Facing Leviathan: Dealing With the Chaotic & Unpredictable - Kyle Stoltzfus

So that that is one way, that is one way of dealing with the storms of life or dealing with the chaos, the uncontrolled, is to shrink them down, to reduce them down, to reduce it to a known and predictable space where we can just live in relative comfort. So we organize the world into this kind of round, smooth, frictionless space. And then when Leviathan finally does get in there, it's going to be terrifying because we don't know how to deal with him anymore.

So, Kyle, in our world today, it feels like we're the most advanced, you know, it's all this progress in science and technology and all of these things and all the other buzzwords that could be used. And yet, at the same time, there's this element of chaos and the uncontrollable that we all face and experience. So we're going to talk about that in this episode because that's a very real experience for all of us.

Tell me about how humans have tried to respond to the uncontrollable in the past. Like, what are strategies? What are ways we've looked at when things happen that we can't explain or don't we don't know what to do with? How have humans in the past handled that?

I like what you're saying there. Like, there's it does seem like in our age right now, we are transitioning from a stage where there's just been a lot of equilibrium, a lot of smooth sailing, you might say, toward what some people say would be more of a gray zone, you know, where there's just more potential for chaos.

But regardless, we've always had to face it. To be human is to face in ourselves, you know, the possibility of chaos. And there are certain times in history where chaos or the uncontrolled was just more a part of just a part of your everyday experience. It was just assumed, right, that there was a lot of uncontrolled forces in the world in a way that for us, we don't have that experience quite so much. We're used to being in charge. We're used to being in control a bit more.

But to your question there, how did how have people dealt with the uncontrolled? How have they dealt with chaos? I think it's unfair to people, the ancients, you might say, to just say that they lived in a world of just credulity where they had no ways of understanding chaos and uncontrolled things. And the whole world was just like magic, and they used incantations, which they knew didn't work. They did have ways of both confronting and corralling and also constructing responses to chaos and the uncontrolled.

And in the sphere of, like, religion, one of the more extreme ways that you could talk about controlling, or at least not controlling, you couldn't control it, but governing chaos was through some form of sacrificial ritual. So, for example, you know, some gods like Moloch, a Canaanite god, he was the sort of god you had to appease. Okay, so it's like, I know that Moloch can at least corral chaos.

Sometimes he causes it, right? So to make him not cause it, I'm going to offer some kind of appeasing sacrifice. What was really horrifying about Moloch was he demanded a child sacrifice as a means of appeasement, right? But that is one way they responded. This is like some form of appeasement. They also had a really rich vocabulary to name to name chaos in a way that we are, I think our language is a little bit more impoverished. In the biblical story, you start off and there is immediately a triumph of God over the uncontrolled and the chaotic. And also, I think he doesn't withdraw from it. He doesn't like name it evil. There's the creation story.

There's God and in the beginning, right? And then he creates and there is the Hebrew tohu vavohu. It's formlessness. It's chaos, you might say. It's like a churning mass. And then God speaks again and he takes action on that and he begins to form things that are distinct, you know, further clarification. But what's interesting about the biblical story is that when God creates and the spirit broods, everything takes its origins here and there's this mass of turbulent water, we say, and then that's carried forward. Okay, it's carried forward in the Psalms. It's carried forward, you see, in Isaiah and especially then in the Gospels. I think we'll get to that a little bit later. But you'll see you'll see the activity of God towards that is to work with it.

And he sees possibilities there. Isaiah's language to work with, just one more example, maybe, I think it'll become relevant later on, is that for the Romans, which the first Christians encountered, they also had a really elaborate system of governance, of ritual, of warfare, of heroes that they saw as a way of both curbing and controlling and exploiting chaos.

Okay, and it's very, very ritualized ways that they saw of coming together, say, in the Colosseum, in a way that gave a picture of how they saw that Rome's enemies and criminals, those who would introduce chaos into the economy of Rome, would be put under the thumb of the might of Rome, and then there would be peace and prosperity.

Interesting because Caesar Augustus, if I'm getting this right, was called the Prince of Peace or something like that. He'll bring peace, you know, to the world and all of these things. Yeah. And I guess that was their way of saying, yeah, we're going to control this. Uh-huh. You know, you don't fit in the system, we'll smash you because we can't allow the uncontrollable into our society, I think is another way of saying it. And there were geniuses at it. You know, the Romans, what made them dominate for so long was just their efficiency.

They had incredible power and they could just crush dissent and communicate well. And so their capacity there is really strong. So, yeah, Prince of Peace, we'll probably get there, right? But also, you see Christians picking up some of the same language and saying, you know what, who the real Prince of Peace is, that's just a parody. He's the pretender. We know who the real Prince of Peace is.

So the difficulty, like in our own lives and throughout the human experience across time, the difficulty is that chaos and what have you is unexpected, unpredictable, yes? By definition, right? Like, what do we do with that, you know? Uh-huh.

That presents a challenge for people who are, you know, if you're going to be trying to control or manage the uncontrolled, it's exactly that. That's a threat to your credibility. If it's your job, right? If it's your job as a Caesar or as a manager or as an administrator, whoever you are, if it's part of your job to deliver on results, to name outcomes, or to at least say, I'm going to make you peaceful and secure, that possibility of chaos coming in, it's a direct threat, not just to your job, but it's to your credibility. Because it's your job, right, to see your way through chaos and to make certain kind of outcomes predictable there.

And I would, if I can, just enlarge that a little bit.

It seems as though that in our culture, you know, we don't have Rome in the same way that we used to. We don't sacrifice to Moloch, so we say. But what's become, what's really captured our imagination as a way to deal with chaos, as a way to tame Leviathan, that's one of those biblical pictures of a mythical sea monster who, I think he's historically real, but he also represents these untamed forces.

And he lives in tohu vavohu. He plays in the deep, the biblical authors say in Psalms. He seems to relish it. That's where he lives. But in our times, we've turned increasingly to competence and management. Okay, we place a heroic individual in a boardroom, and he is the one who can name outcomes and say, we should be here, here, and here, and here's the timeline, and we're going to break that down into smaller tasks for you. And we'll have regular meetings until we achieve that outcome, and that's how we will tame Leviathan, put order to things, right? Break down the tasks, name outcomes, and then you can become, you can optimize the process. And I am describing there to be called a Tellurian management.

There's other ways of talking about management, but that's the one that most kind of clearly laid out. You identify an outcome, you outline ways to get to that outcome, and then you take the process and you optimize it. And I think it's that optimization that we're still in love with.

You're optimizing your, is this efficiency as well? Would that be another way of describing this? I think so. You know, optimization is the process. Efficiency is like the characterization of the system. You have an efficient system. That's one that gets to the outcome with as least chaos as possible, with as least expense. Yeah, it's almost a trying to compensate for the unknown or like control the unknown factors, right? Of like, we're going to get this thing just as locked tight as we can to keep out the whatever unpredictable thing that may hit us, right? Is this basically, that's kind of management theory in a lot of ways, right? For organizations and this, that, and whatever.

I think that's right. Yeah. And it's a focusing in on one thing, one variable, and you're saying that's what our goal is here. And you exclude a lot of other things. And then once you've got that locked in, you identify the most expedious way to, or expedient way to eliminate other possibilities and then to achieve that one thing.

But back to your question a little bit, it is that nature, it's the nature of the chaotic, it's the nature of the uncontrollable to be exactly that, to be uncontrolled. It will arrive out of some kind of unexpected direction, and it arrives at a timetable of its own. Yeah.

This is so true. Okay, so to zoom in a little, how does what you're describing fit with this idealized view that many have in Western culture, or maybe just humans in general, of the hero, like the glorification of the individual who's going to be that rising star to single-handedly come in and tame the chaos and fix the whatever situation? I'm thinking like the way we lift up, you know, figures like Alexander the Great, you know, Julius Caesar, these great men of history. Yeah. Like, how does that fit with what you're describing? Where does the idea of the hero come into this picture? Yeah. You can learn a lot about a culture by taking a look at who their heroes are, who it is they see as being the good man, the great man.

My suggestion here is that, like in times you've mentioned, like in Alexander the Great, a Caesar, they saw their places on the battlefield, right? And that's where they confronted the chaotic and the uncontrolled.

And they also recognized, for some anyway, that this required something of them. You know, they had to develop the capacities to enter bravely onto the battlefield, to enter into parliament or wherever it is they're practicing, and that this may not be all about optimization. Okay. They're actually going to have to demonstrate the characteristics of a heroic person to be thought of as a leader, to be thought of as a hero. I tend to think these days we esteem more of the optimizers.

We esteem more of the people who can build for us, or at least give the picture of for us, some kind of frictionless life. A life where we've removed adversaries, a place where we've removed frictions and obstacles. Like the modern equivalent, say, you know, something like a Jeff Bezos where with one click on Amazon, you know, it'll be delivered to my door the next day and no problems, no friction. It's just take care of the problem. I don't ever want to see it again. And society rewards people like that, you know, say Jeff Bezos as now being one of the richest men in the world because he built this thing that fixes these problems and optimizes our lives.

Would that, or am I taking this too far? Would that be an example? No, you're giving, I think you're giving a good example there in the example of quick delivery, you know, via Amazon. That's the frictionless ideal, is that perhaps we could even get to the place where further than me needing something, I don't really even have to prompt. It's suggesting to me what I might need or want. And Amazon does that a lot. Amazon does really well with that because you're willing to give a little bit of privacy away for the sake of surveillance so that they can predict for you what things you might want. Do you need more soap? I think you've run out of soap.

Click this buy button and you can do it in one click. It takes you half a second and bingo, it'll show up at your door the next day. You can buy a smart fridge that'll help you do that. Like keep inventory. It's like, oh, I think you're about out of this. Would you like to help, can I help you out? But that's the ideal. Is the frictionless, optimized life. Another way of saying it is that in that form of life, everything has become controlled, predictable, and optimized for me. See, this is really interesting. Actually, I've never thought about smart fridges being a similar response, say, to chaos and, you know, trying to control our lives as, you know, ancient mythologies.

Let's not take that too far. You know, and yeah, obviously don't take it too far, but it does kind of come back to that human need of, I really don't like when things are out of control. Uh-huh. You know, I just want everything to work and like nothing break. And, you know, it seems like it's touching at something that's a very human thing, a very human thing. Okay, so to bring it back around, as we were talking about the hero and things, thinking about, you know, does culture, I'm thinking, you know, we're here in America, so I'm thinking, you know, Western American culture, whatever, have a warped view of what the truly heroic is?

Well, and I find they're interesting too, like warped view perhaps, but it's just, I'm still just back there turning around, so a smart, like a smart fridge. What does that mean? Because at least I would suggest, and to make a bit of application there, you know, we do need to become readers of our culture. We need to become aware, not just of like, oh wow, I have a smart fridge, but what is this communicating to me about what constitutes a good life? And if you need that, or depending on who it is you're turning to, say, a Bezos figure as the chief optimizer, it's going to tell you a lot about commitments, about what it is you idealize as seeing a worthwhile life.

And it's probably going to come back to an element of predictability, a controllability. But could you ask your question again? I'm losing the track. Yeah, yeah. So does our culture then have a warped view of what the heroic is? Or who we view as heroic, maybe if you want to put it, bring it to a person, like who we say that's the heroes that we want to look up to? Yeah.

It's a good question. I feel like it's a partial view, and I could point out some liabilities for that view of things that sees the world basically in terms, again, of optimization, controllability, and predictability. And the first thing that that world is going to be mute about, the first thing that it will miss would be those things that are not quite so outcome-driven, okay? Things that are less than optimizable, we'd say, or that aren't predictable. And here's where some of the falseness of holding up as a hero, a person who you see as like, oh, he's like the chief optimizer.

Well, it turns out in my own preparation for the session, it turns out that many of the most significant parts of our lives and of our collective lives together are actually kind of unpredictable. And they mark us. They leave an impression on us. So I'm thinking of things like 9/11, okay?

Or COVID, a little bit more recent in our memories. And probably so traumatizing for Western cultures because it felt so uncontrollable, so unpredicted. And we tried our best to make it predictable and corral it.

We don't have to go far there. Yeah, but it spawned out of control. But the response there is what was interesting. We were, wow, this is out of control. That's frightening, but we can, we can, we can control it. Yeah. And that was the hope. The fall of Soviet Russia, a kind of unforecast, right?

Or the rise of Nazism, also uncontrolled and unforecast. Arab Spring, a bit more recent as an example, a significant shaping event, right, in the modern-day Middle East. But it was not foreseen. It wasn't predicted by the analysts. So our ability, it turns out, our ability to predict things, to optimize things, to make things controllable is in fact limited to a very small portion of goods in our life. And I'm not saying we can't control anything. We can. We can make food arrive at certain times. We can have our fridge full, some of that stuff. But it doesn't scale up very well to the stuff that really seems to matter.

It's almost like you can optimize, but it's only on a lot of the surface level, hands-on type things maybe. But then there's so much underneath the surface that we just, you simply cannot. Is that a way of saying it? Maybe like materially goods. Yeah, yeah. Like I can hit a button and something will arrive from Amazon, but I can't hit a button and fix a broken friendship.

No, I don't think you can. No, it doesn't work that way. You know, like how do you optimize? There's like a lot of things that you just can't, you can't. And the question there becomes, and if you have the hero as the optimizer, he can offer you something when it comes to some portions of life, which are, you know, to a degree important. But what about when you've got that broken friendship? Yeah. And if all we've got surrounded by is heroic optimizers, they kind of go quiet, or at least quieter. They don't have quite so much to offer there.

So the danger, I think the danger we're anticipating there is that if you are at a time of relative calm, okay, if you're in a time where things are going well, the optimizers can remain heroic. But Leviathan still might be there.

It just hasn't fully been known yet. He may be in a phase of history where it's relatively peaceful and chaos seems to be kind of in the background. My own fear is that we could prepare people and designate them as leaders or heroes who are in a lot of ways optimizers, who are in a lot of ways thinking, you know, the world is basically governable. My job is to govern it and control it and to deliver results, to deliver outcomes. And I can do that in the most economical way possible, using the fewest resources. And when chaos does poke its head up, we can either squash it or ignore it.

But what the, and the danger there is if Leviathan does show his head, we could have prepared, we could have prepared a whole generation of people or ourselves who don't know what to do. They fall mute. Yeah. It's only, yeah, like what you're describing there, as you're saying that, my brain was thinking, oh, assembly line. Like it's this idea of like, I can optimize the assembly line. I can, when you're talking hands-on things, we can figure out how to build stuff and make things and fix this process and all of that. But then when it comes to things that don't fit into that framework, it does feel like your life could spin out of control so fast.

Yeah, yeah. Well, and even an example of that though, you know, it's Henry Ford who famously said, you know, you can have whatever color car you want as long as it's black. Yes. And, but what's happening there, what's happening there is he is, he's recasting this thing of transportation and this new invention of automobiles in terms of optimization.

Okay. So he's saying everybody can have a car, but I hope you like black because that's all you're going to get out of this vision of optimized processes. The world becomes kind of monochromatic, even in the goods, material goods you have. So there's that side of it, but I'm agreeing, you know, if you would buy wholly into the ideal of optimization, of frictionless life, it potentially becomes idolatrous, kind of in the tone of Isaiah 44. And who but a fool would make his own God an idol who cannot help him out one bit?

It's kind of how it says, I'm paraphrasing there a little bit. So that is one way, that is one way of dealing with the storms of life or dealing with the chaos, the uncontrolled, is to shrink them down, to reduce them down, to reduce it to a known and predictable space where we can just live in relative comfort. So we organize the world into this kind of round, smooth, frictionless space. And then when Leviathan finally does get in there, it's going to be terrifying because we don't know how to deal with him anymore.

And then you start telling, this is really getting a bit tangental, but I think very relevant when the Leviathan does poke its head into, we had everything working so well, you know, and then the unexpected, the uncontrollable happens. Then people, it seems like, have this very human expression of trying to explain it in terms of terms with the unexplainable. Oh, you know, oh, oh, well, it's because of, and they'll come up sometimes with these crazy, outlandish ideas of this happened because the government was controlling the weather to use some crazy, absurd example. Or like they'll try to come up with an explanation to at least help make sense of it in their own heads. Yeah, I feel like that's a very human thing.

And it almost goes back to way back in the day, the ancient mythologies of, oh, we had crop failure because we didn't sacrifice to the gods in the right way or something like that. That just feels like an incredibly human thing. Yeah, I think you're right. And that is that that human tendency to look for causes.

Oh, it's there in Job. Yes. You see life in terms of cause and effect. And there's always a clear cause. And some of the call of, say, a Job is, it seems like by the time you get to the book, God's call there is to say, well, you know, he's understanding of that probing for cause, but he doesn't give the cause.

We got a view of the backstage ourselves at the beginning of the book, but even that isn't extremely clear. And why did this happen? And it's almost Job's question goes unanswered. Yeah, and that's, yeah, that's a tough book to wrestle with, I think, probably by design, you know? Yeah. Well, Leviathan shows his head in there a number of times. Exactly. Probably for that reason. That's a really great point. But I think it does, it does part of what responding to the question there too, you know, if we got caught in this web of trying to make things explainable, we can think that by explaining things, then we can control things. Yes. Or that if other people explain things that they're in control of them, right?

But it can become, it can become, it can take the mystery out of it for one thing, but it causes them to just become paralyzing. We never actually learn to face Leviathan because he will come. We can't always explain it. And to turn toward him with courage and faith doesn't always require of us that we fully understand. We can still accept it and say, this is part of my experience right now. I'm not fully sure I understand. This is definitely adversity. I think Leviathan is showing his head. This feels chaotic and there's a potential for loss of control and to take the next step of obedience without fully having to explain why.

So as we think about all this, what then would you say is the Christian view of facing Leviathan or facing the uncontrollable, the chaos that will inevitably hit our lives? Yeah. The Christianity has a lot to offer here, I think.

But one prerequisite is we'll have to change our lives. Okay. We're going to have to be willing to not just control, to manage, to optimize. Because you do notice if you just try to make for yourself a smooth and frictionless life, one of the things that happens is it tends to focus on our own comfort, our own need for preservation of that life.

The Christian way, the Christian way offers a way that accepts some of the burden of facing chaos. And that's willing to say, yes, I can accept responsibility for that. And I can walk into that freely and with courage and faith, doing the best thing that I know and leave some of the outcomes up to God.

So I take some cues here again from the first pages of scripture where when God creates, when God creates, he creates that formless void. And it's interesting to me that it's not assessed as just evil, something to be fought against. The spirit of God hovers over it. And there's the expectation that something more is going to come out of that. There's going to be formedness. There's going to be flourishing. So where the spirit of God is hovering, you see the possibility of potential and the glory of God happening. Okay.

So you move forward in the scriptural story and it comes up again where the actual phrase tohu fabohu doesn't come up very much, but formlessness, voidness, and the possibility of chaos springing in from quarters. Yeah, that comes in quite a lot.

And what's interesting is that that same pattern continues with God's work. There's the potential of chaos and the spirit of God is hovering. He's brooding and out of that comes the praise of God and comes the flourishing of his people and creation.

A man like Joseph, I think he's the first that said that the spirit of God was actually on him in the Bible. And what does he do? He steps into a place, in a foreign place, notwithstanding, and where there's the potential for formlessness and voidness through a famine, he brings some order to that. Okay. But it requires something of him. He's not just an optimizer, although he's pretty good at it.

It also requires something of him. You carry that forward so much here, but you get to the gospels, right? And there is another figure who we come to call the Son of God, and we recognize him as the Son of God partly through these pictures of him doing things like walking on the deep.

Yeah. He's walking on the formless void, and it doesn't really seem to affect him. He's not just avoiding it. He's on it, and he can command it, but he doesn't always. And that becomes a picture, right, of who Jesus is, of what his willingness to enter into chaos and the uncontrolled, which ultimately finds, I think, its ultimate picture in his death on the cross. And that's the ultimate being out of control sort of event is death.

And a lot of things happen there, but it gives us a picture. Okay. What does it mean? What does it mean to meet Leviathan? What does it mean? Controllability, predictability, optimization, or is Jesus suggesting a different picture? And I think he's suggesting a different picture.

So for early Christians, for the first Christians, I'll just say for them, when they made confessions like Jesus is Lord, part of what they're saying is that the oud and tottering system for controlling chaos of Rome couldn't deliver there anymore. When Paul writes in Thessalonians, he picks up this Roman catchphrase. It might have been Roman propaganda, you know, peace and prosperity.

Rome is here to control chaos. And if you watch what's happening in the Coliseum, we'll give you a picture of what that's like. Caesar is at the top. We have legions. We've got great communication. And we control chaos. And Paul picks that language up and says, you're hearing this language, peace and prosperity, and there's going to be sudden disaster. That title rightly belongs to Jesus.

So Rome and Caesar just becomes an imposter, a cheap imitation of what Jesus promises.

So I think people are probably going to be asking, okay, so how does this affect my life? How does this look? You know, like what does this look like? There's an interesting piece here because you have in the ancient mythologies and the heroes that they lifted up is this great man comes in and, you know, defeats the enemy, slays the dragon, takes care of the chaos, fixes everything, or the god of whatever, you know, is appeased. And the weather is great and our crops don't fail this year. You know, you have those kinds of stories. But then in the gospel, you have Jesus comes and instead of doing all of that, he is killed. Like he dies.

And he leads by serving, you know, washing the feet of the disciples. And it's like, whoa, okay, this is a different picture. Yeah. This is a very different picture than, you know, Caesar Augustus, who is like, I'm going to control everything. I'm going to fix everything. Rome is the greatest thing ever, you know, on this earth.

You want to talk a bit about some of that contrast and then, yeah, like how do we actually live in the reality of that new, new, in the reality of what Jesus has established by dying on the cross, I guess, is a way of saying it. Yeah. And you have the oldest, some of the oldest architecture we have shows that kind of world. You've got a pyramid. It all comes up to a point. There is a Pharaoh, the representative of God or the God himself, perhaps. And everything flows down from there. But what's strange here, there is a structure of authority in the kingdom and answers to Jesus.

But the upside downness of it is part of what you're touching on is. Yeah. How do you understand what power looks like? How do you understand what it looks like to defeat death and chaos? Well, how about foot washing? How about self-giving love?

And a willingness, a willingness to accept responsibility for those who are weaker than you. A willingness to eventually voluntarily enter into something as extreme as death. That's part of the Christian way. It's not a way of empowerment, of entitlement, of a grandism, of moving yourself up the ladder so you can get to the top of power and exercise more control, more predictability.

It turns toward, it turns toward the chaotic. It acknowledges it, but it doesn't seem to need to tame it. And in some ways, it's a willingness to be crushed by it. And this is a paradox, right? But to be crushed by it and to give oneself over to God in hope.

But that sounds very different to me. Yeah. The controller, you know, the chief controller. It's almost like the culture and human nature says, I'm going to collect as much power and influence and stuff and resources that I can so that I can control everything.

And Christianity is the other way around, basically, where it's like you give yourself up. Like it's this pouring out of self and sacrificial love. And that's, that's a, there's a quote I read. It says, culture tells us that it is in the public space or like the public sphere, maybe up on the stage. That's where heroic leaders are made, you know, and whereas Christianity is the other way around. It's those quiet moments of serving and giving of yourself. It's not up on the stage, we'll have the fancy, you know, I'm the best, I'm the hero moments. Yeah. You know, you want to speak into that a bit? Yeah, great.

The culture we live in, it can so prize, you know, platforms, right? Yes, influencers. Yeah. Is the nice, is the nice modern word. And here we are talking about this. But I think, I think that Christianity is a lot about the preparation of a certain kind of people. And those people, maybe they perhaps could win a platform at some time, like who's to say?

But that needs to be given up to God. And what the focus is, I think, is on a certain kind of person, right, who is prepared to bring presence. So maybe the contrast could be helpful there. It's presence, not platforms.

Oh, I like that. Yeah. Yeah, that presence of, for example, we're talking about efficiency and optimizing, but presence is not very optimizable. Not awfully. And that's why we begrudge it. You know, and it doesn't, it's so, it seems so slow moving. Oh, yeah. Because it's so, so optimizing is like fixing everything and checking everything off the to-do list and building systems and all that. And you know, maybe you need that in certain things perhaps. But whereas presence is, you know, sitting with someone in their moment of grief, say, or, you know, being there for someone when they're having a difficult time, helping someone in a way that's, you know, it would have been more efficient just to whatever, you know, hire someone to take care of that.

But instead, you show up and help that person with, you know, fixing something on their house, whatever. Uh-huh. That doesn't check the efficiency box always. Not at all. But it does check the presence box maybe or something. I don't know. Talk to me about that. Well, that strikes me as important because it, and it corresponds to some of my experience as a pastor.

You know, part of my life, I'm a more administrator and optimization is something I enjoy. I've got a bent toward efficiency. But as a pastor, as a pastor, you're just invited into, almost required to walk into these places where there's nothing optimizable.

Grief, love, friendship, worship, lament. And then you're called into these sorts of situations where you can't offer optimization. And it would be sacrilege if you tried to. Because what this person is going through is just sacred. And what you can offer is the presence of God, is the presence of the Spirit that kind of brooding over what it is they're going through.

But that's only conveyed through presence. And what strikes me about those kinds of encounters is not only are they not optimizable, they're the ones that you come away and you say, wow, I was changed. The Lord met me in that. And rarely have I had that kind of experience in the moments where I feel like I'm in control.

Yeah, that's really true. Because it's like you come away from something like that and you probably aren't going to say, that was, yeah, that was efficient and we optimized, you know. But you will say sometimes coming through those moments, I'm just thinking of several right now, you know, where you're like, I was transformed. Yeah. You know, I was, whoa, like I, I had growth or maybe not me. I mean, that sounds, you know, or that person experienced some really powerful redemption or healing or something.

Well, I mean, there was no checklist where you just, yep, we did the formula and bingo, we fixed it. You know, it's not those kinds of situations at all. And I wonder if the two might be kind of inversely related, where if you make the world optimized and controllable and predictable, exactly in proportion to that, recedes our capacity to be like, wow, I think I was changed.

Oh. And other things like hope or expectation, faith, recede, where the horizon of the predictable increases, it seems to me. So it's not so much about, it's about making the kind of world, you know, where we live in hope, where we live only as far as our presence will allow us to go. And we leave some of the rest up to God. And it comes through in some really surprising ways.

Yeah, that's neat that you mentioned that. Because I'm just thinking of some of the more powerful moments that I've witnessed or been transformed by. Yeah. And they were generally in situations where it's like, this is just out of control. Like the, I don't know what's happening. And, but there was a, there's a really powerful thing with presence. Yeah. Presence is definitely part of it. And, but there's a part you just can't really explain. It's not like I can look back and be like, oh yeah, these were the six things that came together and bingo and made this. Although we frequently try to do that. Again, that, yeah. That mental energy we have as humans to look for causes and effects.

Yeah. Well, I've tried. Yeah. We could really wear ourselves out there though too. But it's just this, again, another quote here, you know, God leads by serving and saves by dying, like the example of Jesus there. Yeah. I think that's a, that's a really important piece.

And then the inverse, the myth of the hero tells us that dynamic, charismatic, and glorious individuals can heal cultures through their personal skill and glory. You know, that's like the inverse of what Christ showed us. It's like, that really lands.

It does seem, it's almost like this human nature to want to lift up certain people. It's like, ah, they've got the answer, you know, or they've fixed it. They have an incredible skill. So therefore we should follow. I don't know. I'm still wrangling with what that means because it's such a human thing. Yeah. Well, at least maybe just exploring the contrast here a bit like we are.

It can mean that the heroes, Christian heroes, they may not always be able to demonstrate their capacity for control, you know, but they will be able to show presence. And more than likely, they'll be able to show that capacity, the good, strong word of mortification, of relinquishing, of saying, this may not be everything I hoped for, like Jesus in the garden, the Father's, you know, take this cup from me, but nevertheless, not my will, but thine be done. And then he enters freely in. And the courage is just astonishing.

There's a battle there. Yeah. But he's still willing to show up. He's still willing to be present in that kind of obedient, but also voluntary way. Whoa. Yeah. So I wonder what sorts of heroes do we need that demonstrate those capacities?

It's like I've sometimes wondered with students here, you know, maybe our heroes as Christians, maybe they need to be the people who've had their deepest fears relieved through trust in God. That's going to look different. Yeah. Yeah, I like that though. That's like really going down deep into those things and seeing that Christ is there in it. And that's the transformation that happens. That's the rootedness or the rest that can come from that where they can, where we can be stable through those times because we know it's, can we fix the chaos? No, you know, but we're relying on Christ who can. I don't know. There's a lot more to that. I feel like I need to dig into a bit.

Well, and that's so good. We can sometimes have the picture with Western Christianities, especially of the kind of triumphalist Christianity that has trouble dealing with things that we can't change, that are intractably part of our experience, that are painful, that are difficult, that are whatever, or just challenging.

And then we have trouble there. But it, again, for in Jesus, in Jesus, in his descent, in his descent into death, he united himself to that one thing we all have in common, which is our eventual death. It's the ultimate chaos. It's the ultimate uncontrolled event.

And in entering into that, you could ask if this really goes bad, in the furthest extreme, who will be there for me? And that's Jesus giving his, yes, I will be there even unto death. I'll go that far for you. And on the cross, when he says, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? How far will you go, God, to be present with me? Even that far to God's forsakenness on our behalf.

It's just because a powerful way of seeing that in Christ's voluntarily giving himself over to death, he even changed the nature and use of death itself. We no longer need to be terrified of it. We could say, oh, this isn't quite what I wanted, but I can give myself over and I can still act in the best way I know how.

So for those watching or listening to this, I'm sure many are facing the uncontrollable. They're maybe dealing with chaos in life, things that the unexpected, the unpredictable. So what can they do with this? What is a proper response?

Where should they turn? What would, yeah, give us something to that people can take away from this for their own lives. Well, in talking with, it was a mother of young children for whom chaos takes the face of her children.

And one thing I don't want to be heard here is that you can't do anything, that there's no appropriate steps to take toward making things a little bit more controllable even. I'm not trying to suggest that. I'm not trying to suggest that, you know, we just relinquish control or that we just take our hands off the wheel entirely. What I am trying to say is that to, I'll start theologically, to participate, to live in the spirit of Christ is to not make those that need for control the ultimate thing. It's a tyrant. Okay.

And to live as if we can control things and predict things and make everything smooth and frictionless very quickly becomes idolatrous. So the first thing I'd suggest for people is to have a look, you know, to look critically at our lives and to especially look at the things which suggest that yes, you know, life is actually very controllable.

That's our pervasive world. Everything about our life is about optimization, about controllability, predictability. It's not just on the manufacturing line. It's in our social lives. It's in medicine. It's in things which had ultimate significance. And it's suggested to us, you could optimize this.

So examine that. Another thing I'd suggest here is don't run from adversity. Okay. It's like Paul was so delighted in some of his young churches that he was a shepherd over when they faced adversity. But it wasn't so much that they faced it. He wasn't a masochist. He just like, oh, they're suffering. That's good. It was that they were actually investing in it. And there was the new creation breaking out on the other side of it. They were changing into the glory of Christ, into his image. So don't run from adversity.

A lot, again, our culture tells that this discomfort is bad. And if you encounter discomfort, you need to soothe it. You need to do away with it. Talk through it, whatever it takes. But it's probably a bad thing. And so I'd suggest if you find yourself in an adverse situation, don't close in on it too quickly and say, this is bad and I need to get away from it.

Try to sit. Try to be quiet. Allow the Spirit to work. And ask, you know, what possibilities are there here for Christ to be revealed? I suggest too, and this is practical, I think, so much, so much of our, so much of our ability as either individuals or as communities to weather the difficult times which do come, to weather the deep, comes not just through our heroicness as individuals, not just through our willpower and our ability to bootstrap things.

It comes through a wide tapestry of friendships that we've invested in deeply already. It comes through shared experiences with people who we've already got a connection with. It comes through cultivating the kind of life that is rich and has a lot of stories in it, which help us to stay oriented and focused.

And I think it comes too through having already introduced into our lives, willingly and voluntarily, adversity to cultivate the resourcefulness that we need to kind of steer in. And then when the really big things do happen, it gives you more resources.

Almost like building a level of resiliency, perhaps? That's a good word. Yeah. Resilience is part of what you're, I think, developing. Yeah. If you live that kind of widely interested and varied and storied life. Yeah, this is really good to think about these things because it's so easy to say, oh, well, chaos, ah, you know, that's scary. We're just going to ignore that or we're going to try to, you know, fix everything. And that can, that can go badly, you know, in time. And I think it's very important to have these kinds of conversations in life. And I think that'd be something I would encourage listeners to do is to actually not just ignore these things.