Divine Plagiarism

(The following has nothing to do with this post. I had to do a bit of boundary analysis recently. I had a friend (not C) with whom I had been very close during grad school, and shared many deep things. Of late, though, they don’t really respond much to my attempts to communicate. I understand they are busy (new demanding job,) and I understand I talk a lot, but I felt as if I had been trying to keep the same level of friendship, and they had changed their without telling me. It became clear we were no longer deep friends, but I did not want to call them a mere acquaintance. I was blessed to spend some time with them face-to-face recently, which was awesome. While hanging out with them, I remembered how much I enjoyed being their friend, and how much I cared about them. So I think there must be a new category. ‘Old Friend:’ someone who has previously been a deep friend, but due to circumstances is no longer able or willing to maintain that level of intimacy. Treat as acquaintance unless catching up (temporary return to previous circumstances,) then act as deep friends briefly. Retain possibility of returning to deep friends if circumstances change. Sidetrack complete, return to main post.)

"Love. You can know all the math in the 'Verse, but take a boat in the air you don't love, she'll shake you off just as sure as the turning of worlds. Love keeps her in the air when she oughta fall down, tells ya she's hurtin' 'fore she keens. Makes her home." - Captian Malcolm Reynolds, Serenity.

I am talking to a friend of mine. Great guy. So he tells me how he feels God leading him to seek a commission as an officer. He feels that he had been running from God for a while. He feels like God had been telling him to go down that road for a while, but he had been scared. He was scared of the idea of command, the idea of leadership. In facing his fears, he sets out upon the path set out for him. It got me to thinking. I knew I was supposed to go down that road for a while. I think I set out upon it without really knowing what it meant. Those things are scary, the idea of command, of leadership. Not just advisorship, nor nominal administration, not any of the things we confuse for leadership. Leadership reaches beyond itself, expands its territory, accepts responsibility, claims ownership. God has been teaching me. I pray that I have been learning.

I spent 6 months’ worth of weekends reclaiming my house. I bought a fixer-upper. Felt led very strongly that was the house I should buy. So I set about reclaiming it. Reclamation. What we do after the fall. We reclaim. I paint, fix, landscape, and get to thinking about many things. (I learn all the things my overpriced education failed to teach me.) Picking weeds out of the ground, I learn that in this fallen world, death is the means by which we maintain order so that life can grow. Weeds die, plants grow. Sin dies, life grows. So I spend this time reestablishing dominion over this space that God has given me, this fraction of an acre entrusted to me. And He asks me, ’what is this about? Why are you doing this?’ I know the answer. It has to be about more than me. I will pass away. I am a vapor. And the answer is Him. This was my purpose since forever: subdue the Earth, reclaiming it for the kingdom of God.

There was a more immediate answer. ‘To raise a family.’ I reclaim this space to make a home for them. God will provide. There was something deeply true about it, this house. As I reclaimed it, as I reshaped it into my image, I began to own it. But ownership was not dictatorship. The house was reshaped to meet my purposes, but my purposes did not end with me. So the house and I were both about God. Ownership was more like trusteeship. It became an extension of me to be used to serve God. So in the establishment of dominion is the establishment of relationship. I do not lessen the house by making it mine. I increase it, as I bring it into something bigger. I become part of it as it becomes part of me. To reside in it and not take ownership of it is to neglect it. All of these things are infinitely more true about human relationships. It is far easier to be a tenant in a relationship, to invest only enough to remain. To not face the things we need to repair, assuming we can either leave or let someone else fix it. But there is no trust in tenancy. We do not treat rental cars very well. Tenancy is safe, for there is no real investment. But it is inadequate. We abandon the relationship when it gets hard. We leave behind abandoned tenements, and try to find new ones. We need to own our relationships. We need to take responsibility, take dominion, take ownership of the spaces which God has entrusted to us.

I remember staying with some friends (great friends who I deeply care about, intentionally left anonymous, pardon the negative example.) I remember the smoke detectors beeping because they were out of batteries. Not just one. All 5 of them. This seemed odd as it was an easy, inexpensive thing to fix, a thing that provided safety and told you loudly if it needed maintenance. Something struck me as wrong about this, but I could not put the finger on it at the time. It occurred to me much later, when remodeling my house. One must take ownership of the space entrusted to them by God. People do this in different ways, certainly. But to have something so easy to fix clearly and obviously broken was a function of not taking ownership. As if there were an expectation that someone else would fix it. But if it is yours, you must take command. You must take responsibility. You must expand yourself to fill the territory God has given you, vicariously and visibly extending His dominion through your chunk of this world. I realized this was true in relationships, as well. We would fail to take ownership. The fire extinguishers in our relationships would beep, louder and louder, but we would just allow them to continue. Perhaps the other person might fix them. If they got loud enough, we could just leave the relationship and find a new one. As men, we were often absent, and even when we were present we would only be present as tenants, not owners.

We all know the old Navy movies. Where the crusty old ship’s captain talks about ‘his ship.’ And as direct and crude as he would be, his men loved him, because they knew that he loved them. He conceived of the ship, with all the men on board, as an extension of himself. Instead of being seen as megalomanical, it was deeply appropriate. The captain was no mutineer. He had been entrusted with the ship, given the charge of a mission. He turned the ship with his will, not to serve himself, but to do the mission. The worst aircraft commanders are not the control freaks. Control freaks are ineffective leaders, but far worse are those who fail to take ownership of the aircraft. Those who fail to take command are totally unable to accomplish the mission, and are equally unable to win the respect of their crew. ‘These are my people.’ What a profound statement. You have become their leader, and they have become your charge. Both the leader and the led are in a relationship. You have extended yourself through them, but they become yours, and hence you care about them. They are not just any people. They are your people. It is not until they become yours that they matter to you in any sense beyond vague general beneficence. To the true leader, his men begin to mean more to him than his own life. In the execution of the mission, he becomes part of them as they become part of him.

Why do we fail to take ownership? Because it is scary. You might make the wrong call. You might let everyone down. You probably will at some point, if you choose to pick up the mantle of command. This is a terrible feeling, that people have trusted you and you have failed them. This is a risk. But if you wait for someone else to take command of what God has entrusted to you, the risk doesn’t go away. If someone steps up, they have to take the risk that should have been yours. If no one rises to the task, then the risk of failure is visited as a certainty upon those who you were charged to lead. Perhaps you will make the right call, but it will be the hard call and you will be hated for it. This is certainly a risk. But just as the risk of failure, it is one someone must take.

Ultimately, the idea of responsibility is scary. When you are in command, you are responsible for the actions of your subordinates. Because of the command climate you establish, they may act one way or another. You will be responsible for their actions. This is a terrifying concept, to be held accountable for choices you did not make, because they were made under your watch. And here comes the temptation of control. There is a vast difference between dominion and domination. When you cease to respect the people under your command, leadership becomes despotism. This is the opposite problem of the failure to command. You must still lead with an open hand. Gondor is wrenched from Denethor’s dead fist. Perhaps it would have been less unpleasant for him if he had not forgotten what Steward meant. A control freak cannot extend his leadership beyond himself effectively. He never lets himself become part of his people, for he is unable to let them become a part of him.

The quote at the top is from the closing scene of Serenity. (Firefly is an awesome series, by the way.) Malcolm tells River the secret of flying a starship. River is more than capable of running all the numbers, of reciting the various pilot age techniques. But Malcolm understands something deeper. It is about love. He loves his ship. He loves his crew. They are part of him, and he is part of them. This is not Hallmark card love. This is something real, something thick, not runny like water. A love you can slather all over something, one that will stay stuck. In the long-term, deep investment in something beyond themselves, the leader and the led become something together, something deeper than they were before. The deepest of loves come about in the service of something greater.

Even in our hearts, there is a battle between ownership and weeds. Our fallen desires seek to overrun the garden of our hearts, strangling any real life. In claiming ownership of our hearts, we uproot these weeds, these little sins and temptations that draw us away from Him. We abdicate when we give ourselves over to these desires. To completely yield to them is total abdication, which is unfortunately not uncommon. How many have no ownership of their lives whatsoever, and only think about the next time they can satisfy their flesh? Dominion must start in our heart. As Paul tells us, ‘take every thought captive.’ God has entrusted you with yourself first, so you must begin your dominion here and work outwards. If not, you set yourself up for assassination, for the most effective method of attacking territory is to attack its owner.

There is something deeply true about maleness here. Something that we seem to be lacking. In far too many Christian relationships, the man is little more than a sperm donor. He is a passenger. Sometimes his wife is asking him to lead, and he is unwilling to step up. Sometimes she is unwilling to be led, and he simply gets sick of fighting her for the steering wheel and gives up. We have ceased to be despots, but in the process we have abdicated our role completely. And we fail those entrusted to us. We are to be as Christ. He took ownership of the Church. We were His beloved, and He fought through hell for us. Even when we hated Him. He loved us more than life. He took total ownership for the brokenness in His relationship with us (even though it was totally our fault,) and repaired the brokenness at great cost to Himself. But He did not let us simply drift away. There is nothing in Jesus that says ‘I don’t care, go ahead and do whatever.’ He tells us, ‘I would really like you to do this with me, because I love you,’ or He tells us ‘I would really like to do with you the things you want to do, because I love you.’ He proved His rights to His throne through service. So should we.

There is something equally true about fatherhood here. Our culture has a number of people who confuse friendship with fatherhood. Friendship is the outcome of successful fatherhood. It is not the process. A father takes ownership of his family. Their well-being is more important to him than his own. In the process, though, there will be times when he knows what is best for his children, and they do not. Out of his love for his child, he will be compelled to lead them to do things that they may not want to do at the time. He may have to come to a battle of wills with the child. To avoid these battles is to abdicate his position. He must fight fair, though. He must respect his child’s will even as he imposes consequences for disobedience. He must be willing to listen. He must remember that he is entrusted with his child by God, and is accountable for his actions. Friendship is not the same as ownership. To exercise the deep levels of ownership that fatherhood requires in a friendship would be beyond unhealthy. Accordingly, to exercise the much lower levels of ownership implied in a friendship within the parent-child relationship is to fail to take ownership of your role. You can walk away from a friendship if it doesn’t work out. You can’t walk away from being a dad. This is not to say that the home is to be a dictatorship, rigid and confined. A father that moves beyond dominion into domination is a father that will never be able to raise his children to be more than himself. We can neither abdicate nor dominate. We must be fathers who take dominion over our house, who love our children more than ourselves, who love them enough to discipline them. Here we see the miracle of parenthood. The leader becomes part of his people, just as they become part of him. The leader shapes them, and is in turn shaped by them, as they carry out the mission together. The father shapes the child, even as he is shaped by the child, training him to love and be loved by God. The child is shaped in the image of the father, so as the child grows, he grows to be more and more like the father. As the child grows, they take more and more ownership of their own actions. Ideally, by the time they leave the house, the child has taken full ownership of themselves. In this, friendship becomes possible. In the outcome of successful parenting, the child and the parents are friends. The child has taken full ownership of himself, the parents respect that ownership, and both parents and child take ownership of their relationship.

Remember the Centurion. ‘I am a man in authority, and I am under authority.’ The leader has been given his command by a higher authority. If he is to effectively command, he must be willing to receive orders from that authority. If we are to expect others to submit to our leadership, we must first be submitted to Christ. We can only lead if we are in turn led. The pretender to the throne cares nothing for the country, nor for the people. He is submitted to nothing, and his authority is illegitimate. The true king is a servant first. ‘The hands of the king are the hands of a healer.’ He is submitted to God, from Whom he derives his authority. A true leader is under God, and when placed in command, places his people above himself. He is first, but chooses to be last. He is last and first all at once, as are those under his command. In this way, the commander and the commanded become one. They become part of him, and he becomes part of them. Abdication fails the latter: the would-be leader never becomes part of his people. Domination fails the former: the would-be leader never lets his people become part of him (or her.) A leader takes ownership of his charge, but holds them with an open hand before God.

We were meant to be reclaimers. We are, in some sense, gardeners. We live after the fall, so we work by the sweat of our brow. Weeds grow. If we do not expand to fill the territory allotted to us, we surrender that land to thorn bushes. Remember God’s command to His chosen people to fill the promised land. He commands us to do the same: ‘go and subdue the earth.’ We were never told to ‘go and be tenants on the earth.‘ We were told not to rent the earth for a while, but to claim ownership of it. God has given humanity a ’Manifest Destiny’ to reclaim this world for Him. The gardener must subdue his garden, breaking it like either a horse trainer or a horse whisperer. Either way, notice what happens when the gardener gains control of his land. The land is not laid bare like a stripmine, entirely to the contrary; under his leadership, the land reveals the beauty it always had hidden as it yields its fruit. In the same sense, we need to expand to fill our spaces and relationships in order to safeguard them from the advance of rust and thorns. We need to expand to fill our territory, to fill our role.

We suffer from a lack of ownership. We suffer from an abdication of role. We need men to rise up and claim the roles God has set out for them. We need fathers to rise up and love their wives, love their children. We need believers to reclaim this world for Christ, to own their spaces, to take lead their charges. We can neither abdicate nor dominate. We must take command.