Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Chris Brauns, MDiv, DMin, is the senior pastor at the Congregational Christian Church of Stillman Valley, IL. His other books include Unpacking Forgiveness and When the Word Leads Your Pastoral Search. www.chrisbrauns.com

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Bound Together

ZONDERVAN

Contents

Foreword by Michael Wittmer........................................................11Introduction: A Fairy-Tale Beginning...............................................15Chapter One: Strange and Troubling Truth...........................................23Chapter Two: Original Rope.........................................................39Chapter Three: The Rope That Is Stronger...........................................53Chapter Four: Bound to a New King..................................................63Chapter Five: Can We Blame the Rope?...............................................75Chapter Six: Bound Together for Joy................................................93Chapter Seven: Bound Together in Marriage..........................................109Chapter Eight: A Red Rope for Hurting Families.....................................127Chapter Nine: A Rescue Rope for Those Facing the Fear of Death.....................147Chapter Ten: Roped Together in Country and Culture.................................163Afterword..........................................................................183Appendix 1: The Gospel and Assurance of Salvation..................................187Appendix 2: For Further Reading....................................................193Acknowledgments....................................................................196Notes..............................................................................199

Chapter One

The funny thing about the truly strange is that sometimes it's real. Alan Jacobs, Wayfaring

Everyone will have noticed how the Old Testament seems at times to ignore our conception of the individual. C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

And Joshua and all Israel with him took Achan the son of Zerah, and the silver and the cloak and the bar of gold, and his sons and daughters and his oxen and donkeys and sheep and his tent and all that he had. And they brought them up to the Valley of Achor. And Joshua said, "Why did you bring trouble on us? The Lord brings trouble on you today." And all Israel stoned him with stones. They burned them with fire and stoned them with stones. Joshua 7:24–25, emphasis added

I didn't understand the principle of the rope was at work when I saw Stevie Baxter drunk. As far as that goes, at first I didn't even know he was drunk. I was only ten at the time. Stevie was eleven. I was playing with friends in a green meadow by the muddy Des Moines River. Stevie was sipping what appeared to be orange pop and acting stupid. I figured he was staggering around and slurring his words to entertain us.

My friends, Stevie's cousins, were far more knowledgeable about the effects of alcohol than I was, and they immediately understood that Stevie was three sheets to the wind. They laughed and poked one another. I sensed I was missing something, but I couldn't quite figure it out.

Even when I saw Stevie getting sick, I didn't know what was going on. It wasn't until Stevie's mother showed up and figured out that Stevie's older brothers had spiked her eleven-year-old's Orange Crush that I put two and two together.

Mrs. Baxter lit into Stevie's suppliers with the unmitigated fury of a tornado. I was scared just watching her scream and yell. The objects of Mrs. Baxter's wrath hung their heads and took the verbal pummeling. They were too drunk themselves to be much offended. All the while, Stevie was bent over, hands on his knees, continuing to vomit on the banks of the muddy river.

I didn't tell my parents that Stevie had been drunk. But if I had shared it with them, despite the fact that he was eleven years old at the time, they would have been only mildly surprised. Stevie was a Baxter. Baxters drank. It was expected. Your average Baxter child was regularly in trouble by the end of junior high and had crashed at least one car by the time he was in his late teens. Of course, not every Baxter was drunk all the time. But most were. Stevie was just the latest in a long line of drunken dominoes to topple over.

Like I said, I didn't understand at the time that the principle of the rope was at work. If you had asked me at ten years old what had happened, I would have said that Stevie chose to be "bad," that it was his decision to drink. And if you had asked me why I wasn't drunk, I would have told you it was because I had made better decisions than Stevie, that somehow my ability to say no to alcohol was stronger than Stevie's, that I was a better person in some way.

Even without knowing any of the people involved in this story, you can tell this is an overly simplistic evaluation. The reality—a truth we will be unpacking in greater detail in this book—is that Stevie's decision to drink at age eleven was not merely the result of his choices as an individual. Yes, at some point Stevie chose to drink. But a large part of the reason Stevie guzzled whatever was mixed with his orange pop was that the people in his family had shown him by their words and examples that this was the only choice he could make. Stevie's family had jumped into the river of alcoholism. And when they did, they pulled Stevie into the current after them.

Families like Stevie's are but one sad example among billions. And the reality that underlies this experience—that our lives, our decisions, our choices, our actions are directly and indirectly affected by the decisions and choices of other people—is one of the defining realities of life. Yet much of the time, we forget about it. We act as if we are the captains of our own ships, as if somehow our lives and decisions as individuals can remain unaffected by our ethnicity, our family background, and our nationality.

In the case of families, we might even say that "they are we and we are they." Our future and our place in this world aren't simply the sum of our own individual choices. On varying levels, we are roped together with others. When someone we are roped to is lifted up, we are lifted up with them. When he or she jumps off a figurative cliff, we are pulled down with them. This is what I refer to as the "principle of the rope"—the simple truth that our lives, choices, and actions are linked to the lives, choices, and actions of other people. To put it simply, as I have done in the title of this book, we are "bound together," tied to others in our good and bad choices.

There are endless illustrations of this principle, and not all are so dramatic. We talk a lot about the principle of the rope in our church and at home. Recently, when I was out for a walk with my ten-year-old son, I asked him, "Benjamin, what do I mean by the principle of the rope?" He responded quickly. "Oh, I think about that a lot. Here's the best example I can give. Today a couple of kids in my class got in trouble. So none of us got to go out for recess. That's the principle of the rope."

So it is. While my son's fourth-grade class is comprised of individuals, they are not islands unto themselves. When Ben's classmates misbehaved, they were "roped" to the rest of the class. Two jumped off the behavioral cliff. And, at least for one recess, they pulled the rest of the class down with them. As this classroom example implies, the principle of the rope—our solidarity with one another as human beings—is not confined to our family...