"Where you at, Little Dawg?"

Checking in on how authentically I'm living my faith

At a gym where I was a member several years ago, I frequently ran into a guy I knew from a couple of other contexts. He’d come in with a group of guys. He was much smaller - shorter, and less buff, in fact, constantly striving to fend off chubbiness (he was a chef) - than the rest. They all talked trash and laughed a lot when they went through their training routine.

When the others were standing around him, coaching him through a particularly arduous rep of some exercise, these sinewy giants would stare at him and yell, “Where you at, Little Dawg?” They were checking in on his immediate mental and attitudinal state as he mustered the requisite perseverance to complete the motion.

That scenario occurred to me today as I was striving to rise above a cranky mood and scrambled thought process. I’d read my daily devotional right after I put on the coffee and headed downstairs to my office, as is my custom. It was a good one, and for a few minutes, I felt equipped to embark on my day with a healthy perspective.

It wasn’t but a few minutes until I was engaging the world with gritted teeth, and some decidedly un-Christian language.

I’d like to tell you that this was an outlier rather than the norm, but such is not the case.

I do better at big-picture Christian focus than I do bringing my faith to the granular level of my existence. I love checking out the latest articles at Plough, Touchstone, Acton, and Substacks such as The Abbey of Misrule , The Natural Theologian, and Pilgrims in the Machine. For a while I did a weekly series of short podcasts called “Exemplars of the Faith.” Each installment was a profile of a cool figure from the history of Christianity. It spanned the centuries, from Augustine to Julian of Norwich to Kierkegaard to Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

But respond with calm to circumstantial provocations? Or behave as a credible witness when interacting with my non-Christian wife? Or organize my day with a steadiness of purpose? Those chops could use some burnishing.

It’s interesting, because when I’m reading about some cultural or public-policy issue our society is facing, I often find myself thinking that what is needed is a broad recognition of the centrality of Christ. Just this morning, at Real Clear Politics, there were two opinion pieces about marriage and societal health juxtaposed to show the contrast in their viewpoints. One was by New York magazine contributor Rebecca Traister, and took the predictable east coast / chattering-class stance that looks askance at such recent works as Get-Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization by Brad Wilcox and The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind by Melissa S. Kearney. Traister takes these books to task for not seeing how the developments of the past fifty years have given people many more life options and, more particularly, empowered women, conditions that she asserts would be reversed if marriage was once again prioritized to the degree Wilcox and Kearney would like to see. The other piece was by Wall Street Journal opinion columnist Jason Riley. He, too, dealt at length with Kearney’s and Wilcox’s books, but his take was pretty much the mirror opposite of Raister’s. Riley says that “in 1960 only 5% of babies were born to unwed mothers in the U.S. In 2019 it was almost 50%. U.S. children are the most likely in the world to live with only one parent. This is an enormous problem, and there’s no such thing as too many books being written about it.”

Now, my interest isn’t in digressing into a focus on marriage, but rather to use this as an example of how such areas of cultural exchange lead me to a reaction along the lines of “what’s missing is a focus on the redemptive power of the Son of God.”

But what good is opining thusly about the societal level if I’m not applying it to, say, the next five minutes of my life? Doesn’t a prescription for the entire populace start with me having such a focus?

I do notice that I’m better at some areas of Christian outlook and behavior than I was even fairly recently. Temptations and ways of lapsing that hounded me for years are now decidedly in my rear view mirror. They truly don’t interest me at all any more.

I’d say there are two main factors in achieving this kind of progress: prayer and community.

I’m still not methodical about praying. I don’t fold my hands, kneel and devote the first thirty seconds to thanking God, a couple of minutes asking him to watch over those I know to have particular problems, and a conclusion to praising his glory. My style is more to tumble all over myself.

Which is okay, I think. As Paul says in Romans 8:26, the Spirit, knowing what our intent is, takes over with “inexpressible groanings.”

And the sense of community I get from my deepening involvement at the church I’ve been attending for a little over a year and a half has been indispensable. Those folks hold me accountable, and I know they include me in their prayers.

So where am I?

I certainly don’t feel sanctified. But as a work in progress, I am determined to keep my lodestar fixed in front of me.

I’d say this pretty much sums up how I see my present state: