Bede and Benny Hinn

Bede's blog last week in which he talked about the dead with honesty sparked some predictable controversy about what is appropriate to talk about and what isn't. This is particularly relevant for us bloggers, as the competing goods of privacy and openness contend in the fields of inquiry. Bede's take on this is that in our culture we tend to suppress the "negative" rather than engage it fruitfully:

"I haven't got time for the pain" says the familiar commercial. But what happens when I do the unthinkable and take time for the pain? Well, just to give one man's testimony, when I learned to take time for the pain of a headache a whole area of my life opened up. I saw directly the ways in which I create tension for myself and how my body responds by trying to get me to stop doing this destructive thing to myself. My headaches, particularly the ones that start at the crown of my head and radiate through my neck and down into my back, have become friends instead of enemies, because they warn me that I am harming myself. And this happened just because I took some time and some openness with something that isn't positive. The same is true with death. Those kids need to know about death, and so do we all. We need to know that we aren't going to live for ever in this particular life, and that our time is limited and we don't have any of it to squander. This sense of limitation can push us to open ourselves to each moment and to be alive to what can be accomplished now. It can expand our lives in countless ways. (source)

I agree. A lot of what passes for "being polite" is actually an effort to avoid unpleasantness. But unpleasantness is part of life (and, for that matter, ministry). Overcoming this takes patience and training. Prayer is one way. But I know so many people that pray thinking that they know what the answer to their prayer ought to be and thus they are disappointed. Maybe God has something better in store for your headache than it's remission!

I'm troubled when I see this resistance to God-given-reality manifest in religion. Take Benny Hinn, for example. Got diabetes? If you believe in Benny Hinn and send him money, God might cure you. If not, then you didn't believe enough. This guy feasts on people's inability to let God be God. I'm all for healing prayer--but this guy isn't interested in real healing. (BTW, it's amusing to read the TON of websites that document his various frauds, unfulfilled prophesies, investigations, and heretical theology.) But I digress. The point is, pay attention!

-t