Chick-Fil-A...

"We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same." -"Our Deepest Fear," Marianne Williamson

"I give you a new commandment: Love each other. Just as I have loved you, so you also must love each other. This is how everyone will know that you are my disciples, when you love each other." -John 13:34-5

I was recently dating a girl. Now I'm not. I know, it's not the first blog that's started that way.

She's a great girl, just not the one right now. When we stopped dating, she wrote me a letter. (P.S. That's totally cool. I LOVE letters! They're a lost art.) At the end of the letter she finished, "You have always inspired me to be the best person I can be. Please continue to spread your joy with others."

Wow! There truly couldn't be a greater compliment. That meant more to me than anything. I am certainly not the world's greatest guy in a relationship. But I was so humbled. Something about the time we'd spent together had made her life a little better and given her a little wider picture of love, and now she's sending more light out into her surroundings.

And that got me thinking. Things aren't great in our world.

That's not saying anything groundbreaking. But it's not just in the midst of the election results. Clearly, if the past 11 days have shown us anything, it's that there is a lot of fear and pain in our world that has been building for a long, long time. And it's not limited to one region or one party or one gender or one race.

Institutional and relational racism remain in our world. Executives are making obscene bonuses while workers are left struggling to manage the budget day-to-day and paycheck-to-paycheck. Neighborhoods have become increasingly segregated by class, race, ideology, and status. Teen suicide rates are at an all-time high, while mental illness affects more and more each day. We've developed better relationships with things than we have with people. Leaders have misused their power and roles to lie, cheat, abuse those under their care.

We've let fear of others and fear of the unknown dictate our choices. The pain in the world is real. For some, it feels insurmountable.

But that's not how the world was meant to be.

There's a beautiful word in the Hebrew language: shalom. You know the word, even if you don't know Hebrew. It's usually translated "peace." And peace is a great thing. But it's not exactly what shalom means.

No, its meaning is MUCH deeper. Shalom is about wholeness, completeness, order. When things are in a state of shalom, they are all working together in harmony and perfect rhythm.

And that's how the Bible tells us creation started. God created and called everything "good." There was a garden, and the trees, the animals, the first two people, and God were all living in perfect harmony, in shalom. There wasn't competition. There wasn't fear. They were working together and there was perfect reliance on one another.

But that's clearly not the story we are living in today. Everything is not in shalom. But shalom should always remain the due north to which our compasses point. Followers of Jesus should recognize the deep pain of our world and our neighbors better than anyone because we have an anchoring story for what the world should be. We should never overlook it or dismiss it. It should pain our souls.

But we should also always remember that that pain is not the last part of the story. We should always be looking for the light, working to make more shalom in our midst.

One of my favorite writers, Henri Nouwen, writes in his book The Return of the Prodigal Son, "Cynics seek darkness wherever they go. They point always to approaching dangers, impure motives, and hidden schemes. They call trust naive, care romantic, and forgiveness sentimental... People who have come to know the joy of God do not deny the darkness, but they choose not to live in it. They claim that the light that shines in the darkness can be trusted more than the darkness itself and that a little bit of light can dispel a lot of darkness."

I think that what it means to follow Jesus is that we leave the fingerprints of light and shalom where darkness and sin have left pain and brokenness. We should be particularly tuned into the pain of our neighbors and then work to jump into the light that God is seeking to shine into the broken places in our world. The world started with shalom, and that is where God is moving it again.

The world should be better because people who love Jesus are a part of it. Our neighborhoods and our schools and our workplaces should feel the fingerprints of God's grace because we passed through them. After all, that was Jesus' charge to his friends at their last meal together. "When people see you," he told them, "they should know you are my followers because of how big you love." In other words, they should see you adding more shalom to the world.

I was in the drive-thru line with one of my students the other day after the election results had come through. They were talking about the fears they felt. They were upset at all the hate they saw in the world. And as we were ordering and getting ready to pay, we looked at each other and decided that we couldn't fix every one of the world's problems. But we were also definitely going to make the world a more shalom-y place, little by little.

So we paid for the meal of the woman behind us in line. Her check was even more than ours! HA! And as we were pulling away, we could see her smiling and waving in the rearview mirror. We'll never know anything about that woman, except that for one instant, there was more shalom in her life because two strangers wanted to leave the fingerprints of love on a fast food order.

This is a really small story, but I'm more convinced by the day that we are called to work to bring light into the world. We are called to see how deeply broken things are and to call those out those things that bring darkness and oppression. We are called to recognize the pain our neighbors feel and comfort them and work to alleviate the mechanisms that keep them in pain. We are called to see the darkness.

But we 're never called simply to point it out. We are never called to settle in it. And we're never called to let others settle their either. We are called to see it and help others recognize that there is light in our midst.

So may we see the places sin has left things out of shalom, the places where relationships and structures are broken and people aren't living the fullness of life they were designed for. And may we be people who work to bring light into that darkness. May we be the kind of people who have the audacity to believe that things can be better. May we be accused of naivety and childish dreaming for believing the world is capable of working in harmony. And may we get our hands dirty in that work of shalom.

forever unfinished...