It’s a sobering thought to realize that we will all someday face a final judgment.

In the 2006 Martin Scorsese movie, The Departed, Jack Nicholson’s character, mob boss Frank Costello, walks past an associate in a bar and asks how his mother is doing. The man replies, ruefully, “She’s on her way out.”

“We all are,” says Costello without a trace of sympathy, “act accordingly.”

It’s a telling insight into the character. The murderous Costello is not a man who believes he’ll live forever. He knows he’s going to die, but his monstrous actions reveal a disbelief in any sort of reckoning for his behavior. There’s no final judgment on Costello’s horizon — and so he acts accordingly.

But we know better. Or do we? Do we act as if we believe we must give account? We confess as much in the creed, that Christ is coming to judge the living and the dead. We see it in Matthew 25 when Jesus questions those who come before him and then divides the sheep from the goats. And we read about the great white throne of judgment in Revelation 20.

Scripture presents the matter of a final judgment gravely and assumes we’ll take the warning seriously. Writes Paul to the church at Rome:

[D]o you presume upon the riches of [God's] kindness and forbearance and patience? Do you not know that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance? But by your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath when God’s righteous judgment will be revealed. For he will render to every man according to his works: to those who by patience in well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life; but for those who are factious and do not obey the truth, but obey wickedness, there will be wrath and fury (2.4-8).

And to the Corinthians:

[W]e must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive good or evil, according to what he has done in the body (2 Cor 5.10).

So do we believe and act as gravely as many such passages warrant? Often enough, to my shame, I do not. Other times I do, and frankly it has been God’s mercy to realize that his patience is meant to lead me to repentance, as Paul says, not excuse my wrongdoing. If I thought I were getting a pass, my walk would look differently — to my everlasting chagrin, no doubt.

Sometimes our morality is really just a social morality. We’re more concerned about whether our neighbors or friends might catch us in sin, less that there is really something objectively wrong about what we’re doing. We suppress that thought. But we must give account in the end nonetheless. It may be unpopular, but it’s not imaginary.

The Bible shows us the image of a loving and forgiving God who desires and promises to forgive the sins of which we have repented. But as Paul says in Romans, God suffers our sins with mercy and patience to provide us time and room to put those sins behind us. We are to disown them.

We fall, yes. We fall often, also true. Not a day goes by that I’m not faced with just how sinful I really am. But I dare not indulge those sins because there really is a day of judgment coming, whether Frank Costello thinks so or not. And I, like all of us, need to act accordingly.

So may the whole day pass that neither lying tongue, nor hands, nor straying eyes commit sin, nor any guilt stain our body. There is One that stands by watching from above, who each day views us and our doings. . . . He is witness, He is judge; He looks on every thought the mind of man conceives, and this judge none can dupe.

– Prudentius (Daily Round II: A Morning Hymn)

The first time I really got Mary was on Good Friday a few years ago.

In a very solemn service the night of Great and Holy Friday, as the day is called in the Orthodox Church, a series of funeral dirges are sung, one after another. I stood there in a dark church, a bier with an embroidered icon of the crucified Christ in the middle of the room, as the chanters and congregation expressed the mystery of the Lord’s Passion in somber melodies. How could the Lord of Life die? And to what end?

I listened intently to the mournful lyrics, many which referred to the grief of Mary, and my mind returned to the prophet Simeon’s sobering words to her: “[A] sword will pierce through your own soul also. . . .” Here was the sword. As I stood there, those lyrics rolling, rolling, rolling on, I imagined Mary at the foot of the cross, looking up into the dimming, anguished eyes of her boy, and my heart broke.

It’s impossible to know what Mary knew in that moment exactly, but did she realize her son would rise? There’s no evidence she did, and much to the contrary. For all she knew, the words of the angel spoken those many years ago were horribly, tragically wrong. All she could see was her dead son’s ravaged body, pulled down from the cross, hastily wrapped in grave clothes — did the windings make her think of his newborn swaddling clothes? — and placed in a tomb.

A tomb.

And as I faced that thought, looking through her eyes, I became aware. I understood Mary in that moment through her grief — a mother’s grief.

For years Mary was an argument to me. Or a dismissed doctrine. My understanding of her was entirely contextualized by the fact that I was Protestant, not Catholic, and therefore nearly forced into marginalizing her. I treated my friends’ mothers better than I treated Jesus’ mother. I had no connection to her, merely a doctrine with which I disagreed. But how do you disagree with sorrow? How do you argue with grief?

In Mary’s pain, I finally saw her motherhood and through that her whole person. I considered the mutual feeling between Jesus and Mary, seen so movingly in the tortured distance between cross and earth when the dying Christ compassionately ensured his mother’s earthly care by entrusting her to his beloved disciple John. How could I have missed what was happening?

Another thing I missed for years — and this is so obvious I feel foolish just mentioning it — but Mary is still Jesus’ mother. It is not as if the ascension reversed the incarnation. Jesus is still the incarnate son, and Mary is still the woman who gave him flesh. This is more than a statement of bald fact. It testifies to an ongoing relationship. It was Orthodox pastor and author Patrick Henry Reardon who first helped me see this, something for which I will always be grateful.

The church reveals this truth in its iconography. Oftentimes when the death of a saint is depicted, angels stoop over the body to welcome the person’s soul into their arms and escort them to the side of Christ. Not so with Mary. Would Christ send angels on the errand for his own mother? Inconceivable. Traditional icons of Mary’s death show Christ at the side of his mother’s resting body, her soul, tiny like a baby, in his arms.

There’s a lot to unpack when considering Mary and her place in the church. But the place to start is with affection and honor, because she’s the dear and precious mother of our Lord.

The most obvious thing to do with mothers is to celebrate them.

I watch my Megan day in and out striving to raise, nurture, encourage, protect, correct, and prepare our kids. It’s a humbling thing to behold. When I say that I couldn’t do it, I say the obvious. When I say that she does, I speak of the miraculous.

God has a special concern for mothers, something apparent in both the Bible and the memory of the church, which tell the story of so many noteworthy mothers. Just start with the matriarchs of Genesis. There’s frank Sarah, crafty Rebekah, longsuffering Leah, and meek Rachel — women who gave birth to a nation.

Then there’s Jochebed, who acted so bravely to save her son, Moses, and Moses’ own wife, Zipporah, who acted so bravely to save her own. There’s patient Hannah who bore the scorn of a sister wife, all the while trusting and praising God nonetheless until one day her Samuel was born.

Bathsheba’s story provides a beautiful picture. Before her husband’s death in 1 Kings 1, Bathsheba bows twice before David. But then when her son Solomon is elevated to the throne in the next chapter we see his deep respect and honor for his mother:

So Bathsheba went to King Solomon. . . . And the king rose to meet her, and bowed down to her; then he sat on his throne, and had a seat brought for the king’s mother; and she sat on his right.

Where Bathsheba first prostrated herself, now Solomon bows to her and enthrones her by his side.

Another woman, perhaps missed by many Christians today, is Solomonia, whose harrowing story is told in 2 Maccabees 7. Solomonia was forced to watch as her seven sons were martyred at the hands of the tyrant Antiochus Epiphanes. Said Cyprian of Carthage, celebrating her fortitude, she “loved her sons not delicately, but bravely.” And, pointing to her courage, John Chrysostom said, “Let all mothers hear these things, let them emulate the woman’s courage, her love. . . .”

That Solomonia’s sons so readily accepted martyrdom commends her parenting. She raised godly children.

Chrysostom narrowed in on this point. “[I]t isn’t giving birth that makes a mother,” he said, “but raising [her children] well. . . .” The first, he said, “is a matter of nature,” but the second “is a matter of choice,” which is to say that it takes intentionality, prayer, sacrifice, nurturing, and a good deal of determination. Saints don’t happen by accident. They’re raised by godly mothers.

Scripture gives us pictures of mothers like this as well. Think of Timothy’s mother, Eunice, and grandmother Lois. Think also of Mary, the mother of our Lord.

The memory of the church is likewise filled with powerful examples of such women. Augustine’s mother, Monica, springs to mind — a woman who prayed her son into the arms of God. And then there’s Emilia, the mother of Macrina, Basil the Great, and Gregory of Nyssa.

To think of the impact that these children had on the church is to understand the vital importance of faithful mothers.

In her essay “The Grotesque in Southern Fiction,” Flannery O’Connor writes that readers desire and even need something uplifting in the books that they read. “There is something in us,” she says, “as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored.”

At Thomas Nelson, where I work, we strive to publish stories that are in some sense redemptive. It’s a priority at the acquisitions and editorial levels. It might be accomplished by telling stories that show heroism and courage, or that share human pain and suffering, or that deal with setting wrongs right, or that reveal the providence of God at work in human lives. The ways are endless. The sense and scope of redemption is broad because that’s how God operates in the world, broadly, in ways we sometimes see fully and in many more ways that we do not.

But here’s the problem with being broad: Some people’s expectations and experiences prepare them look for redemptive acts in particular areas and not in others. Looking toward only one region on the map of grace means that some will miss redemption that is situated elsewhere. Some will even reject something as redemptive because it comes from a direction they do not expect.

This isn’t so much regrettable as merely expectable. People are infinitely various and have infinitely various appraisals of the world around them. A story can conceivably be all things to all people, but not in the same way or in the same relationship.

This is an obvious but important thing to recognize because a critic or reader may decide that a book and its meaning is not redemptive. And maybe they’re right. Maybe the author and publisher funked it. But maybe the reader just didn’t get it. Flannery O’Connor tells about receiving a letter from a reader who informed her that she experienced nothing uplifting in O’Connor’s stories. “I think that if her heart had been in the right place,” O’Conner commented, “it would have been lifted up.”

Similarly, in an essay on writing short stories O’Connor deals with frustrated readers who felt her stories ended poorly or meant things they did not like or agree with. I love her counsel to storywriters: “When you write a story, you only have to write one story, but there will always be people who will refuse to read the story you have written.”

Such is life. In the theological sense, redemption may be an objective fact. But in the literary sense, redemption is a subjective experience for the reader. And to close with one final simple but inescapable observation from O’Connor: “It takes readers as well as writers to make literature.”

When you note personal or spiritual growth in your life, there can be a tendency to disparage your past, to look down on a self that you might now regard as wrong or naive or simply juvenile.

I’ve been listening to tracks stored in the dusty, cobwebbed corners of my iPod lately. Songs I haven’t heard in years are tumbling out, one after another. There’s a lot of 77s, Bob Dylan, Bill Mallonee, Tom Petty, and Daniel Amos. Sometimes the songs still work for me. Love the Byrds! Other times not. Did I really like Al Green that much?

Earlier today I listened to tracks from Rush that made a lot of sense to a younger, more rebellious Joel. I shrugged through at least a few of them this go round, basically unimpressed.

Embarrassed by our journey

I heard other bands whose songwriting I today find insufferably childish. I won’t name any names for fear of offending, but you have plenty of your own examples I’m sure. I used to like that? Groan.

But don’t groan too much. Remembering a younger you can serve as interesting commentary on your personal growth, but don’t let it double as an indictment on where you’ve come from — especially when it comes to spiritual matters. You are Today’s You because of Yesterday’s You, and nowhere is this truer than in matters of the heart.

Instead of the iPod look at the bookshelf — the novels, memoirs, and spiritual books in particular. Pull down some volumes and read your marginalia. With some ideas we can still identify after years and years. Others? Not so much. Now cringe if you need to, but those ideas meant something important enough then to underline, to highlight, and to scribble a note or two.

You’ve come a long way since that moment, but you wouldn’t be where you are today without that moment.

Embracing our journey

None of us is today where we were last week, and the more we appreciate and like our current place, the easier it is to look down upon where we’ve come from.

I don’t hold all the beliefs with which I grew up. I discount certain points of doctrine today that I proudly affirmed a decade ago. But I’m glad even for the theological and spiritual approaches with which I now differ. Even if those ideas were erroneous, they are part of my development. I’m not me without them.

If I drive to Sacramento, California, from Eugene, Oregon, I shouldn’t despise the fact that I spent a moment in Medford, Yreka, and Redding. They are on the way. Unlike points on a map, our past positions may not be morally neutral, but it does no good to despise those except the sinful — and even then we should consider being merciful to what Christ has shown mercy.

Our spiritual journeys may have many twists and turns, but God sets the course and guides us along the way. Trust him enough to appreciate where he’s taken you.

Little things can affect dramatic change — good and bad — even if you’re unaware that any transformation is underway.

If you walk into my kitchen, it might appear at times like a laboratory. Meg and I brew our own kombucha, several gallons of which sit on the countertop, happily fermenting away. We also make our own yogurt, kefir, and lactofermented vegetables, carrots mostly. We’re next thinking about making our own sourdough.

It’s as easy as it is fun. All you do is ready the raw ingredients and let nature do the rest.

Each of these preparations involves living, active cultures that transform the ingredients from one thing to another. Back it up a step and kombucha is just sweet tea, yogurt is just milk, etc. But the added cultures — just a small amount — metabolize the sugars they find in the ingredients, grow, and permanently alter the product. What started out as one thing becomes another, and it happens while you’re not looking.

Jesus actually taught about this, and his words can both inspire and warn us about little things changing our lives in big ways.

Leavening the lump

We’re perhaps familiar with the Mosaic ban on leaven around Passover. These days there are several different kinds of leavening, but the Bible is talking about the living kind, like yeast or sourdough starter, that runs rampant through a lump of dough.

This is the image Jesus conjures in the parable of the leaven, in which he describes the kingdom of heaven as a woman adding a little leaven to her dough to see it spread throughout the entire lump. Because of the fermentation process, the leaven transforms the dough in which it is placed.

Commenting on this passage, Irenaeus identified Jesus himself as the leavening agent. The idea is that once Jesus gets into you, he can take over your whole being. Once the kingdom starts growing, it can’t be stopped.

But there’s another kind of leaven mentioned in the gospels as well: the leaven of the Pharisees. Jesus tells the disciples to beware this leaven, which he soon explains as the Pharisees’ teachings. The warning is clear enough. Once their ideas infect you, they can corrupt your whole person.

Corrupting thoughts

Whether it’s wine or beer, kombucha or yogurt, you have to be careful that errant bacteria do not get into your product. Without good sanitation, something may sneak in and ruin your work, throwing off funky flavors and even spoiling the whole batch.

And that’s true for the Christian life is well. Certain doctrines and dispositions can be very disruptive to our spiritual growth. Just think about how certain doctrines might engender pride or acquisitiveness. What about envy and discontent? And they can spread and spoil without our awareness. If you smell the funk, the damage is already done. That’s exactly why we have to be on guard, as Jesus directed.

It’s interesting to me that there’s a linguistic connection between fermenting cultures and our beliefs. Both are connected by the word cultus, which implies both work and worship, labor and liturgy.

Jesus’s analogy to leaven makes the connection. The kingdom spreads and grows and so does corrupting doctrine. We benefit from actively cultivating the former while guarding against the latter.

Paul indirectly picks up the same connection, and it’s from his letters to the Galatians and Corinthians that we get the phrase, “A little leaven leavens the whole lump.” That’s what leaven does. Let’s make sure we’ve got the right kind.

My Moses can be a fickle child. The other night he said in his singsongy, Luganda-tinged voice, “You are not my daddy.” It’s a funny thing to hear as an adoptive father.

My response was funny too. It was a knee-jerk thing — accidental, really — but I dropped some theology on the boy. “You’re right,” I said, “I’m not your father by nature. I’m you’re father by grace.”

Come again? It was out of my mouth before I really understood what I had said. The words came from something I had been reading, but as I reflected on them I realized how appropriate they were.

God explains our place in his family with the image of adoption. Note these lines from the letters of Paul:

“God sent forth His Son . . . to redeem those who were under the law, that we might receive the adoption as sons” (Gal 4.4-5).

“[H]e predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ” (Eph 1.5).

“[Y]ou received the Spirit of adoption by whom we cry out, ‘Abba, Father’” (Rom 8.15).

These verses might strike some as unremarkable, especially if you’ve been in the church your whole life, but think about what’s at play here: Jesus became like us so we could become like him and therefore call God “Father.”

Irenaeus of Lyons put it this way in book three of Against Heresies:

[I]t was for this end that the Word of God was made man, and He who was the Son of God became the Son of man, [so] that man, having been taken into the Word, and receiving the adoption, might become the son of God. For by no other means could we have attained to incorruptibility and immortality, unless we had been united to incorruptibility and immortality.

We are now part of God’s family, but our inclusion is not the same as if we were God’s natural sons. Theologically speaking, we participate in God’s divinity not by nature, but by grace. I’m not divine by myself, but Jesus became human so that I could become so. By God’s grace I can partake of the divine nature (2 Pet 1.4).

Just stay on that for a moment. It’s astounding. If we are in Christ, we are really, literally, actually sons and daughters of God.

Scripture says that the very concept of fatherhood derives meaning from the fatherhood of God. Couldn’t you then say that adoption works the same way?

Adoption is not merely a metaphor for the Gospel, something we attach to the Good News because of our experience grafting families together. Rather, human adoption derives its meaning from divine adoption.

Adoption is more than a legal designation. It’s a transformative reality wherein we are fundamentally changed through our participation. Because of the work of the Holy Spirit we call God Abba, Father, Daddy — and it’s true. That’s what adoption does.

Moses and his brother Jonah are not my natural sons. But they are my sons nonetheless. I’m sure it’s going to take Moses some time to figure this out for himself, but I was admittedly relieved when he later said in that same singsongy voice, “I love you, Daddy.”

Maybe he gets it after all. I suppose the bigger question for us is whether we really get it.

My son Fionn and I play the drive-time game Slug Bug. The idea, if you’re unfamiliar with it, is to identify as many Volkswagen Beetles as possible while out and about and thereby rack up points against your opponent. Right now I’m creaming my kid, I’m proud to say.

Don’t feel sorry for him. He used to win all the time.

One thing I’ve noticed is that since playing, I see Bugs everywhere — all the time. Red ones, blue ones, silver ones, yellow ones, avocado-green ones, white ones. They’re inescapable for me now.

Of course, it’s not like there are actually more Bugs on the road than a month ago. It’s just that I’m paying attention to them now. You get more of what you focus on, at least qualitatively if not always quantitatively, though I suspect that’s also true in some areas.

Doesn’t this offer a powerful tool for improving our view of life — our interaction with our kids, our jobs, our spouses, our churches?

Just take children for a moment. I recently listened to Dr. Karyn B. Purvis talk about the difference between being a coach or a warden to your children. I think I default to warden very easily.

I catch them in one infraction or another, which is easy enough, but then a funny thing happens. It’s like a downward cycle of rule-breaking begins. If it goes on long enough, my kids can’t do anything right, creating just more bad behavior to ding them on.

To make matters worse, the longer it goes, the more defeated they feel. They lose heart and don’t even want to try.

There’s a difference between morality and moralism. One guides. The other suffocates. The warden becomes a moralist, policing every bad behavior. Consequently, he gets more bad behavior. The coach encourages and directs; he inspires and connects. The more good he sees and underscores, the more he gets in return.

I’m sure I should stop saving for college for my children and start saving for their counseling. But one thing that would help my kids is to focus more on their virtues — their good hearts, their creative initiative, their goofy ambitions, their praiseworthy conduct — than their vices.

Fionn’s got enough to worry about with me beating him at Slug Bug.

You know the song that runs, “Catch a falling star and put it in your pocket”? Try subbing out the word “Christian” for “star” and you’ve just identified one of the world’s favorite pastimes.

The most recent manifestation of this is the dating service that is offering a million dollars if a person can prove that she (or possibly he I suppose) has had sex with Tim Tebow, the popular New York Jets quarterback and outspoken evangelical Christian.

Tebow’s professed virginity has been the subject of scorn for some time, and it seems it would delight some people to no end to prove him a phony.

There’s no way to win with people like that, but let’s remember the rules of the game. Showing Christians to be hypocrites is considered proof that their belief is disingenuous, their profession bogus. Perversely, such a revelation somehow validates the unbelief and resentment of those who delight in wickedness. It’s a kindergarten stunt, but adults are its best practitioners.

When a Christian is exposed for having committed some sin or other, these people kick up their heels and dance to the news. It seems few joys are so great as confirming the prejudice that Christians are fundamentally false. But to feel better about your own immorality by exposing the immorality of Christians is the flimsiest of fig leaves.

The problem is that the whole game is flawed. Let’s just go ahead and lead with the obvious: Christians are hypocrites. For that matter, I’m a hypocrite. What’s more, it’s normal. It’s natural.

For Christians to fall short of the standards they profess and proclaim is as normal as breathing. How can it be any other way? It doesn’t mean they’re phony. It simply means they take God’s standards seriously, even if they struggle (as most of us do) to live up to them.

The easy way to avoid being called a hypocrite is to define immorality down to the point of meaninglessness, but then what do you have? I’ve written about this before in a piece called “Go ahead and live badly.” The upshot is simple enough: If Christian morality matters at all, it’s worth practicing badly.

So what if Tim Tebow is exposed and all the worst suspicions of cynics are proven true? For the cynics, realize you’ve won a worthless trophy. For Christians, love him anyway. Pray for grace and mercy and forgiveness — just like you would hope he would do for you when you fall.

On the Sunday after Easter the Eastern Orthodox Church commemorates the encounter of the Apostle Thomas with the risen Jesus.

You know the story. Skeptical about his fellow disciples’ enthusiastic claims of the resurrection, Thomas took a wait-and-see attitude, earning him the moniker Doubting Thomas. But then, when Christ appeared to him, Thomas exclaimed, “My Lord and my God!” There in that moment Doubting Thomas became Believing Thomas.

Two things stand out for me about this encounter. One is clear from the story; the other comes from the later events of Thomas’ life.

1. Jesus’ gracious condescension

Thomas’ fellow disciples believed in the resurrection before he did. But Jesus would not leave Thomas in darkness and disbelief. I think this line from a commonly-used communion prayer of John Chrysostom beautifully captures Jesus’ gracious condescension:

As you humbled yourself from on high for our sake, so now stoop to the measure of my lowliness.

Christ stooped. He made special allowance for Thomas because Christ loved his disciple. He was willing to come to where Thomas stood and enlighten him there. Recall the image of the Good Shepherd that Jesus employed. Thomas the lamb wandered, and Jesus came to get him, to retrieve him, to pull him back into the fold.

And the result was powerful.

2. Thomas’ bold life

The same Chrystostom observed this about the subsequent ministry of Thomas:

Thomas, being once weaker in faith than the other apostles, toiled through the grace of God more bravely, more zealously and tirelessly than them all, so that he went preaching over nearly all the earth, not fearing to proclaim the Word of God….

Thomas received much grace, and the impact of his ministry reverberates across many nations to this very day because he served it back in like measure.

Now believing, Thomas boldly ventured further than any other apostle, further than Paul by at least double the distance. He established churches first in his native Palestine, and then Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and continuing the eastward sweep all the way to India. There are indigenous Christian communities in India to this day that find their parentage in the first-century work of Thomas.

Not bad for a doubter.

Jesus comes to us so we can go for him. And the story of Thomas should give us all hope, wherever we happen to be. Even if we’re weak — maybe especially if we’re weak — God will meet us where we are and use us for his glory.