Pope Francis, The Light of Faith, and the Transforming Power of Jesus Christ

The Catholic Church has declared October 11, 2012 to November 24, 2013 as The Year of Faith. As a committed Christian and theologian-psychologist I applaud this emphasis.

I believe The Year of Faith expresses the heartfelt cry of Christians worldwide to draw close to the Lord Jesus Christ in our modern day. As Paul says, “There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to one hope when you were called; one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all” (Ephesians 4:4-6).

I want to share with you some of Pope Francis' first apostolic letter “Lumen Fidei” (“The Light of Faith”). I do this with admiration for his spirit of pastoral care, and with the conviction that he is speaking on behalf of the Body of Christ, Catholics and Protestants alike:

Pope Francis

The light of faith is unique, since it is capable of illuminating every aspect of human existence. A light this powerful cannot come from ourselves but from a more primordial source: in a word, it must come from God.

Faith heralds the transforming power of belief in Jesus. Faith does not merely gaze at Jesus, but sees things as Jesus himself sees them, with his own eyes: it is a participation in his way of seeing.

We trust the architect who builds our home, the pharmacist who gives us medicine for healing, the lawyer who defends us in court. We also need somebody trustworthy and knowledgeable where God is concerned. Jesus, the Son of God, is the one who makes God known to us.

Faith makes us aware of a magnificent calling, the vocation of love. It assures us that this love is trustworthy and worth embracing, for it is based on God's faithfulness which is stronger than our every weakness.

To receive the transforming power of Jesus requires a personal transformation, a journey never completely finished in this life. But we can benefit from psychological and spiritual tools that help us move forward. One of these is the Self Compass. The Self Compass helps us renew our personal conversion to Jesus and cooperate with the Holy Spirit in guiding our daily lives.

This Vatican endorsed model for personality transformation is based on Christ's personality and lets the radical new reality of his resurrection shape our personalities. By applying the Self Compass growth tool, your life can be purified and transformed during this Year of Faith.

The Self Compass

LOVE & ASSERTION

Faith is deeply connected to personality health. Faith helps to counter the corrosive effects of anxiety, depression, and anger. The Self Compass promotes personality health and thereby increases a person's faith. 

Love and Assertion are two complementary compass points within every person's Self Compass. What is the connection between faith and Love? In order to love God or another person, we must reach out to them. We must open our hearts. We must risk caring for them. This requires faith! I have counseled hundreds of people who suddenly received this insight and gasped: "Oh no, now I realize I've lived my whole life to be safely self-contained. I've been too afraid to ever really love anyone." 

To grow in Love requires the courage of Assertion. Mary risked trusting the Angel Gabriel's message to her. Though she no doubt felt some fear, and though she certainly didn't know how she could become the Mother of our Lord, she ended the conversation assertively: "May everything you have said about me come true" (Luke 1:38). Mary dared to assertively express faith in the God whom she loved and trusted. We can become more like Mary.

WEAKNESS AND STRENGTH

Spend a few concentrated moments today or tonight hungering and thirsting for Christ’s presence in your life. Don’t be afraid of any Weakness. Integrate your vulnerability and even self-doubts into your faith in God’s Strength. The Catechism says, “Only faith can embrace the mysterious ways of God’s almighty power. This faith glories in its weaknesses in order to draw to itself Christ’s power” (273). Out of Weakness we are made strong. This humble Strength is what God loves to foster in us. A rhythm between Weakness and Strength never makes us arrogant.  

The Self Compass helps you cooperate with grace, so that you may be transformed in Christ. To help your journey of faith this year, I'm including a link to God and Your Personality: Revised & Expanded Catholic Edition. You can imagine my humble gratitude when I was notified that this book has been added to the Vatican Library. 

Paul Cardinal Poupard of The Vatican has this to say: “God & Your Personality is no New Age influenced waffle clouded in a mystique of blurb, but a useful tool for all those who seek to address personality issues and quench their innate spiritual thirst with the living-water which truly satisfies.”

God and Your Personality

Free Will and Discipline, The Christian Trinity Way

“I will walk about in freedom, for I have sought out your precepts” (Ps 119:45).

In the beginning God builds into human personality the capacity for free-will choices on the one hand, and self-discipline on the other, intentionally creating dialogue partners who voluntarily express their freedom within the blessing of his will and purpose.

Because God’s purpose for creation is larger than any single person or group, he seeks to educate people from their earliest years that their freedom is accountable to him and their personal fulfillment contingent upon the degree to which they cooperate with him. 

God does this through the constant interplay of free will and discipline that intersects every person’s social existence, starting with parental rules and boundaries that nonetheless leave room for childhood expression and exploration, moving into school systems with their behavioral codes, and evolving into an adult lifestyle that must take into account the well-being of others and civil law, alongside one’s freedom to pursue life, liberty, and happiness.

In this ongoing human enterprise, God desires individuals and communities to develop a holy self-regulation akin to that of the Trinity, who live together with individual identities that interpenetrate one another in self-transcending love, expressing the freedom of creative expression and the discipline of guarding one another’s well-being.

Christian Trinity

The Trinity's Plan for A Developmental Rhythm of Freedom and Discipline

Infants, with their parent’s help, experience rudimentary forms of a rhythm between freedom and discipline. They begin a lifelong growth path in regulating inner states, like calming themselves down as they go off to sleep. The parent ensures they are fed, changed, free of pain, well hugged and talked with, yet allows the infant freedom to find their particular way of shifting into a sleep state, a process that initially may include some crying, but develops into the self-disciplined awareness of how to go to sleep peacefully. When an infant begins to grasp and eat their favorite cereal, the parent offers the freedom to explore other foods, within limits of safety and parental sanity. The parent respects the infant’s freedom to stop eating when their internal regulator signals “full,” yet removes food if it keeps getting thrown on the floor, an opportunity for infants to absorb the discipline of social rules for eating.

Toddlers are busy declaring their freedom to become the individuals they are discovering themselves to be. They frequently do this by testing boundaries; yet they need and want limits set for them, clearly and without much ado, so that in spite of verbal or physical protests to the contrary, it is often a relief for toddlers when parents step in and let them know who is in charge. The freedom they experience feels overwhelming at times and needs the counter-balance of fair limits set by parents. Toddlers slowly internalize this external discipline, making it their own, as they learn the initial social rules of interpersonal engagement. 

Toddlers learning social rules

Preschoolers like to challenge boundaries verbally and can be very creative in doing so. “Why” questions and well-formed counter-arguments can amaze and bemuse parents, distracting them from the underlying reality that their child is controlling the situation yet again. Because the specter of power struggles looms large, preschoolers respond well to a few essential limits applied as consistently as possible. Then they feel the security of exercising certain freedoms within the overarching safety of wise discipline. Their social consciousness now includes a sense of guilt when they have done something wrong, a sign that they are internalizing the discipline involved in becoming an interpersonal self.

School age children are concerned with fairness. They respond to reason and like being included on discussions of rules and the reasons for them. When given responsibility for tasks that slightly exceed their capability and praise for a job well done, a cooperative dynamic results in which they exercise their freedom by complying with decisions that affect them, a process that in turn develops increased accountability and self-discipline.

School Age Children Showing Fairness

Adolescents experiment with newfound freedoms. Like toddlers, they push boundaries: geographically, in terms of distances they travel away from home; psychologically, in terms of less dependence upon parents; socially, in terms of friends they make and groups they join; behaviorally, in terms of new ways to define themselves as persons. This exploration can create conflict not only with their parents but also within their developing conscience, an inner force for restraint and ethical assessment of their actual behavior. 

Because they are now capable of abstract thought, adolescents can better stand outside behavior that is troubling them and observe it more impartially. And more easily compare it, for example, to how Christ might behave in a similar situation.  They are intrigued by and like to discuss the possible meaning of scriptures like, “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isa 55:9). This kind of assessment process is part of the spiritual discipline actualized in many adolescents, evident as potential in others.

Adults are more capable of integrating the rhythm of freedom and discipline without the need to overly emphasize either extreme.

Sometimes young adults, after a fairly freewheeling adolescence, will find a deeper relationship with Christ; yet at the same time overemphasize the discipline side of this rhythm at the expense of freedom. This works fine for a season, since the human psyche needs to assimilate truths of Christian faith and doctrine to the point where the personality and human nature become more spontaneously trustworthy. 

 

Free Will and Discipline in Christ

But once the principles are internalized and the laws of God inscribed upon the heart, then persons can relax and trust the flow of the Holy Spirit through their being, expressing greater behavioral freedom, not in ways that are self-defeating, but in ways that are creative and intriguing as they expand the meaning of God-with-us. They take in the beauty of Paul’s insight: “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free” (Gal 5:1).

Even in the crises of illness, divorce, unemployment, empty-nest syndrome, and advancing age, God wants people to combine the freedom of ever-deepening trust in him with the discipline required to make it through a crisis. He wants to enhance their disciplined choices with divine blessing, strengthening their interpersonal selfhood, while simultaneously intensifying their unity with the Trinity, for “where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” (2 Cor 3:17).

Fro more, read: 

CHRISTIAN PERSONALITY THEORY: A Self Compass for Humanity

Christian Personality Theory

 

Should You Witness as A Christian?

Among Jesus' last words, meant to guide Christians from his resurrection until his Second Coming, are these: "All authority in heaven has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you" (Mt 28:18-19).

Jesus Christ's Great Commission

But isn't it antiquated, and even presumptuous, to believe that the divine Trinity has commissioned a worldwide outreach that remains in force in the 21st century?

Wouldn't Christians do better to act in the spirit of pluralism whereby people keep their religious beliefs to themselves out of respect for those who differ? Isn't it both arrogant and immature to assume that a core dimension of the Christian faith, the Trinity, should be shared with all people throughout the world?

Not from the perspective of the original Abrahamic covenant in which God swore by his name that he would make Abraham a blessing to all nations. Abraham had faith in God and God accounted it to him as righteousness, not requiring the sacrifice of Abraham's own son of the covenant, Isaac, because God foreknew that he would sacrifice his own Son to actualize this covenant with humanity.
 

Jesus Christ is the Trinity's sign and seal of an eternal covenant that brings reconciliation to God to all who receive him (Jn 3:16-17). Life in Christ is everlasting Trinitarian communion. God has removed all barriers from the God side for this life to be received and lived. But on the human side there are many barriers, some religious, some political, some social, and some psychological.
 

While it is true that no one holds a corner on God, and no religions fully have their act together, including Judaism and Christianity, nevertheless Christ seeks witnesses who stand up and are counted among those who have discovered that God as human takes his place among us, God as holy judges us for our sins, and God as divine requires persons who know him to surrender to the transformative power of the Holy Spirit.
 

It is not enough for religions to have rituals or codes of law for ethical behavior. God wants people changed from the inside out. This can happen with or without religion, but not without the knowledge that God yearns to encounter repentant hearts, welcome persons into Trinitarian love, indwell their human nature, and develop righteous wholeness in their personalities and relationships.

Faithful Servants

A Trinity mission statement today might include spreading the Gospel as a faithful servant in one's chosen profession, perhaps as scientist, entertainer, athlete, clergy, teacher, homemaker, politician, factory worker, coach, journalist, or a thousand other occupations where one quietly lives one's faith and fashions friendships with co-workers that emulate Trinity life.

Since the Holy Spirit takes the lead in establishing new churches from Pentecost through today, one might expect, too, that the Spirit is calling new generations of pastors, evangelists, therapists, religious teachers, musicians, and parishioners to celebrate the growing cloud of witnesses from every tongue and ethnic group that come to know and love Jesus as Lord, taking the Father as their very own "Papa," and experiencing the love of God poured through their inner cores by the Holy Spirit.

Cloud of Witnesses

In fact, there is no such thing as static Christianity, other than when Christians lapse into apostasy or become lax and forget their prime calling. Christianity worldwide, however, is growing as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit create opportunities for friendship with God and fellowship with others as compelling as when Jesus said, "Go and make disciples of all the nations."

For more, read:

TRUSTING IN THE TRINITY:

A Self Compass for Humanity

How Facing Doubt Leads to Greater Faith

Too great an emphasis on perfect faith actually blocks growth instead of facilitating it, creating the unconscious expectation that without perfect faith God will be disappointed and reject a person.

But God has more patience and maturity than that, for as Jesus said, a tiny mustard seed of faith is sufficient for the Lord to work within a person (Mt 17:20). The Trinity wants to help people face, feel, and process their doubts, which in turn leads to greater faith.

Even John the Baptist, whom Christ held in the highest regard, sent a messenger from his prison cell to ask Jesus once again if in fact he was the Messiah. Jesus sent back the answer that “the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised,” all signs from Isaiah’s prophecy attesting to the Messiah’s arrival (Lk 7:22).

John the Baptist

So if individuals are trusting Christ for their right standing with God, then God makes room for occasional doubts as they experiment with:

• how prayer does and doesn’t work
• what to do when they feel uninvolved in a worship service
• how to handle it when they can’t meet a homeless person’s needs
• what to do about behavior they feel is wrong but have to seek God’s help over months or years to overcome

Natural rhythms of faith and doubt ultimately bring people closer to the Lord. For all the doubts they endure, although people can’t always hold onto God, he nevertheless holds onto them. As Jesus promises, “No one can snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all; no one can snatch them out of my Father’s hand. I and the Father are one” (Jn 10:28-30).

During Christ’s ordeal, Peter struggles with intense doubt about whether to claim friendship with Jesus or deny knowing him. He temporarily opts for denial just when Jesus needs him most. And after the resurrection, Peter reaches the point where he throws up his hands and says, “Come on boys, let’s go back to Galilee and start fishing.” He stands at the place all human beings know from time to time, even when they also know and love the Lord, where life just does not make sense. There are too many setbacks, too much confusion, and too little guidance from the Holy Spirit.

But then it does make sense. For Jesus follows his weary fishing crew to the Sea of Tiberius, and there he makes a little campfire on the shore and grills some fish, shouting to Peter and the others in the boat, “Have you caught anything yet?” (Jn 21:5).

Jesus Appears to the Disciples

Peter starts to yell back that the fishing is as dismal as his own life, when suddenly he recognizes Jesus and dives headlong into the sea to swim ashore. The Bible says the disciples don’t say much at that meal, perhaps too busy internally absorbing the rhythm of doubt and faith, crisis and deliverance, self-consciousness and joy—and feeling mostly awe, not only that they had been right in choosing to follow Jesus, but that they had chosen, for the most part, to believe all he had told them.

Rather than trying to secure a flawless platform of witness that one is adamantly Christian and proud of it, a wiser stance might allow that all human beings, including one’s self, hold even cherished beliefs somewhat precariously, and therefore stand in need of God’s continuous provision to remain close to him.

Once persons accept that they are both strong and weak, hardy and frail, capable of moments of shimmering faith and times where all seems lost, then they can relax, breathe, and trust in God’s faithfulness and providential care. Add to this the hundreds of scriptures that attest to the transcendent power whereby God saves those who hide themselves in him, and people can enjoy a degree of equanimity, knowing that Christ is there for them in faith or doubt.

In seasons of celebrating God or times of questioning, the “I AM” of God faithfully indwells the “i am” of the believer. For the same Peter who denies even knowing the Lord, later writes to all who would follow Christ, “Now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed” (1 Pet 1: 6-9).

For more, read:

TRUSTING IN THE TRINITY:

A Self Compass for Humanity

 

Does Jesus Want You To Be Spontaneous?

Spontaneity means responding to immediate circumstances in the present moment, experiencing the present as an existential moment of “now”—a capability that requires both mental flexibility and spiritual openness.

The power of spontaneity, if a person gives into it and cultivates it as a way of responding to the Holy Spirit, allows for serendipitous experiences otherwise missed if preoccupied by the past or worried about the future.

When Jesus called each of his disciples, they responded spontaneously to the calls, all but the rich young ruler who met the invitation with an excuse that he had many properties to manage and many responsibilities to oversee, and therefore, sadly, was simply too busy to respond to God. Jesus didn’t try to convince him otherwise by pleading for him to consider all that he would miss, but rather turned away in search of the next person who would hear his invitation and welcome it.

Too Busy to Respond to God

Spontaneity, needless to say, is different from impulsivity and irresponsibility. Christ doesn’t want persons to act rashly on the spur of the moment, doing things they will regret the next day. That is why the Holy Spirit works to build a rapport with a person’s whole human nature: your mind and heart, body and spirit—and this evolves over the years.

God desires for his people to learn to trust his presence in their whole being, so they can sense when he is guiding them in novel directions, or affirming the way they are headed. Sound thinking, genuine feeling, bodily sensing, and spiritual prayer combine to keep you zestful in faith, sensitive to the moment, and responsive to God’s dynamic way of guiding you.

 

Seeking God's Guidance

In times of unusual stress, Jesus declares, the Holy Spirit intervenes at a core level: “But when they arrest you and deliver you up, do not worry beforehand, or premeditate what you will speak. But whatever is given you in that hour, speak that; for it is not you who speak, but the Holy Spirit” (Mk 13:10-11).

The same principle applies to private Bible reading, group Bible study, or church worship. Opening your being to the biblical narrative allows the Holy Spirit to sometimes augment the general meaning with a more specific application to your life.

Christ walks and talks among individuals today as surely as he did with his twelve disciples, and his spontaneous interaction with the contemporary believer requires just as much flexibility on the part of the person as it did for the disciples.

 

Jesus Today

By listening afresh for the spontaneous ways the Spirit is speaking, you can truly hear a word of knowledge, a word of wisdom, or a prophetic word that brings counsel in an area of need or a creative idea in an area of quandary. 

In this way the Holy Spirit, the wellspring of creativity and spontaneity, crafts nuanced love poems aimed at your heart, letting you know how cherished you are, “I AM” encountering “i am” with blessing and sustenance for each day.

For more, read:

TRUSTING IN THE TRINITY:

Compass Psychotheology Applied

 

Trusting in the Trinity

How Christians Can Handle Mixed Motives

Self-interest and Self-Transcendence

Human beings pursue self-interest from infancy. Many of the developmental stages of life are motivated by self-interest: autonomy, curiosity, industry, and choices concerning education and vocation. God, too, possesses self-interest: a passion to share the truth, beauty, and goodness that indwell his core.

While self-interest motivates people to pursue behaviors that they believe will fulfill them, God seeks to help them balance self-interest with the complementary truth of self-transcendence. A divine example of self-transcendence is revealed in Christ, who though he was fully God, chose to humble himself for the well-being of the human race, even to the extent of becoming both sin and an atonement for sin, so that through his death, billions of people could receive everlasting communion with the Trinity (Phil 2: 5-8).

While Christ moved graciously within the rhythm of self-interest (acting in ways that fulfilled his identity) and self-transcendence (reaching beyond himself to do the Father’s will), human beings need help from the Lord to cultivate this rhythm.

It helps to begin by understanding the ambivalent attitude a person can feel in many situations, the fact that a person normally and frequently experiences mixed motives. 

Mixed Motives

The parent with the screaming toddler can intervene with two motives in mind: 

1. Be quiet so that you quit irritating me (self-interest).
2. Learn to mind me so that you can be a more socially successful child (self-transcendence). 

Both these motives occur simultaneously, often unconsciously, but persons can bring them into actualizing awareness by recognizing self-interest alongside self-transcendence. 

When interacting with God, say in the offering of a tithe during a worship service, people can admit to mixed motives: 

1. Lord, I offer you this portion of income because I trust that you in turn will bless and take care of me
2. I offer you this as a gift for the work of your kingdom, whether it helps me out or not.

At a purely human level, too much self-interest leads to:

• insensitivity to the needs of others
• dominating conversations by talking and not listening
• holding grudges
• not seeing the need for becoming more humble and altruistic

Too much self-transcendence leads to: 

• excusing others' behavior without ever confronting them
• letting a spouse or child run one’s life
• caring too much about what others think 
• living by the dictates of outside influences to the exclusion of inner guidance

Either extreme arrests personality growth and stultifies spiritual transformation. However, the beauty of owning up to self-interest lies in the fact that it takes a person off the fast track to glory, the self-aggrandizing highway to holiness, where one acts benevolently, like the Pharisees often did, yet in fact is motivated by personal gain. Jesus noted: “Be careful not to do your ‘acts of righteousness’ in front of others, to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven” (Mt 6:1).

The beauty of owning self-transcendence is that one can sacrifice self-interest to meet others' needs without making a show of it. “But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you” (Mt 6:3-4).

No human being gets very far with God with unchecked self-interest or exaggerated self-transcendence.

Overblown self-interest says to God, “Look how unselfish I AM. Look at how I do good things in your name. Look at ME.” When confronted by such persons on the Day of Judgment, Christ says, “I never knew you; depart from me” (Mt 7:23).

Exaggerated self-transcendence says, “Look God, there is no me left. I’ve given everything for you. I don’t even care if I live or die, as long as you get the glory.” This self-negation denies the very self, the “i am,” that Christ came to redeem and affirm. So God is left with an empty hull of a non-person, and how can he relate to that?

In Relationship with God

The point is that God delights in a self-honesty that allows us to admit into consciousness a full range of motivations, freeing us to strike a balance between loving ourselves and reaching out to serve God and others.

For more, read: 

TRUSTING IN THE TRINITY: 

Compass Psychotheology Applied

Tight Spot: How God Comes to Your Rescue

Years ago I sang with two other young men in a group we called The Brotherhood. We sang and gave our testimonies at churches, prisons, army bases, and college campuses. The gymnasium for tonight’s concert was in an older part of St. Louis, Missouri. The crowd of several hundred people were seating themselves.

An hour into the concert I noticed the pastor who had invited us walking hurriedly toward the stage. He appeared agitated and had a frown on his face. At this point Rick was doing a solo and John stood next to him, his head bowed in prayer. The pastor motioned to me. I stepped down to the side of the stage.

“Dan,” the pastor said, “we've got big trouble. A youth gang is gathering outside the gym right now. They've been very violent around here the past few months. Their leader's been jailed for assault. We’ve got to end the concert and get people safely to their cars before things get out of hand.”

My heart started pounding. I remembered my days as a violent teenager before I came to Jesus. I knew all too well the feeling of a fight brewing. John glanced quizzically my way. Rick continued playing the piano and singing. I looked out at the audience and felt a lump in my throat. 

How can all this be ruined? I wondered. Do something, God! I prayed. Can You please handle the gang?

“Dan,” the pastor said, grabbing my arm, “we don't have much time. Get up on the stage and call it quits.”

At that moment I felt propelled forward. “I’ll be right back,” I found myself saying to the pastor. I walked right past him and out the front door. I stepped into the moonlit night and came face-to-face with about twenty young men who stood there, silently staring at me. They had red bandanas tied around their foreheads, and wore an odd assortment of army fatigues and leather jackets. 

 

I felt guided to walk straight up to the leader, a big guy standing out in front. He wore a black leather vest,  showing nothing underneath but big pectorals. His piercing eyes locked onto mine. The gang formed a curtain around us both, cutting off my exit.

“Hi,” I said.

He grunted.

“I'm Dan,” I said. “We're having a great time inside the gym. Why don't you and your friends come inside and sit up front?”

Looking at me like I was from another planet, the gang leader flexed his biceps, and grinned incredulously at his buddies.

“We come to bust up yo' party.  What you doin' invitin' us in?” he challenged.

I ran out of words. Lord! I shouted from inside myself. Help!  

A moment later a calmness poured through me as though the Holy Spirit was clothing Himself in my skin. I stepped forward and gave the gang leader a big hug.  

He stood there frozen for a few seconds. Still holding his shoulders, I stepped back and looked deep into his eyes. I glimpsed pain underneath his bravado. I took a deep breath and said, “I love you, man. And so does God. Follow me.”

He didn't hit or grab me, so I turned around and started walking back toward the front door of the gym. I could hear feet shuffling behind me. Without looking back I led the parade of young toughs right up to the front of the stage. John's and Rick's eyes bugged out, but they kept singing. The gang members seated themselves on the hardwood floor a few feet in front of us.

The pastor was standing toward the back, looking tense. I walked up the stage stairs and whispered to John to start some hand-clapping songs. He started playing an upbeat tune from a group called Ocean:

Put your hand in the hand of the Man who stilled the waters,

Put your hand in the hand of the Man who calmed the sea,

Take a look at yourself, and you will surely see,

Put your hand in the hand of the Man from Galilee.

I could hardly believe my eyes when the gang leader began clapping along with the music.  One by one, each member of the red bandana gang joined in. By the time we closed with the chorus of “Amazing Grace,” these young men were singing loudly, tears running down many a cheek.   

I never thought I’d be watching the transformation of twenty young toughs who came to fight and left with a new song in their hearts.

I will sing a new song to You, O God,

On a harp of ten strings I will sing praises to You!

—Psalm 144:9