Christian George

So I just got back from a weekend of waterskiing in Florence, Alabama. Rebecca and I were visiting Marge, a friend from college. It was my first time waterskiing and I must say, I took it in the face the first few times. Granted, the water was too choppy to ski on, but that’s really no excuse. It’s the strangest feeling being motionless in the water and then blasting off. Your body surges forward, your abs and lower back tense up, and before you know it you’re standing straight up on top of the water.

I often wonder what was going through Peter’s mind when he swung his first-century, hairy fisherman leg over the side of that boat to stand on the water. Talk about putting your weight upon your faith! Was it like glass? Or concrete? What about the water? Perhaps the water had an identity crisis. Normally it would allow a man to sink right through, but not that day. That day it behaved like asphalt or gravel and supported Peter’s 175 or so lbs. Sure, we all know that Peter doubted and eventually sank. But he also walked. Those first few steps must have stuck with him for the rest of his life. And how interesting–at the end of his life, the feet that had witnessed the awesome power of God supported the weight of his body when he was crucified upside down.

I think sometimes wiping out is the best thing we can do for our faith. It’s the questions we miss on the exam that we always remember. It’s the times when we deny Christ like Peter, that healing comes and Jesus says “Feed my sheep.” How can shepherds understand what their congregations are going through when they themselves have never experienced the lonely separation from God? Not that we should seek rebellion or sin, but God’s power is best displayed through our weaknesses. His mightiness always overcomes our fecklessness. God’s muscles are bigger than our cellulite.

Here’s another watercolor I did recently entitled “The Contemplative Life.” As a Protestant, we are very good at productivity. We live for it. Our churches thrive on new programs and building projects, our lives themselves are consumed with producing results–40 hours a week at work, etc. I am the chief of sinners, when it comes to this. I suppose we find our value, to some degree, in what we do. When asked to describe a friend, I usually say, “Oh he’s a lawyer, or she’s a med student.”

Recently, however, I have been absorbing the nourishment that comes from reading the contemplative writers–St. John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, Henri Nouwen, Thomas Merton, etc. I am discovering that true identity comes not from what we do, but from who we are. When we realize that we are the beloved of God (Song of Song 2), it transforms our relationship to God and others.

I painted this painting for a friend who has discovered the beauty of the spiritual disciplines. He has taken some radical leaps of faith in his life, leaving a very successful job to pursue uninterrupted intimacy and community with God. Chatting with him the other day, I have been astonished at how different he is. We often say that God changes a person, but it’s really true. When God gets a hold of someone’s life and they pour themselves into the Scriptures, they become something altogether different. Their attitudes are redirected, their conversations, too. There really is power in the Gospel, and I’m discovering it afresh in the lives of people who are willing to take radical leaps of faith to encounter the God who demands our everything.

I recently painted this picture for a friend in Birmingham. It’s a watercolor. I stylized the Japanese characters a little, but the top character means samurai and the bottom means faith. As I was painting this, I began to think about how the two of them are related.

Thucydides once said, “The nation that makes a great distinction between its warriors and its scholars will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools.” In my own experiences, I have always tried to marry my faith with my martial arts training. I have come to believe that Christians must take the gospel out of the church, out of our homes and into the remote places . . . to the very ends of the earth, so to speak. It’s not very popular to do that these days–we live in a culture that is morbidly afraid of pushing an agenda on anyone, especially a faith agenda. But to be a Christian is to spread Christ’s love. This is simply the great commission.

During my training in Aikido, I resonated with the Japanese honor system expressed in the dojo. The discipline of this art also caught my attention. What would happen, I wondered, if I could approach my faith with the same intensity and dedication as the Aikido practitioners around me? Would it transform my relationship to God? Would it make me more serious about practicing the spiritual disciplines. Would it spark revival in my own heart? Perhaps. So that’s what I have been attempting to do this summer. . . to take the lessons from the dojo and apply it to my every day life.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

Two days ago I finished Godology. Well, no one ever finishes a book, but two days ago I abandoned it to my editor. It should come out next year sometime. That’s the thing about books. You spend several months writing them and then by the time they hit the shelf it’s like, “Did I write that?” Here’s a portion from a chapter entitled “Mardi Gras and Icicles:”

“So I’m standing on a parade route in New Orleans yelling my head off for beads. It’s Mardi Gras and electricity zigzags through the air. The jazz is swinging, the floats are rolling, and I’m dancing like the world’s about to end. To my regret, I catch a glimpse of a topless fat guy catching doubloons. On his belly was a bright red fleur de lis, the official emblem of New Orleans. The pedals wiggled as if independent from his body. I winced—it’s no wonder they call it “Fat Tuesday.”

The next Sunday I stumbled into church. The excitement was low and a general boredom hung over the congregation. As the music played, I didn’t feel like getting my praise on. My hands wouldn’t clap. My feet wouldn’t dance. I tried to squeal out a few notes, but my throat was hoarse. I was all used up—just another dehydrated Christian sucked dry by the fangs of worldliness.”

. . .

“The Trinity is a mystery. No doubt about it. But this is what we know: God has forever existed in three persons—Father, Son, and Spirit. Before cities were constructed or worlds created, God hung out with himself. He was His own party. Some say three’s a crowd, but in this VIP club, the King, Prince, and Advisor share a perfect blend of intimacy, community, and eternity.

I’ve always been a sucker for thrift stores. Give me a few dollars and a free Saturday and I’ll come back with anything from a torn up pair of jeans to a urine stained couch. On one such day, I stumbled upon a faded blue Bruce Lee T-shirt. He was really laying down the law with a flying dragon kick. The shirt didn’t have any bloodstains, so I decided to try it on. As I stepped into the three-way mirror, a thousand kung fu kicks appeared in the distance. Each pane of glass reflected the images of the others. And I stood in awe, gazing at the Bruce Lee infinity.

How can God be one and three at the same time? Got me. I’m still trying to figure out how Bruce Lee jumped that high. The English language can’t articulate the unity of God. Though grammatically troubling, it’s perfectly accurate to say that God are one and They is three. Like a three-way mirror, each person in the Godhead satellites the other—an eternal reflection—forever bright, forever burning, forever dressed in glory. Most families have some degree of dysfunction, but not God. In Him there is no distant stepfather, prodigal son or absentee spirit.

Believe it or not, the word Trinity is actually not written in the Bible.3 But the Scriptures clearly teach the unity of God: “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one” (Deuteronomy 6:4, NIV), and they also teach the diversity of God: “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19, NIV). So we believe them both.

One of the beauties of living in a postmodern era is that we don’t need a cold scientific explanation to believe in the supernatural anymore. Modernism is behind us. In the eighteenth century the Age of Faith gave way to an Age of Reason. But now in the twenty-first century, we are entering into another great Age of Faith. We are living in an age when we know that the more we know, the more we know that we don’t know much at all. You know? And such knowledge makes us small again.”

This is the cover of my latest book, “Godology: Because Knowing God Changes Everything” (release next year). Each chapter contains an attribute about God, a spiritual discipline in sync with that attribute, and an outward expression of that truth for the world. It’s the whole upward, inward, and outward thing.

I must confess, though, that as I am engaging God’s characteristics I find that at my best, I can only sit before His attributes and behold them. They are too beautiful to analyze; too exhaustive to wrap into a twelve page chapter. I’m writing this book barefoot–sometimes in rubber Crocks– because the ground of God is holy. It’s somewhat embarrassing to attempt to describe the indescribable, to articulate the Eternal. So thank you for your prayers. I’m currently on chapter eight and the horizon is on the horizon.

With the Lord’s help, I am also writing a Trailblazer book with Christian Focus Publications in Scotland on the Great Scottish Reformer John Knox. I think John Knox was the kind of guy you wouldn’t want to have lunch with. He was stubborn as a mule, his temper was out of control, but he was also in love with the Savior. I guess it took a brazen kind of guy back then to reform the church. But mercy. To see him at Starbucks or something would certainly be a sight.

It’s jazz fest down in here in New Orleans and I wanted to show my support with a quick jazz painting. I played the saxophone in highschool and college and love the raspiness of the instrument. But down here, the sax players are unbelievable. Their fingers move a mile a minute. I think it’s all that crawfish eating–pulling tails from torsos. I heard a guy make his saxophone sound like a duck the other day–QUACK QUACK QUACK.

I’m currently on chapter 6 of my new book, Godology. It’s easy, sometimes, for writers to breeze through chapters without letting the subject matter really sink in. But for some reason, this book is making me slow down to really engage the character and nature of God. I’m discovering that the deeper I go, the more I get sucked in. For example, this chapter is on God’s holiness. I’m finding that God’s holiness is much more serious, and even dangerous, than I previously expected. To be in the presence of a holy God could cost you your life–like Uzzah in I Chronicles 13:7. Yet, the mystery of salvation is that the Holy God, the One who lives in “unapproachable light” flickered to earth as a man. Holiness found a very human place to live.

Back in high school I sketched this portrait of my granddad, Robert Wyse, only months before he died. I’ve never released this picture to the world, but feel it is right to do so now. My granddad was an amazing man. He was a Christian, a carpenter, an engineer, and believe it or not, a renown aviator. He built his own red bi-plane from scratch. Some of my earliest memories are sitting in the cockpit, eyes on the skies. He and I often shared lengthy theological discussions and he instilled within me many things: a passion for incarnational living, fishing, woodworking, and most of all, dreaming. He once told me that nothing was to hard to tackle if God was behind me. His words are proving true.

This portrait is charcoal on tinted paper. 1999.

This is my radio interview with Debbie Chavez from yesterday. I sensed the interview went well, but I was rather surprised at the end when she brought up the notion of hell. Most radio personalities won’t touch that topic with a ten foot microphone, but not Debbie. No sir. We discussed how my generation doesn’t want to step on any toes by embracing a taboo on the topic.

It has become popular, if not completely widespread, to underemphasize the biblical view of hell–that lake of fire with brimstone and gnashing of teeth. It’s written off as uneducated and medieval. But Jesus talked more of hell than heaven, and if we are to be biblicists, we must consider the heaviness and seriousness of this long forgotten mystery. Health only comes from an understanding of sickness.

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Picking up a paintbrush was difficult, but I must admit, it was rather refreshing to work with pigments instead of paragraphs. This is an oil on canvas entitled “Eyes Wide Shut.” In this painting I wanted to communicate the power of prayer. It’s kind of like Picasso meets Saint Benedict.

Sometimes we have to embrace the blindness so we can see God. We have to embrace the deafness to hear him. And when we do, we find sweet communion with our Savior. Hope you enjoy!

On April 9, I will be speaking at Vintage Church in New Orleans. If you are in the area, I’d love for you to drop by. We’ll be catering some sushi, possibly even sashimi. Rob Wilton is a good friend of mine and he serves as the lead pastor there. He blogs here:

The Christian faith is about being salt and light in a bland and dark society. In the heart of New Orleans, Vintage Church is making a real difference. Without apology they are committed to the historic roots of the faith, but they are carving out a culturally relevant niche. I believe God is calling each and every one of us to embrace a radical Christianity that takes seriously the homeless, the helpless, and the unchurched. A church is defined not by buildings, but by people, and the thick presence of Christ dwells in the midst of Christians wherever they meet. God is urging his people to engage the world with his compassion–to do the work of apostles and preachers by wildly abandoning ourselves to his blueprints. May he bless you this week as you drink deeply from his grace.

This is a brief video promotional clip about April 9th.

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