Lenten Readings from Me-Ville: Day 16

I can check Wikipedia to get a rough idea of when and how to change the oil in my car, and from there I can, according to the spirit of the times, “fake it till I make it.” But there are all kinds of life experiences and life choices for which a culture of self-sufficiency becomes not a privilege but a prison.

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Copyright 2008 Cook Communications Ministries. Deliver Us From Me-Ville by Dave Zimmerman. Used with permission. May not be further reproduced. All rights reserved.

Lenten Readings from Me-Ville: Day 15

Displacement isn’t a bad thing; it’s a necessary element of any journey. If we want to get anywhere we aren’t, we can count on being displaced. The key is to plan for it. We can do some planning on our own—we can google our destination and download driving directions; we can flip through our address book and figure out if anyone we know lives anywhere near where we’re going. But the best plan for displacement is to trust ourselves to a trustworthy guide.

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Copyright 2008 Cook Communications Ministries. Deliver Us From Me-Ville by Dave Zimmerman. Used with permission. May not be further reproduced. All rights reserved.

Lenten Readings from Me-Ville: Day 14

ESCAPE FROM SUPERBIA

Take a prayer drive through your community. What cultural messages do you observe as you go? In what ways are the billboards, stores, and status symbols of your community reinforcing the notion of entitlement? How do they promote self-absorption? What does your community need to be delivered from? What tables in your community would Jesus upend? What pharaohs would he confront with the message “Let my people go”? Which of these would your community have the most trouble leaving behind?

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Copyright 2008 Cook Communications Ministries. Deliver Us From Me-Ville by Dave Zimmerman. Used with permission. May not be further reproduced. All rights reserved.

Lenten Readings from Me-Ville: Day 13

Ultimately, when we strip away all the airs that we’ve put on, our true friends are those we are for and who are for us. When we understand that God is for us, when we realize that Jesus is pro-me, a knock at the door doesn’t lose the sting of potential judgment and likely change, but it does lose the sting of an attack from the unfamiliar. We lead through the rooms of our refuge not an awkward stranger but the lover of our souls, who was present when we were formed in secret. We learn from Jesus where our public persona doesn’t measure up with what he (and we) know to be true of ourselves. And he offers us a way into a life that is freer, truer.

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Copyright 2008 Cook Communications Ministries. Deliver Us From Me-Ville by Dave Zimmerman. Used with permission. May not be further reproduced. All rights reserved.

Lenten Readings from Me-Ville: Day 12

Jesus is fully God, but by his incarnation he is also fully human—the image of that effectively invisible God. He has become in flesh what we’ve read of God in the pages of the Bible: a friend of sinners, a deliverer from all kinds of evil, and a teacher thoroughly invested in our well-being. Jesus is in fact so pro-me that he in effect becomes me.

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Copyright 2008 Cook Communications Ministries. Deliver Us From Me-Ville by Dave Zimmerman. Used with permission. May not be further reproduced. All rights reserved.

Lenten Readings from Me-Ville: Day 11

In the movie Office Space, one of hundreds of anonymous workers is singled out as management material after being inadvertently hypnotized to not care about anyone or anything but his own sense of inner peace. The movie has proven successful because the concept is so familiar: When we figure out how to work the system, and all the people in it, we are rewarded with more substantial titles and more office space. A happy side effect of the turn inward is that the annals of power are reduced in our minds to an abstraction, some far-off other watching us only from a distance, which we consequently don’t have to deal with.

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Copyright 2008 Cook Communications Ministries. Deliver Us From Me-Ville by Dave Zimmerman. Used with permission. May not be further reproduced. All rights reserved.

Lenten Readings from Me-Ville: Day of Rest

The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption.
--Romans 8:15

Lenten Readings from Me-Ville: Day 10

The great thing about this unapproachable God, however, is that he does approach us, and in so doing he reveals to us enough of his character that we can draw some conclusions about who he is and what he intends for us. The same God who wraps himself in light in Psalm 104 blesses all of creation by maintaining it:

These all look to you
to give them their food at the proper time. . . .
And you renew the face of the earth.

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Copyright 2008 Cook Communications Ministries. Deliver Us From Me-Ville by Dave Zimmerman. Used with permission. May not be further reproduced. All rights reserved.

Lenten Readings from Me-Ville: Day 9

We gladly approach the God of Me-Ville in worship because he can’t be bothered to approach us in rebuke. Meanwhile the God of the Bible, wrapped in unapproachable light, lies outside the boundaries of Me-Ville, outside our field of vision.

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Copyright 2008 Cook Communications Ministries. Deliver Us From Me-Ville by Dave Zimmerman. Used with permission. May not be further reproduced. All rights reserved.

Lenten Readings from Me-Ville: Day 8

Has this ever happened to you? The [worship] music starts to a familiar tune, and your mind drifts along, enjoying the light, essentially noncommittal moment. Maybe there’s a little swaying going on, and in your peripheral vision you can see a hand or two in the air, waving like they just don’t care. And you decide that you don’t need to look at the song book in front of you or at the giant TV screen above you, because you’ve been singing this song for years, and you know the lyrics like the backs of your waving, noncommittal hands. So you enjoy the moment and sing right through it: “Thou, O Lord, are my heart’s desire, and I long to worship me.”

Wait! “Thee”—I meant “thee!”

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Copyright 2008 Cook Communications Ministries. Deliver Us From Me-Ville by Dave Zimmerman. Used with permission. May not be further reproduced. All rights reserved.

Lenten Readings from Me-Ville: Day 7

ESCAPE FROM SUPERBIA

This week, keep a journal of your interactions with other people—either direct interactions, people you talk to or sit next to on the train, or indirect interactions through television or film. Pay attention to what you find yourself thinking about them, and what thoughts about yourself well up alongside them.

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Copyright 2008 Cook Communications Ministries. Deliver Us From Me-Ville by Dave Zimmerman. Used with permission. May not be further reproduced. All rights reserved.