Author: Bekah Mason

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The Difference Between Grace and Karma


I appreciate what Bono, the lead singer of the rock group U2, has to say about grace: “It’s a mind-blowing concept that the God of the Universe might be looking for company, real relationship with people, but the thing that keeps me on my knees is the difference between Grace and Karma.” Bono explains that the idea of karma is central to all religions:

What you put out comes back to you: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, or in physics– in physical laws– every action is met by an equal or an opposite one. It’s clear to me that Karma is at the the very heart of the Universe. I’m absolutely sure of it. And yet, along comes this idea called Grace to upend all that “As you reap, so you will sow” stuff. Grace defies reason and logic. Love interrupts, if you like, the consequences of our actions, which in my case is very good news indeed, because I’ve done a lot of stupid stuff…. It doesn’t excuse my mistakes, but I’m holding out for Grace. I’m holding out that Jesus took my sins onto the Cross, because I know who I am, and I hope that I don’t have to depend on my own religiosity.

The above quote, found in Joanna Weaver’s book Lazarus Awakening, may have shot it’s way into my top five all time favorite quotes.

I teach World Cultures and Geography, and in that class we spend nearly an entire quarter studying various world religions. One thing that I stress to my students is that there are various themes that are found in ALL religions, Christianity included, because there are certain questions that all of mankind asks: “Why am I here?” “Why is there evil in the world?” “How do I make sense of this life?” “What happens when I die?” What sets Christianity apart from other religions, is that other religions stop at an answer that satisfies the intellectual understanding of man.

The above example is perfect. Karma really is a concept found within every religion because it is a fundamental principle of life, written on the hearts of all people. It is easy to understand and easy to blame for both the good and the bad that occurs in this life. It is also the natural instinct of people; you do good to me, I’ll return the favor. You do bad to me, you’ve asked me to also return the favor. Karma is fleshly man at his best and worst, but it’s flesh. The cosmic balance of the Universe would be upended if something were to happen that changed Karma. I have friends who live their lives attempting to keep the balance of Karma and often proclaim their frustration with said Universe when they feel their good outweighs their bad yet bad keeps happening. “What gives, Universe?”

What gives is that Someone did enter history and upend the cosmic balance of Karma. “Grace defies reason and logic.” Karma only “works” if we are able to do more good than bad, but if we are honest with ourselves, even attempting to keep up with our own good and bad actions is more than the average person can manage. We give too much credit to our good and not enough to our bad. We only count acts of commission, not neglectful omission. Karma is something that keeps us in control; in control of our lives, our destinies. Grace takes control from us and places it firmly on the shoulders of another. And that is a concept at which self-sufficient humanity balks.

That is why I know within the depths of my heart that Grace trumps Karma. I know because it makes no sense to me. It truly defies human logic, therefore it transcends me. And any faith worth following better be a faith deeper than I can understand. Because I know me. And if all the answers can be found within myself, then I’m in trouble. Much like Bono, I have done a lot of stupid stuff, and I for one am thankful that I can look beyond the Karmic laws of the Universe to the Graceful love of the Creator of the Universe who reached into Karma and offered Grace.

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The Thin Line


It’s an age old problem. Those we love the most, have known the longest, trusted with the most of ourselves, are the ones that have the potential to hurt us the most. This is exactly why so many people walk around with a wall around their hearts, keeping people at arm’s length to prevent potential heart break. The benefits of love are simply not worth the risk of hurt and rejection.

Prevention of pain explains a lot in ministry and life in general. Ministry leaders don’t stay places long because it hurts less when those you serve reject you or betray you if you haven’t known them long and you don’t have much invested in them. Marriages are short term agreements instead of lifetime covenants because it’s easier to find someone else than to work through the hurt caused by someone who knows you deeply. We are connected in more social networking ways than ever before in the history of humanity, but we “connect” through the barrier of technology. There is a very thin line between love and hate because great hate is usually only generated by a betrayal of great love. Some people learn this and decide it’s not worth the risk.

I was reminded of this today when my feelings were bruised in a ministry situation by someone I have known for a long time. My first thought was, “That wouldn’t have bothered me so bad if I weren’t at my home church and it hadn’t been someone who knows me.” Knowing and being known opens us up to hurt. And no one wants to be hurt. As humans, our favorite idol is our own pleasure and happiness, and we will often decrease our own happiness to decrease our risk for pain.

But then I thought about Jesus, the One who Scripture claims knows all of our pain and temptation yet never sinned. I thought about how painful it must have been for Him to be betrayed by Judas, one of his disciples, someone He had poured Himself into for three years. Three years is a long term relationship in our time, and they had been together almost constantly in those three years. They shared life together. They knew one another and were known by one another. Three years worth of betrayal were felt in that kiss in the garden.

But even more than that, how much did it hurt for Him to have been rejected by His chosen people? Jesus had known and had been known by His people since the time of Abraham. For eternity, before the foundation of the world, Jesus knew His creation, He knit them together one at a time in their mother’s wombs. He revealed himself in creation; day after day for thousands of years, He put himself out there, opened himself up to the risk of rejection.

Then He came to earth and was rejected. Rejected by His chosen people. Rejected by the very creation into which He had poured His own Image. Rejected by His physical family, who declared Him to be crazy and warned towns to steer clear of Him. Rejected by His spiritual family in the Temple, by those who knew the most about Him but really didn’t know Him at all. He was literally rejected to death.

Jesus knew the thin line between love and hate, but He determined that his hate of sin and separation from His creation outweighed his love for himself and his own happiness. His love for His Bride and His Father outweighed His hate for His own pain and suffering.

So when we face the tough times in relationships, those times when we are hurt, rejected, betrayed, how do we handle it? Do we run away, protecting ourselves and our hearts, or do we remember that Jesus stuck with it for the long haul? When our hearts are breaking, do we remember that Jesus poured Himself into relationships for centuries and was rejected, yet still stuck with it?

When we have times that we feel like no one understands the pain we feel, remember that Jesus invested more time in relationships than any of us, ALL of time, and experienced an equal amount of heartbreak.

He knows what heartbreak feels like and He wants to heal yours.

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Meditation Good for the Brain… and Soul


I read an article on NYTimes.com this morning entitled “How Meditation May Change the Brain”. Recent research indicates that people who meditate on a regular basis increase gray matter in the area of the brain that supports memory and learning while also decreasing the gray matter in the area of the brain that registers anxiety and stress.

Sounds like meditation might just be the cure to a lot of problems in the stressed out, forgetful, anxious culture we have developed in America. Some of the most common complaints of people today include the symptoms we are told meditating will alleviate. The problem for Christians is that we have been trained to believe that meditation is related only to Eastern religions such as Buddhism. So, instead of taking time to meditate and relax, we medicate and continue our stressed out, overworked lives.

There has been much discussion lately concerning the use of Eastern religious practices by Christians. Yoga has been a hot topic debated back and forth. Should Christians participate in an activity that was designed as a form of worship for another religion? Can the benefits of an activity be “Christianized” so that believers can participate without being a stumbling block or inadvertently worshiping a false god?

One thing that needs to be considered in this question is that there are things the Bible itself tells us to do that have become related distinctly to Eastern religious practice because Christians have abandoned them. A great example of this is meditation. In our culture today, we relate meditation directly to Buddhism and we picture a person in a lotus position, emptying their mind and repeating the Ohm.

There is a distinct difference between the meditation found in Eastern religions and the meditation in which we are told to participate in Scripture. As an oversimplification, Eastern religions teach meditation is to empty your mind, to think on nothing, to focus on your inner self and become “one” with the spirit of the universe.

Scripture teaches us to separate ourselves from the stresses of the world. We are to clear our mind, but not to focus on nothing. We have something specific to meditate upon. We are to push out the stress and anxiety of the world and meditate on God, on His character, on His Word.

We are told in Genesis 24 that Isaac went out to a field at night to meditate.

Joshua 1:8 says: Do not let this Book of the Law depart from your mouth; meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do everything written in it. Then you will be prosperous and successful.

The longest chapter in all of the Bible is Psalm 119, a praise of the benefits of knowing and meditating upon the Word of God.

Psalm 46:10 says, Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.

So as far as I’m concerned, the research published in Psychiatry Today: Neuroimaging simply confirms what God has been trying for ages to get humanity to understand: doing what God tells us to do is for our own good (Deut. 10:13).

So is it wrong for Christians to meditate? NO! It’s actually a command from God. But the fundamental difference between Eastern meditation and Christian meditation is the focus of the meditation. Eastern meditation empties the mind and focuses inwardly on self. Christian meditation fills the mind with the Word and focuses outwardly on Christ.

I would encourage you to try the experiment the man in the article is attempting. Rise early. Spend one hour in still silence, thinking on the Word and person of Christ. Train your mind to focus on Him, not on the distractions of this world. In the words of the old hymn, “Turn your eyes up on Jesus, look full in his wonderful face. And the things of earth will grow strangely dim, in the light of his glory and grace.”

Spend some time looking Jesus full in the face, and see if it doesn’t just change your outlook on your day. When we do the right things for the right reasons, the right results occur, and they bring glory to God. Meditation for the man in the article seems to make him a nicer husband, and that’s enough for his wife, but to meditate on and for Christ will change both heart and mind, and can change lives for eternity.

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Mad at Church- Revision and Repost


This was originally posted on January 30, 2008.

I have never read Blue Like Jazz. But I understand from my friend Dave that there is a chapter in the book entitled, “Church: How I Go Without Getting Mad.” That short thought got me thinking. We’ve been getting mad at church since church was invented; just check the Scriptures if you don’t believe me. The office of deacon was created because the Greek Christians were mad that their widows were being overlooked in the distribution of food. Paul wrote to the church in Corinth to reprimand them because they were so mad they were filing lawsuits against one another. Before there even was a Christian church, there were “religious” people. Jesus’ disciples fought over who was the greatest among them. Cain killed Abel because he was mad that God preferred Abel’s sacrifice. As long as there have been people, people have been mad.

But the idea of being mad at church struck me, because church seems to be a pretty common place for otherwise calm Christians to lose their cool. People who would never say a cross thing to their boss at work seem to feel it appropriate to scream at their brothers and sisters in Christ during Wednesday night business meetings. People’s feelings get hurt because their house is not chosen for the next Sunday School class party. Women leave small groups if someone doesn’t check on them when they miss one Sunday and men move their families elsewhere if they are overlooked for a position on a committee. Seeing that I was raised in a pastor’s home, I have been eyewitness to enough selfish and unjust activity in the church that there was a time I wrote the church off completely. Falling into the postmodern idea that my religion was a matter between me and God and no one else, I left the church for a while to find my own way.

That didn’t work, though, because we were not designed to operate alone. God established the family and the church because we were created to be in fellowship—with both Him and with our fellow believers. So if the church is full of fighting sinners, but I have to be a part of the church, I asked myself this morning, “How do I go to church without getting mad?” And this is my answer…

I go to church without getting mad because I remember that some of the most respected evangelists and theologians on the planet conservatively estimate that 50%-75% of current members of evangelical churches are not, in fact, regenerate members of the body of Christ. When you work in the mindset that all of your church members are born again believers, it’s easy to get mad when you go to church. After all, they should know better! If everyone you encounter at church is a Spirit-filled born again believer, than the trouble makers are living in open and obvious rebellion, grieving and quenching the Spirit and hampering the worship of the rest of us. However, when you approach church with the assumption that the majority of people around you are actually lost, your attitude shifts from anger to pity.

The people sitting around you have placed their faith in the prayer they said at the alter, in the fact that they cried, that they were baptized, that everyone said “Amen!” when the pastor voted on their membership, that their mom and dad and grandparents were members of the same church. They have never experienced the godly sorrow that leads to repentance without regret, leading to salvation that Paul describes in 2 Corinthians 7:10. Instead, they have experienced “the sorrow of the world” that “produces death” (2 Cor. 7:10b). The ideas of counting the cost of their salvation, of dying to self, of becoming less so Christ can become more, of submitting to the Lordship of Christ in their life, they’ve never considered their sin and been completely shattered by it. They’ve relied on themselves for their salvation and they are so deceived.

When you look at the church in such a harshly realistic light, the in-fighting and anger make much more sense. The church is full of people who are still bound without choice to the destruction of their sins! They have no choice but to behave in a way that it is un-Christian. Like my mom always says, “You can’t expect lost people to act like they are saved.” This can be frustrating for the 25-50% of people in the church who are truly regenerate members of the body of Christ. But the next time you get frustrated with the people in church who make decisions and show themselves to only be interested in themselves, remember that Jesus once said, “Make a tree good and its fruit will be good, or make a tree bad and its fruit will be bad, for a tree is recognized by its fruit” (Mt. 12:33). If that person is not showing godly sorrow for sins committed against God, chances are that person really doesn’t care, and a lack of sorrow is an indication of lack of relationship.

So how do keep from getting mad at church? I prepare myself in much prayer by asking the Lord to humble me—sometimes I’m mad because I’m wanting to get my own way, which makes me just as wrong as everyone else. I ask Him to search my heart, to show me my shortcomings and transgressions against Him. I ask Him to give me His eyes so that I can see the people around me as Christ sees them—as people made in the image of God, people that He loved so much He died for them.

If I consider myself more mature spiritually than the people around me causing the trouble, I need to check my own heart, work out my own salvation with fear and trembling. Then, if my conscience is clear and my leading is from the Lord, it is my moral and biblical responsibility not to get mad at them, but to instead  come alongside them humbly and show them the more excellent way. I try not to brood, to mope, or get down on those people. That would only make me just like them, and then we would all just stay right where we are—mad at church.

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Against All Odds…


According to an article published in the New York Times on January 23, life began for Maurice Mannion-Vanover on September 11, 1990, with every odd stacked against him.

He and his twin sister were born to a crack-addicted, HIV-positive mother who was incapable of caring for them and soon abandoned them to be raised by the System. Their physical and mental struggles were so great that his sister lived only 20 months. Maurice was also HIV-positive and had severe developmental delays. He would require constant care for his entire life, but against all odds, he was adopted and he thrived under the love and care of his adoptive parents.  Maurice passed away on January 14th, a life cut short by the tragic choices of others. The mere fact that he had a life at all can be seen as nothing short of a miracle.

In a society which increasingly judges the worth of the individual by his or her ability to contribute to society, many would say that it would have been best for everyone involved if Maurice and his sister Michelle had been aborted. After all, their mother was obviously incapable of caring for them and they would merely be two more burdens on an already strapped Child Protective Services System. They were sure to endure lives of pain, suffering and rejection. Lives no one would choose to live.

I have heard more than once the argument that if a child will not be loved and well cared for by their parents then it would be best for them to never be brought into the world at all. Many attempt to twist logic and make their stance concerning abortion a humane one. Who, after all, would want to be born into a life of pain and suffering? Funny thing is, I know many people who were born into situations much like that of Maurice, and worse. (For a great example, check out the testimony of Tony Nolan.) Not a single one of them has said that they would have preferred to never be born. Given the option, the human spirit craves life.

If you read the article in the New York Times, you will see the impact that young Maurice had on a family and a community. An impact that never would have occurred had the “decrease the surplus population” attitude of social Darwinism succeeded in sacrificing Maurice and Michelle on the alter of the American Dream.

That is, in a nutshell, the ethical definition of abortion. It is the pursuit of an idol, one’s desired life, at the expense of another life. We read today with horror and disgust at the arcane practice of child sacrifice to ancient gods, but at its root, abortion is child sacrifice at the alters of convenience, financial stability, self-interest, hedonism.

The worth of a fetus is often determined today by the desire its parents have for it. Hundreds of thousands of dollars are spent in Neonatal Intensive Care units to preserve the life of premature babies; in some states, those same babies could be legally aborted by the same doctor that delivered and is now fighting to save its life. In some of those same states, a person can be charged with two murders if they kill a pregnant woman, even if that woman is on her way to an abortion clinic to voluntarily end the life of the fetus.

I am unashamedly pro-life and anti-abortion (yes, I believe these terms to explain two different yet related ethical stances). I believe that God is the one who knits us together, creates us each individually in his image. I believe that abortion is but one example of man’s attempt to override the sovereign creativity of the Creator.

But I am not looking to change minds based on Scripture or on my religious beliefs. In this month that we reflect on the Sanctity of Human Life, I am asking us all, regardless of religious or political beliefs, to look past “what-if” arguments of rape or incest (less than 1% of abortions performed are a result of such a situation), and think well about the question of life and the inherent worth of a human life.

Take the time to ask yourself the hard questions. What constitutes life? What gives life worth? How do our current laws concerning abortion, homicide and manslaughter, and emergency medicine contradict one another? Is there a way to build consistency concerning human life and dignity into our laws and so ensure that the weakest of our citizens, the unborn, have the opportunity to chase after life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?

The rights of women are supposedly staunchly defended in the abortion debate, but we also speak loudly in America that the rights of one person only extend insofar as they do not infringe upon the rights of another. Abortion denies the right that we claim to be most sacred in America– the right to life.