to Pittsburgh."

Boy, was I miffed. That old map cost me nearly two hours of extra driving.

New maps are a necessity in today's world. Consider this: a person who follows a two-year-old map of North Carolina no longer knows the way to get to Wilmington. He or she would travel an hour out of the way getting to the beach, since 1-40 is now open.

You and I live our lives according to the maps we have drawn for ourselves in terms of what the world is really like. We began making these maps when we were little children. If we are wise and committed to the journey of life, we will continue to work on these maps all our lives.

Dr. Scott Peck has written a book called The Road Less Traveled. In it he talks about the ability to see the world as it really is as a necessity for wholeness. All of us, says Peck, live off our own maps of reality, our imagined perception of the world as it really is.

A major problem in life is when people do not upgrade their maps of reality. Sometimes when we are adults, we find ourselves still trying to operate with the maps we drew when we were small children. Consequently, we can go through life not truly understanding the reality of the adult world we live in, much less the reality of God's goodness.

Psychologists have a definition for people who try to live in their adult world with the maps they drew as children. The definition is transference. It is a way of seeing the world through a map that was developed in childhood and was entirely appropriate to childhood but which is inappropriately transferred into adult situations. The apostle Paul spoke vividly of the acceptance of reality when he told the Corinthians: "When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I gave up childish ways ..." (1 Corinthians 13:11).

Let me illustrate this phenomenon. I'm certain that your parents at times unconsciously disappointed you or let you down when you were a child. Occasionally all parents are guilty of this. Perhaps they promised you a trip for your birthday and then forgot about it and gave you a sweater instead. It happens all the time. That's normal. But if it happens too often and disappointment follows disappointment, the child depicts lack of caring and learns not to trust them. Then, in his childish way, he forms his map of reality on the basis of this repeated experience. It diminishes a person 's pain to believe other persons are basically untrustworthy; that way they don't have to expect anything. A child psychologist once told me, "Always follow through on your promises to children; otherwise, don't promise. You have to be consistent. Don't say you're going to do something and then not follow through." You see, from the realization that "I can't trust my parents" the child can conclude "I can't trust anybody." And real disaster occurs when this map which serves fine in childhood is carried into the adult world. Then, if you do not bother to test that map to see if other people are truly untrustworthy, you develop and expect the worst. It is a syndrome which affects how you deal with everybody who is important in your life - your girlfriend or boyfriend, your spouse, your employers, your church, your government, and on and on. Many of us can become angry with life and quarrel with it on the basis of a map of reality drawn when we were little boys or little girls. We can become unaware of the positive aspects of reality.

One of the paramount awarenesses made by Jesus Christ and the apostle Paul was that human beings don't like to change their maps once they have drawn them. Even when our life maps aren't working well for us, we don't like to change them. It's shaky business redrawing your map. But if you don 't redraw an inadequate map, you're not living in reality. If, for example, you are still using your childhood religion as the only map to get through adulthood, you may be more off-line than you think. And if you are still treating people the same way and expecting the same things from them as you did when you were a child, you may be headed in the wrong direction. Perhaps you know how this works. When I was in college, my best friend received a birthday gift every year on December 18th from his aunt in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. He hadn't seen her in years. The gift was always for a twelve-year-old boy. My friend would laugh and say, "Aunt Grace still thinks of me as a little boy." Frankly, I imagine that many of us stormed out of our homes sometime during many a Christmas holiday saying, "Mamma, I'm not twelve any more." Both my parents are dead now, I'm sorry to say, but even when they came to visit me in my 30s I was in some respects still their sixteen-year-old Harold, Jr., according to the map they were going by in trying to understand me. At times it was frustrating.

Much of the societal frustration and personal anger which assaults contemporary Americans eventuates from the inability of individuals to redraw their inherited maps from the 1960s. We bring forth the realities of the past and become angry when we view a world which appears to exhibit a declining condition for us all. To be certain, our problems have greatly changed. The top problems in America's public schools in 1940 were identified by teachers as the following: "talking out of turn, chewing gum, making noise, running in halls, cutting in line, dress code infractions, and littering." When teachers were asked in 1990 to identify the top problems in public schools they pointed out: "drug abuse, alcohol abuse, pregnancy, suicide, rape, robbery, and assault."35

In like manner, the change in cultural indicators from the previous generation to the present indicates a drastically changed landscape. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, eight out of every ten Americans will be a victim of violent crime at least once in their lives. Violent crimes rose from 188 per 10,000 persons in 1960 to 589 per 10,000 persons in 1991 and the statistic keeps leaping.

The family structure has helped contribute to poverty. Single-parent homes are the order of the day as we move toward the twenty-first century. In 1960 only 2.3 percent of all births were to unmarried women. By 1990, 21 percent of all births were to unmarried women.36 The number of divorces has increased in America by almost 200 percent in the last thirty years, which greatly exacerbates our problems. In his incisive book, Poor Support: Poverty in the American Family, David T. Ellwood points out that 73 percent of children from single-parent families will be in poverty at some point in their childhood.37 The realities are certainly enough to frustrate and even anger the most dedicated Christian. How do we respond at the personal level? Do we simply accommodate the cultural realities or do we have to summon new'resources and perspectives for new conditions?

When he was eight years old, I took my oldest son to a store in Massachusetts to buy him his very first baseball glove. I let him pick it out and we made a big deal over it. We even pitched ball in the aisle to make certain it was the right one. Maybe he'll remember it and maybe he won't. But for years I had remembered how I got my first glove. My mother had saved Green Stamps to buy the glove. I didn't know that at the time. When I was growing up, grocery stores gave stamps to the customers based on the dollar amounts purchased. You pasted these S & H Green Stamps in little coupon books. Then you could go to a stamp redemption center and trade your books of stamps for prizes. It took years to fill up the books. You could trade ten books for a toaster. Of course, you had to purchase groceries for a year to get enough for the toaster. But many homemakers were into that - getting something extra for nothing. And occasionally, you could get something after a few years that you didn't have the extra money to purchase as a luxury.

On my thirteenth birthday, I walked into the house, having asked for a baseball glove for months. Mother couldn't be home, so she left my present on the table. There it was in a brown S & H Green Stamp bag - a baseball glove. It was horrible. My folks knew nothing about baseball. It was too small. It was too inflexible. It was too cheaply made. I never used it a single time. I told my mother I did not like it. I wound up purchasing a used glove from a friend for $5.00. After many months, I threw the Green Stamp glove in the trash, still brand-new and unused.

From that and several other legitimate experiences I carried certain memories into a road map for life for a long time - my parents were poor, uninformed, and very much people who had to struggle against life. I had the road map of a victim. It angered me.

Then, many years later, immediately before the funeral service for my mother, Bob, my hometown friend and college roommate, walked over. He said, "Warlick, you certainly were lucky. Your mother had a wonderful life and was so privileged in many ways." I responded, "Are you kidding me? She had to struggle like crazy. My first baseball glove came from Green Stamps and we almost went bankrupt twice." Bob quickly answered. "No, that's not what I meant. Look over at the casket at Randy, Ward, Johnny, and Jimmy. And at me. Your mother taught us all and influenced our lives in Sunday School and Cub Scouts. Not many women have ever helped raise two Rhodes scholars and the chiefs of staff of two university hospitals." And I remembered that on the day of my first baseball glove, mother had been at an all-day teacher's workshop at the church. And during the year of the Green Stamps, our church had built a new building and we had gotten a little over-involved in it. Mother got the glove wrong but she got life right. Gloves are important to children, much more so than values. But adults ought to know better and should redraw that map to deal with the reality of the adult world. If not, we'll always get the glove right but get life wrong and place on ourselves perceived limitations that may not exist.

We lose touch with reality when we do not redraw our maps for living on the basis of new information. One of the constant themes in the New Testament is that Jesus is the Way, the Truth and the Life, and that in Him we become new creatures following a new map.

One day when His mother and brothers came seeking Him, Jesus left them standing long enough to say this to His followers: "My real mother and brothers and sisters are those who do the will of God." Now Jesus was not rejecting His family. Nor was He rejecting family values. He was simply drawing a new map of reality. He was insisting that there is a reality beyond the earthly family, an allegiance beside which even family ties must take second place. There is an even greater family to which we belong. Being baptized by the Holy Spirit into the Kingdom of God causes you to understand reality in a new way. We have to redraw our personal maps on the basis of the family of God to which we belong. One family of God. "By His spirit," says Paul, we have a new map. "We are all baptized into one body - Jew or Greek, slave or free - and all were made to drink of one Spirit." In baptism we are stamped as the property of God. This gives us a bond with one another that creates a manner of loving and being loved that turns life in another direction.

Only by turning to a reality which lies beyond the earthly family can we properly reappraise some of the threatening situations which confront our twenty-first century world. As we architect our souls for a new century, we must not enfeeble our perceptions or abandon our personal theological tasks. Many are they who can quote the morbid negative social indicators mentioned above. But there is other data to consider. In 1991 the divorce rate had dropped to its lowest point since 1979 (National Center for Health Services). In addition, by 1991 the number of children directly affected by divorce in America dropped to its lowest number since 1970. And while it sometimes seems fashionable to bash the young, consider this: according to the U.S. Department of Education, while in 1960 39 percent of our youth dropped out of high school, by 1990 the high school dropout rate had declined to only twelve percent. Indeed, by 1991 ninety percent of young Americans sixteen to 24 years old had completed high school. In its effort to provide every child with a high school education, the United States has far surpassed the more elite educational systems in Europe and Japan. When we consider that our youth have accomplished this in the face of aforementioned divorce, single-parent family and poverty ratios, we have to acknowledge something inspiring and courageous about that American spirit. In focusing on the problems, which admittedly are significant, we must not focus on the "glove" and get life wrong. Perhaps it is time for us to redraw our personal theological maps and deal with our anger, our relationships, our need for forgiveness, and our personal lifestyles.

Capping The Inner Volcano

It is not easy to be forgiving and kind in our kind of world. We all need space, and it is becoming harder to find. Our grandparents had lots of room. Agriculture was the primary method by which people earned a living. They could do pretty well as they pleased on their property. Heck, they did not even have to lock the doors. When you got mad at my Uncle Jack's farm, Mother just ran you outside to walk through the tobacco or corn fields until you cooled off. You didn't have to worry about being hit by a car or having someone try to kidnap you or sell drugs to you. Then, when you had cooled off, grandparents, parents, cousins, aunts and uncles, living in fairly close proximity, gave you a wide area over which to spread your feelings.

Our world is a lot more close up. We live house to house, apartment to apartment, town house to town house, room to room, suite to suite. We drive fender to fender. We work elbow to elbow. And students at my university go to a small enough school to enable us to know almost everybody eventually. We often get in each other's way. And when we try to spread out our feelings, we often find that the larger family is no longer there to absorb them. We have to focus our anger on fewer people. It naturally becomes more intense.

Living close up has problems. We all love and hate the very people with whom we are the closest. The two feelings exist side-by-side.38 Seventy percent admitted to emergency rooms in hospitals on Saturday night are victims of either domestic violence or violence among friends. All of us compete with one another for honors and recognition, and if we do not get them we become angry. We compete for power, and if we do not acquire it, more anger is generated. Fathers and sons compete with one another, and daughters and mothers compete with each other. We live in a competitive democracy.

And should people my age tend to get smug and say "we're past that state," let me also turn our hair on end: five hundred thousand to one million elderly are abused in this country every year. The most severe cases of violence seen by the family violence professionals have been unmerciful assaults on the elderly. And none of us is getting any younger. In fact, by the twenty-first century, the elderly will be the majority of the population in America.

What do we do when we are mad? Obviously we cannot eliminate anger from life. Nor should we. Differences between people don't just go away. If we don't express them, they fester. It isn't possible to be close to someone without being angry at times. We let our loved ones get close to us by letting them feel our anger when it is there. And if we get to the point where we are always caving in and valuing submission to others, then we will always be sad.

So how do we keep from being either sad or angry all the time?

Consider Jesus. Like most of us, he found it easier to be a star other places than in His own hometown. And He found it easier to accomplish great physical and medical feats than to remove anger from His own closest friends. Here was a man, the son of God, who could calm an entire sea in the middle of a raging storm and tell a leper he was healed. Yet, as Matthew's twentieth chapter indicates, He could not prohibit a jealous woman from making an idiotic statement or keep the other ten disciples from getting angry at her two boys. That's life, isn't it? We can often run a business or recover from surgery or complete a great service project or make the dean's list easier than we can dissipate our feelings of anger toward those closest to us.

Consequently, the person who cannot cope with anger in closeup relationships is going to be a pretty alienated person in our kind of world. "One of the very difficult tasks in growing up is that of accepting that we are not the axis around which everyone and everything revolves, that there are other people who are interested in themselves and are not particularly interested in us."39

We get angry when we feel helpless. We get caught in some bureaucratic system that we feel helpless to influence and we lash out before we get gobbled up. We get angry when we feel we are being neglected or ignored.

What happens to us when we get angry? Hate pumps up our blood pressure. More sugar pours into our system. The heart beats faster. More adrenalin is secreted to dilate the pupils of the eyes, and chemical changes occur in the blood. Even tissue changes take place. In fact, a good optometrist will not examine the eyes of an angry person. You see, anger distorts the retina through abnormal blood flow. Consequently, it is correct to say that a person who is angry most of the time is a sick person.

Jesus and the scriptures were interested in the health of human beings. That is why they talked about anger so much. When Jesus admonished His followers, "Bless them that curse you, pray for them that despitefully use you and persecute you," He wasn't trying to be "far out" or overly dramatic. You see, He was not making the statement for the benefit of others but for our own benefit. In order to be free and healthy, we must pray for those who we think are our enemies. We must channel those emotions into something positive, or like a rattlesnake we will bite ourselves to pieces when cornered. Anger is a form of energy. We can say "forget it." But no one can do that. Energy cannot be destroyed. It can only be converted into another form of energy.

Secondly, we must recognize that we love and hate those people who are closest to us. Consequently, we must never cut ourselves off from those who get in our way and make us mad, or we will miss some of life's greatest blessings. Look at Jesus, for example. Jesus got angry most often at His close disciples. He screamed at Peter and called him "a devil." He became irritated at the whole lot of them at Gethsemane when they all went to sleep on Him and then offered the excuse of being tired. He had to keep ten of them from punching out James and John and probably their mother, also. Compare His great calnmess and compassion with outsiders - those whom He healed and forgave. Yet whom did Jesus return to after His resurrection? Not the crowd He fed with fish and bread. Not the woman with the bleeding ulcer or the man with the lame foot. He came back to that bunch of people that He argued with. And who were the people who gave their lives in faith to Jesus? Who wrote the gospels? There is not a single gospel written by someone Jesus did not get angry at. Not a single healed person wrote a gospel. Not a single person among the 5,000 on the hillside who witnessed the miracle of the loaves and fishes wrote a gospel. No cleansed leper or healed Samaritan stepped forward to write a gospel, did they? Those who followed and loved Jesus were the ones who lived close up with him; and those were the ones He occasionally became angry with.

So much of our fear and consequently our anger comes from self-pity. A family member has made it big and we haven't. Someone with not nearly as much talent as we have has gotten a lucky break and left us in the dust.

Few activities in life are more debilitating and more responsible for resentment and anger than self-pity. I know that about which I write. Self-pity is a special temptation to all people who give themselves to people, like parents, teachers, preachers, musicians, and social workers. We cry, "My time is never my own. I'm underpaid. I'm never appreciated. I never have time to do the things I want to do. People take advantage of me."

If you plan to be a leader in our society, I give you a huge piece of advice: learn now to deal with self-pity. Those who have heavy responsibilities laid on them, and all leaders do, are more prone to self-pity and anger than are others.

Believe it or not, those who are mad because of self-pity form a familiar mood in the Bible. We find a lack of appreciation firing the flames of anger everywhere. Namaan is angry and resentful because Mordecai has snubbed him. Elijah is sitting under a juniper tree feeling angry and sorry for himself. The Psalmist is writing about how mad he is over the fact that bad people are prospering in the world. He cries in Psalm 73: "The ungodly people increase in riches. I'm mad. I've cleansed my heart for nothing." And the classic view of a lack of appreciation is uttered by an elder brother to his father. "Look, Father, I'm mad. All these many years I've served you, done what you wanted, been home on time, never asked for much money, never broke the rules: yet you never gave me anything. But as soon as my brother came home, this one who broke every rule in the book, you have killed for him the fatted calf and thrown a party. I'm mad."

There appears to be much to be angry about in a world which constantly demands that we redraw our personal maps. Limits are hard to swallow. The old terrain of Protestant, Catholic, and Jew has been altered by the influx of Asian religions. We fear our children will not have the secure communities of faith that dotted our landscape. Women in the workplace resist, as they should, every effort to return to a pre-feminist perspective. White males fear having to turn over their hopes of getting a meaningful job to the dictates of the EEOC. Now the men's movement has grown in numbers to stand side-by-side with the women's movement, both claiming discrimination. And they're both pretty angry about it.

I suggest that the place to begin is in learning to face our fears. If anger comes primarily from fear, then it's our fear we have to deal with. My friend Frederick Buechner40 says that the unwritten law of many families, including the one he grew up in, is this: Don't talk, don't trust, don't feel. Don't talk! Don't trust! Don't feel! In fact, I believe this law somehow gets translated to education and the workplace. Keep your mouth shut (play your hurts close to the vest); don't let the people you are with know your weaknesses. Don't trust (never turn your back on anybody). Don't feel; that way you won't get hurt.

We pay a huge price for not talking, not trusting, and not feeling. We never develop the giving, loving side of what we might have been as human beings. And that's where much of our suffering comes from.

I can understand the refusal to admit one's fears. When I grew up there were lots of messages about what you should do in order to be a real man:

Join the fraternity.Play sports.Get it on with lots of girls.Be tough; fight if anybody insults you.Stand your ground.Drink lots of beer.Get a good job, work hard, and be wealthy.Be popular.

Talk about fear. We lived under the dread of being labeled a weakling, a queer, a wimp, or a sissy.

But I'm not certain my generation is any less scared than this generation. Most of us think, "If I tell the innermost things about myself, I will be rejected or put down." Isn't that still a genuine fear? Don't talk, don't trust, don't feel.

Men get scared. We live with a conquering mentality. The central metaphor that dominates most of our male world of conquest and competition is power. Look at the way we define ourselves: muscle power, sexual power, financial power, personal power, political power, the power of knowledge, and even the power of positive thinking.41 No wonder we have a hard time separating aggression and anger. And women, God bless them, are proving no different as they enter the arenas where competition and conquest are honored. Now women's fear and anger enable them to have the same disease profile and early death as men.

What a world. We struggle to fulfill a thousand impossible expectations - I'm supposed to be competitive but gentle; I'm supposed to be ruthless and get things done at the office but tender toward my wife and children; I'm supposed to be efficient but sensual and sexy, to take care of the opposite sex but treat them as equals. And so are you. Small wonder we are angry or sad. And when we get angry or sad we take it out on the young ones or the old folks. We resort to anger and violence because we feel impotent and scared.

Fortunately, our Bible is also a record of how people through the centuries have resolved anger. I turn our attention to the story of Joseph. I like this story because it goes against much of what I fear. It's a story of what happens in life when people tell the innermost things about themselves. Instead of being rejected or put down, Joseph's brothers find just the opposite happening. It's a story of forgetting and forgiving and lowering barriers between people.

You perhaps know the story of the life of Joseph. His brothers despised him. He was daddy's favorite. Daddy bought him a coat of many colors. He tattled on his brothers, got out of all the tough work around the house, and was always dreaming of owning the whole world. Finally, the brothers had had enough. They threw him into a pit, sold him into slavery in Egypt and told their daddy that he'd met with an unfortunate accident.

But somehow in Egypt God raised Joseph up. He was maligned and abused, but God raised him up. He was in prison, but God raised him up. He became secretary of agriculture. He was in charge of the food in Egypt when the rest of the Middle East was experiencing a famine.

Lo and behold, the brothers of Joseph are sent into Egypt begging for food. They have to come before this very brother they had despised. And Joseph - well, he had the upper hand. They did not recognize him. What an opportunity for him to harbor anger over the past wrongs. Successful Joseph, living in Egypt, successful in his job, speaking like an Egyptian, acting like an Egyptian - a real chance to control, to conquer, to let his faith fade and his fear control. What a chance to salvage some selfesteem. Don't talk. Don't trust. Don't feel. It didn't happen that way.

Instead, Joseph wept so loudly that the Egyptians heard him and Pharaoh's household heard about it. He said, "I am Joseph! ... Come close to me. Don't punish yourself. Your father is my father. Your God is my God."

Later in the story the brothers' father, Jacob, died. The brothers were really fearful now: "Daddy's dead and he was the only thing that kept Joseph from us. Now Joseph can have his revenge." What to do? Don't talk. Don't trust. Don't feel. Stand your ground. We'd rather die than say we were wrong. We'd rather lose a leg than admit our ignorance and lose some of our pride. Don't talk. Don't trust. Don't feel. Be mad or sad. It didn't happen that way.

The brothers sent a letter: "Forgive your brothers the sins and wrongs they committed." Then they came down and threw themselves before Joseph. "We made a mistake and we'll be your slaves," they said.

Joseph responded, "I am not in the place of God. I did not make you. I am not your judge and jury. I'm not in the place of God."

This story is a story for the new century. It speaks volumes to us as we seek to redraw traditional boundaries and live within the limits of our humanity. We are one another's brothers and sisters. Your God is my God. Their God is our God. We are not the judge and jury of one another, regardless of the times and conditions in which we find ourselves. If we are to live at peace in these days we must learn to talk, trust, feel, and forgive. As we rub shoulders with Eastern religions, wrestle with new structures for the American family, and confront a shrinking piece of the global economy, perhaps the most vital of these traits for the Christian will be that of forgiveness. After all, that is what we are supposed to do best.

Perhaps governments, private enterprises, men's groups, women's groups, gay and lesbian caucuses, and media enterprises will help us reorder some of our patterns and responses to our ills. Yet forgiveness remains the sole charge to the Christian. It is this contribution of Christian people everywhere which holds forth the promise of a truly enjoyable life.

The Necessity Of Forgiveness

All across our political landscape new maps are being proposed:free trade agreements, health care reform, and educational mandates. Yet these efforts, by themselves, do not strike at the core of a reordered soul.

People who do not learn how to forgive do not enjoy life. The world hands us many irritating people. Some of them frustrate us to no end. If we embrace resentment instead of forgiveness, our relationships and our careers don't get very far. If you want to be a success in the world - major in forgiveness.

A newspaper carried the story of a man who bought a new Cadillac. Every time the car hit a slight bump there was an awful thumping. Twice he took the car to be examined. But they never could find the cause. Always there was the thumping. Finally, the servicemen narrowed the problem to one door of the car. When they took the door apart, they found a Coke bottle inside. In the bottle was a note which read: "So you finally found me, you wealthy ___ ___ ___ ___ (blankety-blank)." You see, a worker was so filled with resentment he thought he could destroy the satisfaction of the person who had enough money to buy a Cadillac. Actually, the worker's grudges and resentments had infested his own mind and his everyday job. The satisfaction being destroyed was his own.42 Thus he made his work-life a slave to his perceived enemies. Our greatest danger in resentment lies not in the wrong done to us but in the wrong we can do to ourselves if we let ourselves become inwardly hardened. Can you imagine having to work in a job which stirs up a vindictive response in you? Who has the reward? You or your enemy?

How impossible Jesus' ideal seems at first - "Love your enemies and pray for them that persecute you." But on second glance it seems to be the most practical and rational rule for daily living that could be laid down. The only rewards in life come through working through relationships. There is no reward in having a small circle of like-minded friends.

Doris Donnelly, in her incisive book Learning to Forgive,43 tells about a family she knew. They were very proficient in the use of resentment. They couldn't forgive anyone; nothing was ever their fault. The family consisted of two parents and their three daughters. The friends of each family member were under constant scrutiny to determine whether or not they belonged to their group. The family socialized together, sat together in church, and participated in the community, all as a small group. Failing to include the three sisters in a birthday celebration, or not greeting a member of the group with beaming smiles and deferential courtesy, resulted in ostracism. The family lived to be stroked by others. It was as if the world owed them a stroking. One year the parents gave the same Christmas gift to each of the daughters' teachers, to the pastor of the church, and to the principal of the school. Anyone who did not respond immediately with profuse gratitude was eliminated from the list for the next time. The family took every delay as a personal slap in the face. And everyone scissored out of their lives knew there was little hope of being sewn into their lives again.

The mother of the family died suddenly. The father and the daughters naturally expected large crowds to gather for the final farewells. They enlisted the aid of the local police to handle traffic on the morning of the funeral. Phone calls were made to neighbors and to their "friends." Announcements were sent via telegram to people who had moved away. The local motels were alerted to save a few rooms for out-of-town guests who might appear at the last minute and need accommodations. Exactly ten people showed up for the funeral. The husband, the daughters, their husbands, one grandchild, and two members of their small circle of friends attended the services. It was truly embarrassing. The town laughed about it for years afterward.

People who scissor others from relationships think they are cutting people out of their lives. In reality they are cutting themselves out of the larger human family. They not only die alone, but whether they know it or not, they live alone as well.

As we live in our day and time, many trespasses will come against us. The world of the twenty-first century, with its limits and imperfections, can hurt us, as men and women have always been hurt. But it is our time, with our people, in our world. It is the only world we will have. It provides the only connection with life we can make.

It is a fact of existence that small circles of mutual resentments are not easily broken. You can take a group of goldfish that have been swimming for their lifetime in a small fishbowl out to the lake. You can turn them loose in the lake, but they will continue to swim in small circles, the dimension of their former bowl, for quite a while without accepting the massive freedom awaiting them. In terms of human behavior, Jesus called the phenomenon "saluting only your brethren." And He told it straight - "what reward is there in that?" It creates an attitude of smallness which is destructive to career, family, and self.

During the ministry in the villages of Galilee, Jesus preached passionately about forgiveness. It was a strange doctrine to most of the disciples. Peter wanted to be legal and statistical about it. But Jesus stated there is no limit to forgiveness. It's a matter of forgiveness becoming a part of the habit of your life. You can't forgive people 490 times without it becoming a permanent attitude. You cannot serve two masters. Either you will bow before the altar of revenge and scissor people out of your life, or you will bow before the altar of forgiveness and sew yourself into the wide fabric of humanity, as imperfect and impulsive as it is.

Peter had not realized the greatness of forgiveness. You cannot forgive people and pray for them, even if they persecute you, without becoming a person of love. Forgiveness creates a loving spirit. Jesus told Peter, "You must forgive from your heart." The key word is kardia, which is translated "heart." But the Greek word means more than the organ of the body. It means the seat of the inner person. Forgiveness is more than an act we do; it is an expression of who we are.

What an incredible power forgiveness turns loose. It is an expansive spirit. A person who has done his or her best and seen others walk off with what he wanted, who has planned and missed, aspired and failed, but can still walk through life with an unenvious and forgiving heart, being happy in his/her own best self, is a person who has won a great victory. That person is a slave to no one. Life itself becomes his or her ally instead of enemy.

The central thesis in Jesus's assertion about the kingdom of God was that small circles of people would become increasingly larger circles of people through winning over and including their perceived enemies. That is the acid test of Christianity. Virtually every other group in society can do everything else Christians can do.

Christians have programs. So does every other group. Christians celebrate Christmas. One group celebrates Shakespeare's birthday. Every social club celebrates its founder. Christians recite creeds - so do sororities, fraternities, and a thousand other groups. Christians sing songs. So does every group, from "ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall" to "The National Anthem." Christians raise money. So does everyone else.

We are revealed as Christians only by the way we forgive other people, especially our enemies.

The greatness of Christianity lies not in its development of small pockets of congenial intimacies. The greatness of Christianity is in its expansive spirit that overthrows resentments, takes in enemies, embraces rivals and seeks the good in all sorts of people across all barriers that class and race can erect.

In our kind of world forgiveness is such a healthy ingredient. We do not live in a world that is politically correct. People become angry and resentful. You and I sometimes express negative feelings loudly and in public. Occasionally this has to be done. If we make people always feel guilty about expressing their less socially acceptable emotions, they will repress them. Later those emotions will often resurface as depression, anxiety, or rebellion. And we find ourselves on the outside looking in, when the more service-oriented world of the future rewards relationships more than manufacturing.

A Lifestyle For 2000

One of the interesting aspects of education would be quite humorous if it were not so tragic. Here are so many people trying to gain the credentials to get a good job, keep a good job, and improve in a job. We put our heads and minds in focus and try to independently get our best grades. To work with others in the midst of a test would be cheating. To copy the work of another would be plagiarism at best and stealing at worst.

Yet the irony of the situation is this. Regardless of your credentials, your life will rise or fall depending on how you get along with other people. Three weeks after you have been on a job, no one cares where you went to school. The issue is: How well do you relate? One week I helped a physician move to Charlotte and a lawyer move back to Kernersville, North Carolina. They are great professionals, fine practitioners, and have degrees from superb universities. But their practices have gone up in smoke. They just can't get along with their partners.

In like manner, three years after you have been married, your spouse will not care much about the good times you used to have in college. He or she will rise with you or fall away from you depending on how you relate or don't relate in that marriage.

Given the stresses and strains incumbent upon us with the demands of twenty-first century living, relationships will assume a heightened importance. While it may seem strange, a clue to effective living in the future may well lie in the biblical witness. This witness emerges from a period in history when relationships were more important than programs and manufacturing. It illuminates our own search for theological meaning. As its pages unfold, we glean how people have tried to merge with other people, taken them over, or been taken over by others. David, for example, was a great king but a manipulative and lousy lover who committed murder because he wanted a relationship with a certain woman. Abigail, with very few options, wound up married to a drunkard. Kings and queens, saints and sinners seemed to fail at relationships. Great administrators were brought low, popular figures wound up on the garbage heap, and powerful physiques were rendered useless because they could not meet others as separate persons and find some peace in their relationships.

Perhaps no greater example need be stated than the one the Bible called Samson. He was strong and powerful. Women and girls were mesmerized by his good looks. Men and boys envied his sense of adventure and his strength. He had everything going for him. But everyone knew his greatest weakness - it lay at the point of his relationships. He always needed a sexual high to help him avoid the intimacy he feared. All his opponents had to do was bribe a beautiful Philistine woman named Delilah and suddenly, with his passions running wild, Samson was sleeping with the enemy.

These tragic stories in the Bible are not far removed from our day. Domestic violence and the AIDS epidemic have focused center-stage attention on the primacy of personal relationships. At age 33, basketball great "Magic" Johnson had an annual income of $17.5 million dollars a year, five world championship rings, a new wife, and a baby on the way. At age 46, football Hall of Famer O.J. Simpson had television and movie contracts and several million dollar properties. What more could a person want?

Samson, David, Bathsheba, "Magic" Johnson and O.J. Simpson have some things in common - they did not do drugs and they were not gay. They were just somewhat naive about the importance of human relationships. If there is a common thread from the ancient world to ours it is the fact that those who are most at risk in terms of their health and their jobs are those who are naive about their relationships.

One of the most penetrating novels you can read is The Plague by Albert Camus. The novel centers on a plague-ridden city in North Africa. A haunting vision of life comes forth when the narrator observes that there have been as many plagues as wars in history.44 Yet plagues seem to catch us by surprise. We worry about wars and pray about conflicts. We light candles in churches for our relatives who are suddenly called up to go to the Persian Gulf. But no one lights a candle or calls me as university minister to express concern about Bob and Sally who are engaged in sexual behavior or drinking too much in one of the frat houses or their dorm room or apartment. I mean, why worry? They don't do drugs and they're not gay. We always find it hard to believe when the plagues of alcoholism, AIDS, and domestic violence crash down on our heads from a blue sky.

How are your relationships? Over 400,000 people have AIDS and over two million alcoholics never drank anything but beer. A soldier in combat in the Persian Gulf had a better chance of survival than two people naive about the importance of relationships.

Consider this. Here's Susan. She's an honors student. She has a 4.0 GPA at a major university. She's a class marshall. She's excelled in every course. She has been accepted to medical school. But Susan is lonely. She thinks sex is a way to become intimate. She's also one who closes off conversations when her angry feelings start to come out. She's a perfectionist. The thoughts of people not pulling their weight or a professor who would dare give her a B infuriate Susan.

Now, here's Betty. She was below the national average on all standardized tests but managed to throw together a 2.0 (C average) for four years. She's occasionally sloppy and will do things spontaneously. Her character is predictable. She sees other people as separate persons and doesn't try to merge with them or take them over.

Over the long haul of their lives, guess who will have a more successful career? Betty. Which one is most likely to have a happier marriage and a happier family? Betty. Which one is most likely to live longer? Betty.

Our success in the future will depend more on how we handle our relationships than it will on how we handle our property and our money.

In this respect I think we perhaps have misread Jesus' parable of the prodigal son. Isn't this really a parable indicting the father of the lost boy?

In Luke's fifteenth chapter the theme of the parable is loss. Jesus tells of three things that were lost. First he tells of a lost sheep. Then he tells of lost money. Finally he tells of a lost relationship.

In the case of the lost sheep, the shepherd went back over every step he had taken and searched in every ravine until he had regained the lost sheep. The woman who lost one of her coins swept every corner, looked under every bed, and fumbled behind every door until she had found her lost coin. But nobody went out to look for this lost son.45

Isn't that the way most humans react? The sheep was the shepherd's property. People will search high and low, long and hard, to regain lost property. Watch someone who has lost keys. Or witness the student who has lost a notebook. A huge poster goes up - "free beer from Kroger to the person who returns my jacket taken at homecoming." Our property is important. Everyone will rally around property. In fact, if you read most church histories and many brochures of universities, they are accounts of what building was built when. And we exonerate those people who, like the shepherd in the story, work long hours or give big gifts to help us acquire our property.

And, like the woman in the parable, most of us will work double shifts in order to regain lost money. Let me lose my wallet and I'll turn the house upside down trying to look behind every door and sweeping every corner looking for that lost money and those lost credit cards.

Ah, but Jesus nails us between the eyes in his final parable. Very few people bother themselves with trying to regain lost parents, lost sons, lost daughters, lost husbands, lost wives or even lost friends.

Wasn't there something just a little bit irritating about the father in this story of the prodigal son? He didn't hesitate to give his son all the property and money that he could. But when the boy was lost from himself, the father didn't go looking for him. Then, when the boy came to himself in the pigpen and returned home, the father ran down the road like a silly clown, killing the fatted calf, blowing money on a party, and inviting all the neighbors over.Just might not Jesus have been trying to show us how silly we humans can be - doing anything within our power-to go after lost property and lost money but sitting at home waiting on lost parents, lost sons, lost daughters, lost spouses, and lost friends to come to themselves?

It's strange what you and I will do to regain lost money and lost property but won't do to go after lost friends. But the key to life lies not in money and property but in relationships.

As the maps are redrawn for relationships, families, and social patterns in our pluralistic world, it will take a conscious effort to nurture a genuine interest in other people. The demands of the next century will call for genuine Christian ladies and gentlemen who can affirm the assets in other people. Timeless truths about human relationships will need to be revivified.

Men will need to realize that men were made to protect, love, and cherish women, not to undervalue, neglect, or abuse them. A gentlemen realizes that to degrade a woman is to degrade himself as a man. He realizes that her character is as sacred as his. Not to be like this is to fail in your relationships and fail as a person in our kind of world. Conversely, to be a woman and not expect a man to be a gentleman to you is to degrade yourself. If we are to emerge as sane and healthy people in the new century we will have to possess enough relational skills to distinguish authentic personhood from the counterfeit.

The Upward Pull

Have you ever wondered how some banks train people to detect counterfeit bills? Some fake money looks just like the real thing. The American Banking Association sponsors a two-week training program. The program is unique in how it helps tellers detect counterfeit bills. Not once during the two-week training does a teller ever see a single counterfeit bill. Not once do they listen to a lecture describing the characteristics of counterfeit money. All they do for two weeks is handle authentic currency. Hour after hour, and day after day they just handle the real stuff. At the end of the training they have become so familiar with the authentic that they are never fooled by the false.

Essentially, that's the Bible's approach to life. How, for example, does a great singer learn to detect bad or mediocre singing? Week by week, hour by hour, and day by day, he hones his craft. He sings the good stuff, associates with the best in his profession, tackles the tough notes, and strives to expand to his fullest capacity. At the end of the experience he has become so familiar with the good that he is never again fooled by the mediocre.

This perspective of the upward pull cuts against the grain of the common adage: "Well, I've got to see how the other half lives so I'll learn what not to be."

You know how this works: "Hey, I've got to try everything once so I'll know what to avoid. That's how you learn about right and wrong."

Not so. The law of the upward pull and the downward drift is a very big part of life.

One of my dearest friends in life was an elderly woman named Ruth Babb. She called me over to her home the very first week I was in the ministry. She gave me a piece of advice that I have found most helpful. She sat me down in an old rocking chair, looked me in the eye, and said, "Don't read what we read. We read Reader's Digest, Time Magazine, Guideposts, and Danielle Steele. Read better stuff than we read. Pull us up on Sunday morning. Lift us to a higher plane. Don't try to be popular. Pull me up."

The apostle Paul wrote some private letters to encourage two of his associates, Timothy and Titus. One theme is repeatedly emphasized in the correspondence. The theme is "godliness." The word "godliness" is only used fifteen times in the Bible and eleven of those occurrences are in these private letters. We are encouraged to train ourselves to be godly. We are urged to pursue godliness.

What in the world is godliness? Godliness is not just a warm, emotional feeling about God. It certainly gives us a warm feeling when we sing some grand old hynm like "Amazing Grace," but that isn't godliness. Private Bible study groups are very inspiring, but that alone isn't godliness.

Neither is godliness necessarily evidenced by conversations liberally seasoned with pietistic and heavenly sounding words like "the Lord" or "Jesus."

Actually, godliness seems to be a matter of focus, of looking up higher than yourself. Jesus once said, "If I be lifted up I will draw all people unto me." In like manner the Psalmist declared, "I will lift up my eyes to the hills." Apparently there is a law of the upward pull that operates in life.

I'm not a physicist or even a mathematician. But I do know this. You can take four apples and place one on each corner of a table. Tie a piece of string about three feet long to the stem of each apple. Gather the loose ends of the strings in your hand and raise your hand above the table until the strings become tight. As you tighten the strings by pulling upward the apples will all come together.

Essentially, says scripture, when men and women look upward, it's not just an individual phenomenon. All men and women are brought closer together in love and service when they lift up Christ.46

In short, surround yourself with people smarter than you are; align yourself with a cause that will outlive your own life. Otherwise, says Halford Luccock, "a college education may be merely the sharpening of claws for the competitive struggle so that one can get a bigger pile of loot."47 A pile of loot is nice, but without an upward vision it can degenerate into an ingenious means of collective suicide.

Perhaps the twenty-first century will place more demands upon us for making critical life-and-death family and economic choices. Certainly we will have to live better with less. As the current generation gets caught in the squeeze between children who demand more goods and more costly education than past generations, and aging parents who consume more expensive medical resources for a longer period of time than ever before, the temptation to view solutions as sociological and/or governmental will be great. These horizontal problems, however, must be addressed by deep personal spirituality. As perhaps never before, Christians will be called to endorse their lives and release the power within themselves to live life afresh.