Hello RiverTree family, Lauren here.

We often cheapen the word goodness. We call many things good…that pizza was good…that movie was good…that job was good… and so on. Society often wants to define what is good, telling us in various ways through the use of advertisements, celebrities, social media, and even passing certain laws. The culture seems to always be trying to dictate what is acceptable as good.

However, God Himself is the ultimate standard of good, so only He can define goodness. Since there are many aspects of God’s goodness, the definition is multi-faceted. God’s goodness “means that God is the final standard of good, and that all that God is and does is worthy of approval (Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology). So, we are not at liberty to define goodness. Everything worthy of God’s approval is good. Anything that mirrors his excellence and attributes is good.

So, how is God’s goodness rightly understood and displayed? God is infinitely good. His gloriously perfect goodness characterizes His nature. God’s goodness directly relates to His moral qualities and often theologians consider love, mercy, grace, and patience as facets of God’s goodness. God’s goodness means that He is kind, showing His goodness toward people. He willingly and freely gives to people with no ulterior motive; His generosity goes far beyond what the recipient deserves because we as sinful human beings do not deserve His loving kindness.

Also, since God is good, He is benevolent. Every good and perfect gift and blessing, both spiritual and physical, come from God. He is the source of everything good in the world. Through His generosity, He takes care of all His creatures and meets our everyday needs. Also, His goodness spreads beyond meeting our material needs; in His goodness, He cares about our spiritual needs.

Spiritual blessings are another way we experience the goodness of God. God brings people to Himself and saves them, which further shows that He is good. The most important blessing of His goodness is spiritual redemption. Truly, from the incarnate son of God being born in a manger to His death on the cross for His people’s sin, Jesus showed others God’s true nature and how God acts in goodness toward people.

So, what does all of this mean for us? First, we should respond in thanksgiving. Since God’s goodness coats every aspect of our lives, we should be thankful for every breath and heartbeat and step we take. We should be grateful for the people we love, our food, job, our life. Further, we can see the beauty and goodness in God’s creation and respond in awe and worship. Even in bad days or bad seasons of life, we know God is still good. He is making the situation better than it could be. He knows all things actual and possible and in perfect wisdom, He guides and directs our lives in the best possible way.

Also, we need to make sure our definition of goodness lines up with Scripture. We should not call something good if the Bible clearly explains that it is not or if it contradicts God’s nature. Additionally, we need to show God’s goodness to others; we need to ensure that our behavior and choices relate to the true definition of goodness. Let’s try to restore the true value to the meaning of the word good by letting God’s goodness set the standard.

For the past few months, as we have been preparing to return to a regular schedule of weekly in person worship, I have found myself caught between desire for routine and a drive for innovation. There is something so comforting about routine. Stepping into a familiar situation can sometimes be the spiritual and emotional hug one needs. I am the king of routine: I have had the same Christmas dinner for nearly 20 years now (homemade pizza), I used to drop a deposit off at the bank on such a regular schedule that one day I was late, and the bank called to make sure everything was OK. So, a big part of me wants to step right back into Sunday mornings as if nothing had happened—to sit in my same seat, do the same motions, fall into the same routine we were in before, get back to normal.

But I also recognize that it is foolhardy to think that there can ever really be a return to the old normal. We are not the same people, RiverTree is not the same church, our community is not the same community, our nation is not the same nation as it was the last time we were together in Selvidge, in March of 2020. To try to recapture that old normal, would be to ignore 15 months’ worth of hard growth and tumultuous change. 

The million dollar question we (and countless other churches) are asking is: how do we balance that comfort of the familiar with that understanding that things have massively changed. We don’t want to prize our own comfort and nostalgia to the point that we become irrelevant. But neither do we want to change and innovate so much that we are unrecognizable from what made RiverTree such an amazing church family in the first place.

Our year plus as a virtual church family gave us a unique opportunity to step back and evaluate not only what ‘church’ means but also how we ‘do’ and ‘live’ church on a week-by-week and day-by-day basis. During this time, we have been forced to get creative with just about everything we do. Some things worked amazingly well (our virtual book club and painting nights), while other things did not work at all (remember quarantine cooking? Apparently not, because no one watched them, ha ha!). One of my biggest fears, as we transition back, is losing that creative spark we fostered so well over the past 15 months. I want us to be a group of people, a church family, that is not afraid to share ideas, is not afraid to be creative, and is not afraid to fail.

I wish I had the perfect answer to this riddle. But I don’t, and I would be a little wary of anyone who says that they do have it all figured out. But I am excited to work on figuring this out together, with all of you. “In what ways should we stay the same?” and “In what ways should we innovate?” are questions I want us to wrestle with as a church family. Let me know what you think, I would love to hear from you all!

Starting in January, we began on a journey preaching through the entire book of Matthew. A huge benefit of this type of series is that it means we cannot skip over any passages that don’t make for nice clean sermons. The downside is that we are forced to wrestling with some passages that we might rather want to leave alone. This week we hit the first of those passages: Matt. 13-23. These verses tell of Herod’s plan to kill Jesus, the holy family’s flight to Egypt, and the resulting murder of all the male toddlers in and around the town of Bethlehem (an event sometimes called the Massacre of Innocents).

Now, it just so happened that this last week was also a family service, meaning it was geared toward and starred more of a younger audience. For obvious reasons we did not focus on the massacre of innocents in a special kids’ service. Rather, we focused on how God protected Jesus and the family by telling them to flee. This is a valuable and important lesson to learn—that God protects us. But a keen reader will instantly notice the dozens of children that God did not protect. How can we say God protects us when we read about the genocide of an entire toddler population?

I will start out by saying that there is not a clean, simple, and satisfying answer to this. This question is one with which I, myself, constantly wrestle and struggle. The answer most often given to this question is that God has a larger plan and works everything for good. Now, I do believe this is true. But simply stating that as a response to something as awful as the mass murder of toddlers is just cold-hearted and lacking any kind of compassion. If you were to give a that simple answer to someone grieving the loss of a child, you more than likely would be punched—and justifiably so! Sometimes the correct academic and theological answer is not the correct loving answer.

Despite this, how I answer this question for myself is wrapped up both in the idea of God’s divine plan and our limited understanding of its scope. I would argue that God prioritizes protecting our soul’s over protecting our bodies. Later in Matthew, Jesus tells us that we do not need to be afraid of the ones who can kill our body’s but rather we should fear the one who can destroy our soul (10:28). This hits on the notion that our time on Earth is so limited in the grand scheme of our everlasting existence. But, because we are not God, we can’t wrap our minds around anything that big. As a result, we focus on the here and now with all of our passions and mental strength.

Think about when you were in third grade. Can you remember the things that caused you stress? What were the day-to-day things that were your entire world? For most of us, we can’t remember. This comes from gaining a larger perspective. We can look back and realize that third grade was such a small part of the grand story that is our life that most of what happened there just fades into the background. But in the moment, while we were living them out, they were the most important things, nothing mattered but them.

Now, please hear me. I am not trying to callously compare genuine heartbreak and loss to a third-grade spelling test. I am in no way trying to mitigate our current feelings of loss. I am trying to illustrate how our perspective of time is so small compared to God’s and how our earthly lives are so small compared to our eternal souls. Yet they are all we know; they are all we can know right now.

Like I said at the top, there are no easy, clean, or 100% satisfactory answers to a question like this. But this is how I currently handle the problem of evil at this point in time. I believe that God’s top priority is protecting my soul and I believe that through Jesus I do not have to worry about the safely of my soul. While we all walk through deeply painful times of heartbreak, loss, and pain on our time here on Earth, all of that is wrapped up in the briefest of salvos across the duration of our eternal lives.

Please, I want to hear how you approach this question. The problem of evil is one we will never fully answer on this side of glory. How I wrestle with it will be different from how you grapple with it. Let me know what has brought you the most comfort in the moments of heartache in your lives. 

In addition, some of the absolute best horror comes with genuine moral messages, that invite the reader/watcher to examine themselves. One of the earliest moral messages I remember from a horror story came from Alvin Schwartz’s collection of folklore tales: Scary Stories 3. One story is about Herold the Scarecrow and how Herold is completely mistreated by his owners. Eventually Herold comes to life and takes his revenge. The underline message here is that we ought to show compassion for others or, put another way, that you reap what you sow. This is a notion we see several times in the Biblical text: “Do not be deceived: God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap,” (Galatians 6:7) or “The wicked earns deceptive wages, but one who sows righteousness gets a sure reward,” (Proverbs 11:18).

Some horror authors are deeply religious in their own personal lives and they use their writing as ways to express and share their beliefs. Take Mary Shelly for example. Her most famous work is the novel Frankenstein. Many people today forget that that the book had an alternative title The Modern Prometheus. In Greek Mythology, Prometheus is a Titan who defies the other Gods by gifting humans with fire, elevating humans to god-like status. This same idea is at the core of Adam and Eve’s fall. Their desire was to be like God, so they ate the forbidden fruit so they could have God’s knowledge. Pride is also at the core of Dr. Frankenstein’s story. He tries to assume the power to create life. His ultimate goal is to ascend to the same level as God, an endeavor that only leads to pain and ends in death. Shelly is warning the reader that the same pride that led Adam and Eve to turn away from God is still in all of us and we need to rely on God to tame that pride.

Horror often gets a bad rap. Don’t get me wrong there is a lot of bad horror out there! But when it is good, horror can be a wonderful introspective tool. So this Halloween season, I would encourage you to not write off horror wholesale. If you are up for it, investigate a good horror movie or book. You might find that it sparks some amazing theological conversations.

Now before I go on, I should say that there will probably be some mild spoilers in this. So if you are worried about that, go watch Dark and then come and read this. With that out of the way, the main premise of this show involves time travel and time loops. We are introduced to the show’s main character, Jonas, as a teenager. We follow his adventures and it is not long before Jonas runs into a man simply called the Stranger. Eventually, we learn that the Stranger is Jonas from 33 years in the future. They have an emotional scene where teenage Jonas is locked up in a bunker and the Stranger (middle aged Jonas) comes and talks with him. The Stranger refuses to let Jonas out, reflecting that if he lets Jonas out that he will not be able to follow the same path to eventually become the person standing outside the bunker. The first 2 seasons of Dark hint at this idea of free will vs. fate. Is the Stranger freely choosing to leave Jonas in the bunker, or is there an underlying fate that is controlling his actions? As the show goes on, we are introduced to the antagonist of the show – an old man named Adam who is horribly scarred. Now, as you might have guessed, Adam is Jonas from 66 years in the future.

Now, here is where things get really interesting on the free will vs. fate front. For a large stretch of the show we see Jonas teaming up with the Stranger to try and stop Adam. They both see Adam as evil, a twisted old man who is trying to destroy everything. But remember, this show as all about time loops. So throughout the third season, we watch as each of these characters turn into their older selves. We watch Jonas slowly turn into the Stranger we first met in season one and we watch the Stranger slowly turn into Adam. The transformation from the Stranger into Adam is especially interesting because we watch as one of our hero slowly shifts his thinking to become the very thing he fought for so long to defeat.  Here we realize that this cycle from Jonas, to the Stranger, to Adam has happened over and over again in a seemingly endless loop.

So this transformation brings the question of free will verse fate right to the forefront of this show. Does the Stranger have any real say or genuine freewill in his life? Or is he simply fated (or predetermined) to always become the evil Adam? (I am over simplifying plot elements here, but you get the main idea). This question of free will vs fate or predestination is one that Christians have been debating almost since the beginning of the faith. Different denominations set up camps closer to the free will side or closer to the predestination side. I feel like most people end up lost somewhere in the middle—seeing both powerful positives and harmful negatives in both arguments.

I really wish I could lay out an answer for this. But to me personally, the most frustrating part of a debate like this, is that there is no way of 100% answering it here on earth.  I don’t think we can have an answer on a question like this short of standing with God at the end of all things. But that does not stop us from wrestling with it. Maybe that is why I like sci-fi so much, because it so often gives us handholds to propel us into these hard topics. I mean my favorite movie of all time, Terminator 2, is another one that sits squarely on the free will vs. fate fence. Is John destined to lead the humans in a future uprising over the machines? Or is it as John himself says, ‘there is no fate but what we make for ourselves”?

I feel like this post has not really said anything, it has simply just been me musing. But I want to hear from other people. Where do you all land in the free will vs. fate spectrum? Does it even matter (which is a whole other debate that we could be having)? Am I ridiculous for losing almost two weeks of my life obsessively thinking about this (I am going to go with Yes)? I would love to hear what you think. Now, I need to go watch something else to clear my head. Talk to you all later!

I want to hear from you. How do you rest? Do you find yourself filling your rest time with ‘jobs’ that prevent you from genuinely resting? What ideas do you have to move forward and engage in actual and true rest?