A couple weeks ago, my 10-year-old son Robbie and I attended the Denver Center for the Performing Arts staging of the musical, The Secret Garden. While we both enjoyed the music, the staging, and the story, on the way home we talked about the deeper metaphors within the play.

It started with a conversation about people and the saying, “Hurt people, hurt people.” In case you’re not following, people who are hurting often express their pain by hurting others.

Then we compared hurt people to the locked up secret garden. Then we identified Mary Lennox, her uncle Archibald, and her cousin Colin as locked up gardens. For each, a story explains the door closing, the neglected ground, and the loss of the key. The essence of the story revolves around the healing of those hurts, tending gardens of the heart, and the blooming of souls.

How about you? Is your heart a secret garden? Are you hurting and find yourself hurting others? Here are four keys (pun intended) to tending your secret garden.

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As I write this, it’s only a few hours until Mother’s Day. As is often the case, I’m woefully under-prepared. I bought cards (thanks to Kiana reminding me) and planned to send them, but a tea-related transit accident killed ruined those intentions. I haven’t replaced them. The meal prep I should have sorted out by now is still waiting for a Google recipe search. All my good intentions for celebrating the most important women in my life (my wife, mom, my mother-in-love, and Nana) now sit in the “maybe next year” pile.

Looking at what I haven’t done, I realize it’s the kind of stuff that those important women always prioritize, plan in advance for, and ceaselessly find themselves ready for when the day arrives. It could be part of a mother’s love … or maybe it’s that I’m still losing to a heart that’s turned in on itself.

All that said, moms have been on my mind tonight. I’m working a late night shift stocking footwear at REI. It’s peaceful in the warehouse and, beyond my podcasts, my only company is my thoughts. So I shuck shoes and think about moms and their love. Then, when on breaks, I’ve been scribbling down my thoughts.

So here are three takes on a mother’s love from three moms who’ve been part of my life. Please share your story in the comments below and happy Mother’s Day to all the moms out there.

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How do you go from hating God to falling into God? I found a new God … the one I could trust.

Have you ever done a trust fall? It’s a team building exercise where one person stands on a chair, table, or a higher platform with their back to the rest of the group. The rest team then forms two lines standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the two lines facing each other. The idea is to have the elevated person fall straight backward between the two lines and into the waiting arms of their teammates. (Still not clear? Check this out.)

If the falling person trusts the team and goes straight backward with their body like a board and parallel to the ground, and the team members stand there and try to take their portion of catch, the weight of the falling person distributes easily across the group so no one person bears too great a load.

It’s a simple exercise for those doing the catching. It can be terrifying for the person who’s falling.

Moving beyond hating God through blame, is like an ongoing trust fall with God. Thus, falling into God.

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While I’m sure someday I’ll regret using this language, Christianity is fundamentally a story about Jesus overcoming the “bad guy.” Why will I regret it? For two reasons:

• First, in our typical way of thinking, the bad guy is, well, bad. There’s something fundamentally wrong with the bad guy and the ultimate goal is his defeat. But Jesus doesn’t do cops and robbers. His frame is not America vs. Radical Islam. It’s not even about us and them. In fact, Jesus the whole point is that Jesus doesn’t see the “bad guy” in the same way we think of bad guys. Instead, for Jesus, overcoming the “bad guy” is about transformation and healing. You know, sort of like Gru in Despicable Me.
• Second, the bad guy is overcome by violence, power, and strength … and Jesus uses none of these.

When all the pretense and theological language is stripped away, this is the fundamental question of atonement. Atonement literally means “at-one-ment” … it’s about bringing that which is separated back together. It’s the idea that something ripped apart humanity and divinity. People are disconnected from their source, their ground of being, that thing that bestows identity and purpose. This is why we devote so much time and energy trying to prove ourselves or escape that deep hollow ache within.

While human sin is the easy answer, what isn’t particularly clear is how Jesus overcomes sin. Western Church history offers two primary answers. The following reviews each of those and offers my thoughts on a third option.

[Read more…] about Who’s the Bad Guy … Satan? God? Me?