Pain and the Plan

Philosopher and theologian Cornel West posits that the condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak. That resonates, doesn’t it? What is our suffering saying to us? What truth is it offering?

Far be it from me to attempt to explain why things couldn’t have been different or how a good and omniscient God works with suffering. Theologians and philosophers and farmers and housewives have been pondering these questions since the dawn of time, and I have nothing novel to offer the debate on the problem of pain.

However, what I’m learning is that, if we can risk allowing our suffering to speak, we just might discover how pain can be helpful to the plan of our individual and collective lives.

Amber JonesFebruary 15, 2024Pain, Providence, Disenchantment, Disappointment

Ravaged Beauty

Now, though, I feel an invitation to look at something else, particularly those things that we never see repaired in this life, those things that stay ravaged no matter what we do. Those disproportionate, unharmonious, impaired things which bring us the exact opposite of pleasure.

What am I not seeing? What errors in beauty am I making? I whisper this prayer, because “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son…” (John 3:16). God must see the beauty in this world to love it with this kind of ultimate passion and purpose.

I recall that Christ, resurrected from the dead, carries the scars of love on his body too. He came to us and offered Himself in death. The pinnacles of injustice and beauty crashed into one another with such cataclysmic force that they killed Him.

And He chooses to wear the evidence of this on His body, ravaged beauty as a signpost for Love.

Amber JonesFebruary 15, 2024Beauty, Disappointment, Disenchantment

God and Sensuality

After decades of this self-abandonment in the name of holiness, I am disappointed with the results. I really thought that if I prayed enough, read my Bible enough, and worked on my marriage enough, I would be made healed and whole. When I survey the damage done by piling all this rock between me – all of me, including my beautiful body and my wild life force – and the Light that is Christ, I shudder. Like most folks schooled in this crazy mixture of modern, Western, Cartesian dualism and ancient Christianity, I feel disembodied. I feel separated from my sensuality, my fleshiness and, consequently, part of myself. When it comes to knowing and loving my sensuality, I am soul sick, all ‘trembling teeth and bloody hands.’

Amber JonesFebruary 15, 2024Sexuality, Disappointment, Sensuality

When Boundary Maintenance Fails

It’s disappointing to get to the middle of one’s life and realize that so much of our First Act was spent maintaining boundaries around things that simply don’t matter, isn’t it? Meanwhile, we never got around to maintaining the fences meant to protect our love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. It’s devastating to realize that we let the wolves have their way with those precious gifts, those fruits of the Holy Spirit, all too often.

Let’s explore what happens when boundary maintenance fails in today’s episode.

Amber JonesFebruary 15, 2024Disappointment, Disenchantment, boundaries

The Crushing Disappointment of Middle Age

I turn 43 in a few weeks and, I must admit, I’m feeling some kinda way about life. It’s widely known that middle age folk experience weirdness for about ten years between the ages of 30-ish and 50-ish. Mid-life crises have long been the go-to fodder for movies, books, songs, and TV series. Stereotypes abound – women scrambling for facial injections and men for sports cars. Everyone sadly grasping for the youth they can never recover and simultaneously dreading the downhill roll toward death that will characterize the rest of our lives.

Yes, the picture America paints for mid-life is quite bleak, even if it is sometimes comical.

But we don’t often get below the clichés to deal with what’s beneath this bleak picture, at least not as a collective people. We may do personal work, like finally beginning therapy or carving out space for a new hobby. We may even embrace physical aging and discipline ourselves to learn new things. These are all common aging practices we celebrate in our overly individualistic culture.

Yet what we emphatically resist doing, as a society, is naming the elephant in the room. The word we seem afraid to speak out loud, but which also keeps us up at night, is the one thing we like to avoid recognizing together – disappointment. No one talks aloud about the crushing disappointment of mid-life.

Amber JonesFebruary 15, 2024Disappointment, Disenchantment, Middle life

The Bad News is Everything is Complicated

Every day, we are bombarded with sensory input which, if we were “awake” to all of it, would render us incapacitated in a corner somewhere. Our brains do us a big favor by quickly sorting all our experiences into neat categories so we can efficiently navigate the information-pandemonium that is human existence. And the crazy part is that we’re not even aware our nifty brains are doing this at all! Unfortunately, the price we pay for this efficiency is binary bias, which is distorted thinking that reduces things on a spectrum down to two categories.

Good and bad.

Right and wrong.

Or, if we want to take an example from the Bible, clean and unclean.

I could go on, but you get it.

We take concepts that are nuanced, complex, and multi-layered and we reduce them down so that we don’t have to do the heavy lifting of gathering all the information, listening to all sides, synthesizing opposing ideas, and formulating a comprehensive opinion.

Today’s episode focuses on the value of complexifying everything.

Amber JonesFebruary 15, 2024Disappointment, Disenchantment, Bias

God-Bearers: The Offensive Advent Invitation

Like so much else in Christianity, Advent is offensive.

Perhaps we’ve grown numb, over the span of millennia and from the re-telling of this narrative and from the commercialization of Christmas, to the shock of incarnational theology; but, today, let’s sit with Advent afresh and attend to the shattering implications.

Because our paradigms must be shattered so that we can comprehend the truth, God came as a human baby through the body of a vulnerable woman. Because new wine cannot be poured into old wineskins, God devastated our cognitive categories and crossed every boundary.

Because God wants Creation to birth God into the world in every conceivable way, in every single moment, in all possible circumstances, and in every particular soul, God has deemed us theotokos too. Because God is faithful to us, and to everything God has created ex amore, or out of love, this baffling salvation has come to us through the mysteries of a woman, a manger, a cross, and a tomb.

Join me today in conversation about the offense of Advent and what it means for us all.

Amber JonesDecember 13, 2023Advent, Disappointment, Disenchantment, Christmas

God Says Their Names: What Four Unlikely Women Mean for Us All

With quaint creche Christmas scenes depicting Mary, Joseph, and the baby Jesus alongside shepherds, wisemen, and various farm animals, the raw and shocking hope of Advent is often reduced to sentimentality. We may quickly glance at the nativity scene on the church’s front lawn while narrowly making it to our Christmas Eve candlelight service, or we may conjure the familiar picture of baby Jesus in our minds while singing Silent Night, but the warm feelings this invokes aren’t in proportion to the paradigm-shattering message contained within the story of Advent.

This Advent season, here on the show and at my Substack, The Golden Thread, we’ll be taking a different approach by exploring some of the darker themes that are often overlooked in our pre-packaged Christmastime lessons.

Today our conversation partners will be an unlikely group of women who the gospel writer Matthew included in the genealogy of Jesus. Their names are Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba (the wife of Uriah), and their placement in the genealogical account of Jesus’ descent is unusual because they are all women of questionable repute.

Biblical scholars, theologians, and everyday Bible readers have scratched their heads over why exactly Matthew would include women at all (which was not customary), much less four of “questionable repute,” in this genealogy which is supposed to be a matter of pride and critical importance in establishing Jesus’s title as “King of Israel?” Consider the dark and twisted nature of these women’s stories, which we will not gloss over today in our search for what’s real in this Advent story.

Join me in conversation with these four women today.

Subscribe to my substack at https://amberhjones.substack.com?utm_source=navbar&utm_medium=web&r=2d2xps

Amber JonesDecember 13, 2023Advent, Disappointment, Disenchantment, Christmas

Gladness or Gratitude?

When we experience disappointment and fail to listen to what it’s speaking to us, we have a hard time getting to gratitude because we have often been equating gratitude with appreciation. Disappointment makes appreciation and gladness, or propositional gratitude, difficult to come by. However, when we do allow our disappointments to speak, we may experience authentic humility.

And humility gives us brand new eyes and ears. It's key to the kind of gratitude that transforms.

Doesn't that sound good this Thanksgiving? Less appreciation, and more humble and authentic gratitude?

Join me on today's episode to dig around for the gold that can be found in seasons of disappointment.

Subscribe to my Substack, The Golden Thread, where I'm writing a little deeper about this journey.

www.amberhjones.substack.com

Amber JonesDecember 13, 2023Gratitude, Disappointment, Disenchantment

Gratitude or Sunny Spin?

'Tis the season for gratitude lists and happy smiles, but perhaps this year it all just feels forced. Genuine gratitude is hard to come by when we're struggling through disappointment. But what if our disenchantments are an integral part of experiencing the kind of gratitude that transforms us? Join me on today's episode as we explore the power behind cutting through false optimism to get to the gold.

If you want to subscribe to my weekly newseltter, The Golden Thread, you can do it here www.amberjones.substack.com

Amber JonesDecember 13, 2023Gratitude, Disappointment, Disenchantment

Welcome to Season 12!

Welcome to Season 12, Gold Digger! This holiday season, we will be exploring the connection between disappointment and gratitude, between light and shadow, and between pain and joy. Our world is experiencing tremendous upheaval and we're left wondering how to tend to our souls, and the souls of others, in times like this. That's what we'll be talking about all season long. Join me as we dig for God's gold in every beautiful, baffling story.

Amber JonesDecember 13, 2023Disappointment, Middle life, Spiritual Formation, Hope