An
interview with Nancy Ortberg, author of
Looking for God: An Unexpected Journey Through Tattoos, Tofu, and Pronouns
...
Nancy, where did the idea come
from?
What
was presented to me in building a relationship with God was this very
prescriptive, boxed-in approach to God that had merit and helped but
wasn’t
always the best way for me to connect to God. The book really is a
journey both
to get out of a box and find fresh and new ways to build a relationship
with
God and to go on that journey to find out is God good. I don’t know how
many
other people struggle with that, but I’ve never doubted the existence
of God.
I’ve often wondered: Is he good? Or is he mad at me, disappointed in
me? So
that’s really part of what prompted what I
wrote.
What was refreshing for me was that
the book consists of short stories, lessons and
milestones.
A
collection of essays. In my mind, everything is connected, but that’s
just sort
of the way my mind works. I think to the average reader it will feel
like just
a collection of essays about different things in life and different
learnings
about God.
How have you struggled
spiritually?
Yeah,
I think it would be great some time for somebody to write a book on
spiritual
disciplines that nobody talks about. One of them certainly is the truth
that
most of us learn our deepest lessons and find our deepest connection to
God
when life gets really, really tough. There have been many of them in my
life.
I
grew up in a very good home, although my dad was a functional
alcoholic. My mom
is a wonderful person, but I think she struggled with that whole
codependent spouse
thing. For me growing up as an only child in that environment there was
this
sense of if life is going good, you better get on your guard, you
better tense
up a little bit, you better look left and right and get ready because
the rug
is going to get pulled out from underneath you. From the time I was a
young
girl, that’s how I saw God. That was one thing I had to spend years
working
through to see God differently and more correctly.
There
were a couple times in my life where I was tested for a neurological
disorder
that would have left me incapacitated. As a young woman in my 20’s,
that was
pretty terrifying, asking the hard questions: What does that mean when
it comes
to who God is? How would I get past my anger and my fear to find what I
hoped
would be comfort and peace?
For
a lot of my journey, it’s been fighting, struggling, asking hard
questions,
getting angry with God, listening, learning, reading, processing —
until I
moved along my journey, saw God more clearly and discovered that he’s
staggeringly
good.
Nancy, you’ve worked in a number of
areas: the medical field, you're a pastor, a consultant and an
author. Are
you able to integrate business into your spiritual
life?
Absolutely.
When it comes to business, one of the things that I believe very deeply
is that
work is spiritually formative. It’s not a result of sin. It’s one of
the ways
in which we understand God better and God redeems the world. I think
work is
noble. From that perspective I believe very deeply that my faith
greatly influences
how I lead, how I work, how I view my work.
I had an “aha” moment when you talked
about quiet time and how, as Christians, there's guilt around quiet
time—how
you do it, how much time you spend on it. It's affirming for me that
you found
God in some non-traditional venues.
Yeah,
that was a big part of my journey. I think someone who hears that would
quickly
say,
Sure, you can find God
other ways. But
then when we do there’s that little voice saying,
This doesn’t count. This isn’t as good
as the 30-minute, 45-minute
thing in the morning called a “quiet time.” And I’m not
really sure where
that came from, but I sure grew up hearing that was the primary way to
connect
to God. And while I don’t think there is anything wrong with doing a
quiet
time, I do think that in any relationship if you do everything the same
every
single day your relationship is going to get pretty small and narrow.
There
is a great passage in Isaiah 29 where God’s complaint against the
Israelites
was that their mouth and their lips said the right thing on the outside
but
that their heart was far from him. And then he goes on to describe it
and says,
”You’ve followed a religion made up only of rules taught by men.” That
grabbed
me very early on— that’s part of what can happen to a quiet time pretty
quickly. There is this pressure to have it in the morning. It needs to
be 30
minutes—45 is better. It has to follow an acronym. It has to spell
something
out like Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, Supplication—you need to
do it in
that order. When you’re done you’ve got to find a way during the day to
let
people know that you had your quiet time and you have to let them know
how
meaningful and profound it
was.
For
me it just felt like such a disconnect. There were days when I would
have quiet time
and I felt nothing, but it wasn’t okay to say that. Then I found that
there
were days and weeks and months that I did, but my relationship with God
was
very stagnant.
There
are lots of other ways to connect to God that are equally valuable as
doing a
quiet time. I think “quiet time” is one of many ways to connect to God
that we
should use, but it’s not the only or primary
way.
For
me experiencing God outside of that and allowing it to count has
expanded my
view of God and really deepened my relationship with
God.
Nancy, how do you and John experience
spiritual intimacy in your
marriage?
That’s
a great question. Hey, let me tell you how we don’t do it.
We
don’t do devotions together. We don’t have prolonged prayer times
together. For
John and I, the primary way we do is through conversations. We have
frequent
and good conversations about how God is prompting us on our own
internal
journey. Conversations sometimes in bed late at night, sometimes on the
phone,
if one of us is traveling, sometimes just over a meal. That works for
us when
we’ve tried all the other things, and it’s always felt sort of
contrived and
awkward and weird. Because we’re both teachers sometimes we feel like,
I think we’re trying to teach
each other
something here.
For
us these authentic and natural conversations in the course of a day or
in the
course of a week communicate what we’re learning about God.
It doesn’t take us long after the wedding to
realize,
I think we’re similar,
and we’re different. What works for John in
his spiritual pathways does not work for me. Instead we should say,
What if we both do it the way
we connect to
God deeply. That’s a gift we bring
to our marriage. I think that’s very, very
healthy.
That's very freeing.
Christians
get bogged down in this quicksand of guilt.
We forget that on the other side of everything, God gives us freedom.
It’s perfectly appropriate to feel guilt, apologize and ask for
forgiveness
when we’ve done things that are wrong. However, it’s not okay to feel
guilt
over “not doing enough”. That puts us right back into Satan's trap,
denying
that the cross was enough. We start thinking,
We’re in charge, we’re so powerful...If
we could just do enough for
God. We have to break free of that to experience this kind
of freedom
in God, in Christ, and be able to accept the way that God deeply loves
us just
the way we are right now.
I’m guessing that earlier in your
marriage more discipline and structure was
necessary?
Yeah,
maybe not so much in the marriage piece between us, but I do think what
you’re
saying is very true when you’re a new Christian. I think I was the
recipient of
great discipline and study, in my school and church. It provided a
great
foundation. I began to sense God saying, “There’s more. I need you to
keep
moving forward and do this in new and fresh and different ways.”
I
think you’re right. There is a place and a huge value that more
disciplined
structure offers us, but we’ve got to stop putting them on the scale
and weighing them and saying,
They’re better
than other ways of doing it.
I
think often of when I was driving in Chicago after I dropped my kids
off from
school one day and the thought popped into my head,
Jesus never journaled. And,
Jim, I pulled the car over to the side
of the road for probably about five minutes and I sat there stunned by
the
thought and I wasn’t sure whether I should laugh or cry, be happy or
angry,
because nobody had ever said that out loud.
Everybody
had presented to me, “If you don’t journal, I’m not sure how you can
have a
close relationship with God”— and that's almost a verbatim quote — I
think most
of us grew up on that. How did we get from “a practice that Jesus never
practiced” to “this is the only way to meet
God”?
So, a quiet time is just one
expression of meeting God.
Exactly.
That’s a fabulous way to say it. Put it in the toolbox. Put it in your
arsenal
of things you can use to connect to God—“arsenal” is not a great choice
of
words—put just in your inventory and use it, but don’t elevate it and
then
don’t try to do it the same way every day.
Copyright © 2008 Growthtrac Ministries.
 |
Author
| • |
Read more articles by Jim and Sheri Mueller |
| • |
Also see Growthtrac's Contributing
Authors |
| • |
We want to know what you think
about Jim and Sheri Mueller's article, "A Conversation with Nancy Ortberg." Please email
your feedback to us. |
|
